regarded as something above the mere yeomanry of the time.11 The same addition, it will be recollected, distinguishes Shakspeare's father, in the town records of Stratford-upon-Avon, from a certain John Shakspeare, a shoemaker, who long troubled and confused the antiquaries. Another sister of the poet's mother, named Christiana, was married to Samuel Cooper, the celebrated portrait-painter, to whom both Cromwell and Charles the Second sat, and whose widow is said to have enjoyed a pension from the French Court, in acknowledgment of similar services by her husband. Cooper was termed "Vandyke in miniature," and he was the friend of Butler, author of Hudibras-honourable distinctions to him both as an artist and a man. He died in London in 1672; there is no mention of the Popes in his will-the connexion was in all probability not then formed-but one of the witnesses to the will is "Thomasin Turner," no doubt the mother or an elder sister of Mrs. Cooper and Mrs. Pope. Mrs. Cooper survived till 1693, and from her will we learn something of other maternal relatives of the poet. She leaves small legacies to her sisters, Elizabeth Turner, Alice Mawhood, Mary Turner; also to her sister Marc, and her sister Jane Smith; and to her sister Pope is this bequest: "My necklace of pearl and a grinding-stone and muller, and my mother's picture in limning." To her brothers (brothers-in-law), Marc, Calvert, Pope, and Smith, she leaves each a broad piece of gold. The poet, then only five years of age, is not forgotten: "To my nephew and godson, Alexander Pope, my painted china dish, with a silver foot and a dish to set it in; and, after my sister Elizabeth Turner's decease, I give him all my books, pictures, and medals set in gold or otherwise." The nephew, even in infancy, must have exhibited a fondness for books and pictures, and his personal deformity combined with this may have suggested that he should become an artist and inherit the "grinding-stone and muller" which his uncle-in-law had used with so much success. Mrs. Cooper, in her will, desires to be decently buried at the parish church of St. Pancras, "as near my dear husband as may be;" and against the south wall of St. Pancras Church is a tablet, surmounted by a palette and

11 Hunter's Deanery of Doncaster, v. ii. p. 292.

pencils, to the memory of Samuel Cooper: "the arms are those of Sir Edward Turner, Speaker of the House of Commons in the reign of Charles II., at whose expense it is probable the monument was erected." 12 He would seem at least to have been related to the family of Mrs. Cooper and Mrs. Pope.

Of no less than fourteen sisters and three brothers Edith Pope came at last to be the sole survivor. She lived to a great age, and had the rare felicity of seeing her son-her only child-crowned with comparative wealth and the highest literary honours, the companion of nobles, and the first poet of his age; and she experienced from him the most devoted attention and unbounded affection.

"O Friend! may each domestic bliss be thine!

Be no unpleasing melancholy mine:

Me, let the tender office long engage,

To rock the cradle of reposing age,

With lenient arts extend a mother's breath,
Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death,
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,
And keep awhile one parent from the sky!"

Epistle to Arbuthnot.

The elder Pope had been successful in business. He had saved, according to the poet's friend, Martha Blount, about 10,000l. His fortune was probably larger than this; but he was unambitious and fond of the country; and when the Revolution came, destroying the hopes and even endangering the lives and property of the Roman Catholics, he withdrew from the City. He was then only forty-six years of age; but having only one son, and that one of delicate frame, and from the religion of his parents disqualified for any important civil employment, there was little in his case to tempt the further pursuit of fortune. He may not, however, have altogether abandoned trade when he retired from London,13 and it is

12 Cunningham's Hand-book for London. The will of Mrs. Cooper is preserved in Doctors' Commons. It is dated May 16, 1693, and was proved on the 28th of August of the same year. The sole executor was her nephew, Samuel Mawhood, citizen and fishmonger of London.

13 Mr. Bowles was informed by a respectable inhabitant of Binfield (who had seen the document) that in the deed by which his estate, when sold, was conveyed, he was entitled "Alexander Pope, merchant of Kensington."

certain that he carried his careful business habits into the management of his property in the country. He retired to

Binfield, in Windsor Forest, about nine miles from the town

And Dr. Wilson, a former rector of Binfield, stated to Lysons, the topographer, that Pope, the poet, did not go to Binfield till he was six years of age. The father may have previously resided in Kensington, but we have no evidence of such residence. In his will made in February 1710-11, he styles himself "gentleman." Hearne, the antiquary, who had a grudge at the poet for the sarcastic notice of him in the Dunciad, has the following curious entry in his diary: "1729, July 18, Mr. Alexander Pope, the poet's father, was a poor, ignorant man, a tanner at Binfield, in Berks. This Mr. Alexander Pope had a little house there, that he had from his father, but hath now sold it to one Mr. Tanner, an honest man. This Alexander Pope, though he be an English poet, yet he is but an indifferent scholar, mean at Latin, and can hardly read Greek. He is a very ill-natured man, and covetous, and excessively proud."-Reliquia Hearniana, Oxford, 1857. In another place, Hearne styles old Pope a "sort of broken merchant," but afterwards remarks that he left his son 300% or 400% a year. The poet, he says, was born at Binfield. This we do not believe, but the assertion that a Mr. Tanner," an honest man," succeeded the Popes at Binfield, is supported by a note of Doncastle's, Hearne's Supp. Volume, p. 119.

of Windsor, and two from the post-town of Oakingham or Wokingham. In this skirt of the great forest, situated in the tract called the Royal Chase, the elder Pope purchased twenty acres of land and a small house near the public road. Economy was necessary in the management of their moderate competency, especially as Catholics were then subjected to double taxes as well as penal statutes. The retired and cautious merchant is said to have put his money in a strongbox and lived upon the principal; and this statement appearing in Ruffhead's Life, under the authority of Warburton, was continued by Johnson and all the subsequent biographers of Pope. In this, however, as in other instances, Warburton appears to have known little of the family history of the poet. Besides Binfield, the elder Pope possessed property at Windsham, or Windlesham, in the county of Surrey, and a yearly rent-charge upon the manor of Ruston, in Yorkshire. He had also money invested for himself and his son on French securities, to all which father and son devoted prudent and zealous attention.14 The family was comfortable-comparatively rich in their own sphere of life, which shaded more into the high than the middle rank of provincial society. Pope, in one of his letters, has said "that he never had a sister." He had, however, a half-sister, Magdalen, the daughter apparently of his father by a previous marriage.15

14 In June, 1713, Pope thus wrote to a friend, though the passage does not appear in any of the printed letters: "I have a kindness to beg of you-that you would please to engage either your son or some other correspondent you can depend upon at Paris, to take the trouble of looking himself into the books of the Hôtel de Ville, to be satisfied if our name be there inserted for 3030 livres at ten per cent. life-rent on Sir Richard Cantilon's life, to begin Midsummer, 1705. And again in my father's name, for my life, for 5520 livres at ten per cent., to begin July, 1707." Again, apparently to the same correspondent: "We are all very much obliged to you for the care of our little affair abroad, which, I hope, you will have an account of, or else we may have great cause to complain of Mr. A.'s, or his correspondent's negligence, since he promised my father to write (as he pressed him to do) some time before your journey. He has received the fifth bill, but it seems the interest was agreed at 5%. 10s. per cent. in the bond, which my father lays his commands upon me to mention as a thing he doubts not you forgot.” -Athenæum, July 8, 1854.

15 In his will (see Appendix), Pope's father mentions, "My son-in-law, Charles Rackett, and my dear daughter Magdalen." We agree with Mr. Cunningham (Johnson's Lives, v. iii. p. 4) that this language indicates that

This lady was afterwards married to a Mr. Charles Rackett, of Staines, in Middlesex, by whom she had three sons, and her family was regarded with kindred affection by Pope, who assisted them liberally during his life, and made a provision for them by his will. The utmost harmony seems to have subsisted between the two families.

The burdens and privations consequent on adherence to the Romish Church appear to have been borne with patience by the elder Pope:

"And certain laws, by sufferers thought unjust,

Denied all posts of profit or of trust:

Hopes after hopes of pious Papists fail'd,

While mighty WILLIAM'S thundering arm prevail'd.

For right hereditary tax'd and fin'd,

He stuck to poverty with peace of mind;
And me the Muses help'd to undergo it,
Convict a Papist he, and I a poet."

Imit. of Horace, Ep. ii. b. ii.

The laws against the Roman Catholics, in spite of the efforts of "mighty William," were marked by a Draco-like severity, but they were leniently administered. By the act of 1700, it appears that perpetual imprisonment was adjudged as the penalty for any priest exercising his clerical functions, with a premium of 1007. to the informer. Every Catholic was required, on arriving at the age of eighteen, to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, and to renounce transubstantiation; without which he could not purchase or inherit lands, and the inheritance passed to the next of kin being a Protestant. To keep a school, board youth, or even profess

the woman was nearer related to him than the man. Yet the poet, in his will, styles Mrs. Rackett his sister-in-law. In some legal proceedings before the Prerogative Court, arising out of the administration of Pope's will, Mrs. Rackett is described as the sister and next of kin of the deceased, and such relationship is admitted by the executors. She must have been married while the family resided at Binfield, but as this was before the Marriage Act of 26th George II., the parties, being Catholics, were under no legal obligation to celebrate the marriage in the parish church, or according to the ritual of the Church of England. The Rev. Mr. Randal, of Binfield, was kind enough to examine the register of marriages from 1690 to 1720, but found no entry of the marriage of Magdalen Pope, or of any female bearing the Christian name of Magdalen.