Pope saw Dryden only once, even if the story is true; but with another old poet, a dramatist, he struck up a great friendship.  This poet was named Wycherley, but by the time that Pope came to know him Wycherley had grown old and feeble, all his best work was done, and people were perhaps beginning to forget him.  So he was pleased with the admiration of the boy poet fifty years younger than himself, and glad to accept his help.  At first this flattered Pope’s vanity, but after a little he quarreled with his old friend and left him.  This was the first of Pope’s literary quarrels, of which he had many.

Already, as a boy, Pope was becoming known.  He had published a few short poems, and others were handed about in manuscript among his friends.  “That young fellow will either be a madman or make a very great poet,"* said one man after meeting him when he was about fourteen.  All the praise and attention which Pope received pleased him much.  But he took it only as his due, and his great ambition was to make people believe that he had been a wonderfully clever child, and that he had begun to write when he was very young.  He says of himself with something of pompousness, “I lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came.”

Edmund Smith.

Pope’s keenest desire was to be a poet, and few poets have rushed so quickly into fame.  He received few of the buffets which young authors have as a rule to bear.  Instead, many a kindly helping hand was stretched out to him by the great men of the day, for there was much in this young genius to draw out the pity of others.  He was fragile and sickly.  As a full grown man he stood only four feet six inches high.  His body was bent and deformed, and so frail that he had to be strapped in canvas to give him some support.  His fine face was lined by pain, for he suffered from racking headaches, and indeed his life was one long disease.  Yet in spite of constant pain this little crooked boy, with his “little, tender, crazy carcass,” as Wycherley called it, wrote the most astonishing poetry in a style which in his own day was considered the finest that could be written.

It is not surprising then that his poems were greeted with kindly wonder, mixed it may be with a little envy.  Unhappily Pope saw only the envy and overlooked the kindliness.  Perhaps it was that his crooked little body had warped the great mind it held, but certain it is, as Pope grew to manhood his thirst for praise and glory increased, and with it his distrust and envy of others.  And many of the ways he took to add to his own fame, and take away from that of others, were mean and tortuous to the last degree.  Deceit and crooked ways seemed necessary to him.  It has been said that he hardly drank tea without a stratagem, and that he played the politician about cabbages and turnips.*

Lady Bolingbroke.