The Works Of - 5 Author:A. Pope Volume: 5 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1889 Subjects: Literary Criticism / Poetry Poetry / General Poetry / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edit... more »ion of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IV, INTRODUCTION TO LONDON LIFE. Correspondence with Wycherley, Cromwell, and Caryll -- Will's Coffee House -- Button's -- Addison -- Rowe -- Steele -- Jervas -- Completion of ' Windsor Forest' -- Prologue to ' Cato' -- Satires on Dennis and Ambrose Philips. 1704 -- 1713. We know little or nothing of the manner of Pope's introduction to society. It would have been most interesting to learn how the solitary student of Windsor Forest really felt and behaved when making his first appearance on the scene of life and action. Letters of his indeed survive, which either were, or profess to have been, written at that period. These are valuable as revelations of his character. But, even when they are authentic, it must be allowed that they are singularly empty of incident, and that, as records of genuine feeling and opinion, they are almost worthless. It was a misfortune for Pope that he had no youth. Deprived of the advantages of friendships with his equals at school, and brought up, by force of circumstances, in the constant company of elderly parents who denied him nothing, he obtained his first ideas of men and things exclusively from intercourse with books. On the other hand, the precocity of his intellect brought him early into contact with men much older than himself, who, while admiring his genius and deferring to his judgment, treated him with an air of patronage natural to their superior age and knowledge of the world. To place himself as far as he could on an equality with these el...« less