the coach and six, was in the water just before you come to Twickenham.-The same. [Rather somewhere in the Hounslow-heath way; for he was coming home from Doily.] -Mrs. B. (Blount.)

I believe nobody ever studied so hard as my brother did in his youth. He did nothing but write and read.-Mrs. Racket.

My brother does not seem to know what fear is. When some of the people that he had put into the Dunciad were so enraged against him, and threatened him so highly, he loved to walk alone, and particularly often to Mr. Fortescue's at Richmond. Only he would take Bounce* with him; and for some time carried pistols in his pocket. He used then to say to us when we talked to him about it, that "with pistols the least man in England was above a match for the largest.”—Mrs. Racket. [After the first edition of the Dunciad, and while Mr. Pope was preparing another yet more irritating, I took the opportunity one morning when I had been reading some things

to him out of Bayle's Dictionary in his study, to turn to the article Bruschius, a poet of Bohemia, who, when he was going to publish a Satire against some of the blockheads of that country, was way-laid in a wood, and murdered by them. Something of the same nature had been then lately hinted at as to Ham walk. I read the article to Mr. Pope, and said something that I thought my friendship obliged me to say about his venturing alone to Richmond, He said, that "the people I mentioned were low and vile enough perhaps to be capable of such designs, but that he should not go a step out of his way for them; for let the very worst that I could imagine happen, he thought it better to die, than to live in fear of such rascals."]

When my brother's faithful dog and companion in those walks died, he had some thoughts of burying him in his garden, and putting a piece of marble over his grave with this epitaph

O RARE BOUNCE!

and he would have done it, I believe, had

he not apprehended that some people might take it to have been meant as a ridicule upon Ben Jonson.-Mrs. Racket.

Mr. Pope was taught his accidence, and the Greek elements* by a priest in the family: was sent to school at Twyford when he was about eight; stayed there only one year, and at other little schools till twelve. "When I came from the last of them, all the acquisition I had made was to be able to construe a little of Tully's Offices."-Mr. Pope.

My next period was in Windsor Forest, where I sat down with an earnest desire of reading, and applied as constantly as possibly I could to it for some years. I was between twelve and thirteen when I first went thither, and continued in this close pursuit of pleasure and languages till nineteen or twenty.-The same.

Considering how very little I had when I came from school, I think I may be said to have taught myself Latin, as well as French or Greek, and in all three my chief way of

*The alphabet only, as he explained it afterwards.

getting them was by translations.-The

same.

I wrote the Essay on Criticism two or three years before it was printed.-The

same.

In translating both the Iliad and Odyssey, my usual method was to take advantage of the first heat, and then to correct each book, first, by the original, next by other translations, and lastly, to give it a reading for the versification only.-The same. [How much he has corrected, and in what manner, may be seen by the manuscripts of each, which are bound up; that of the Iliad in two volumes, and that of the Odyssey in one.]

From the manuscript of the latter it appears how truly he says, that "he translated twelve books of it." That volume contains the first draught of the 3d, 5th, 7th, and 9th books. Part of the 10th from-.

Now dropp'd our anchors in the bay. V. 157. to the end the 13th and 14th, part of the 15th, from

Meantime the King, Eumæus, and the rest- V. 321.

to the end. And the 17th, 21st, 22d, and 24th that is, ten books entire, and part of two others; which, with his great corrections in Broome's part, without reckoning more manuscript of his own which is lost, would make up the compass of twelve books at least. The same; and the manuscript itself.

Mr. Broome had 500l. and Mr. Fenton 3001. for their share in that translation. The same.

Some* wonder why I did not take in the fall of man in my Essay; and others† how the immortality of the soul came to be omitted. The reason is plain: they both lay out of my subject, which was only to consider man as he is in his present state, not in his past or future.-The same.

Some of Plato's and Cicero's reasonings on the immortality of the soul are very foolish; but the latter's is less so than the former's. The same.

* Ramsey and some others, in letters sent him about that time.

† Some of the Popish priests, in their letters.