His knowledge of Greek, though doubtless such as was, in his time, thought respectable at Oxford, was evidently less than that which many lads now carry away every year from Eton and Rugby." Yet he was an accomplished scholar, and a master of pure English eloquence; and a consummate painter of life and manners; and in his Tatlers, Spectators, and Guardians, he laid the foundation of a new school of popular writing. DR. ISAAC WATTS - HIS SCHOOLS, AND EDUCATIONAL WORKS. Watts has been with propriety styled a classic of the people. His hymns for children have exercised an influence on the minds of the young far beyond the Dissenting body, for whom they were written. His verse is generally smooth, sometimes nervous; and the matter is always judicious, sometimes touching, sometimes approaching to eloquence. His "Logic" was once a text-book at Oxford. He was an efficient promoter of charityschools; and he wrote many books of education, from the simple hymns for children to works upon abstract subjects. He was born at Southampton in 1674, where his father, who was a man of strong devotional feeling, and a rigid nonconformist, kept a boarding-school. He was imprisoned on account of his religion, and during his confinement his wife sat on a stone at the prison-door, with little Isaac, then an infant, at her breast. The child showed a taste for books at a very early age: he was taught the learned languages in the free grammar-school of Southampton in his fourth year. The little money he received in presents he spent upon books; and his leisure hours he passed in reading, instead of joining the other boys at play. When only seven or eight years old, he composed some devotional pieces to please his mother. His gentle yet vivacious disposition obtained him friends, who offered to support him at one of the universities; but having been bred a nonconformist, he determined to remain one. He was, therefore, sent in his sixteenth year to an academy in London, at that time kept by Mr. Thomas Rowe, minister of an Independent meeting-house at Haberdashers' Hall. He remained here three years, pursuing his studies with intemperate ardor, allowing himself no time for exercise, and curtailing the period usually allotted to sleep. He thus irremediably injured his constitution. He used to mark all the books he read, to abridge some of them, and annotate others, which were interleaved for the purpose. Dr. Johnson says of his classical acquirements:-"Some Latin essays, supposed to have been written as exercises at his academy, show a degree of knowledge, both philosophical and theological, such as very few attain by a much longer course of study;" and, "in his youth he appears to have paid attention to Latin poetry: his verses to his brother in the glyconic measure, written when he was seventeen, are remarkably easy and elegant." He also made some proficiency in the study of Hebrew, of logic, and scholastic divinity. His acquirements in mathematical and physical science appear to have been inconsiderable. Mr. Rowe was accustomed to say that he never hàd occasion to reprove Watts, and he often held him up as a pattern to his other pupils. Watts returned to his father's house in 1694, and spent the next two years of his life in private study. Probably most of his juvenile works were composed during this time. No compositions of the kind have obtained such extensive use as his Hymns and Songs for Children. Doddridge relates, in a letter to Watts, an affecting incident regarding one of his Hymns: I was preaching to a large assembly of plain country-people at a village, when, after a sermon from Hebrews vi. 12, we sang one of your hymns (which, if I remember right, was the 140th of the second book), and at that part of the worship I had the satisfaction to observe tears in the eyes of several people; after the service was over, some of them told me they were not able to sing, so deeply were their minds affected; and the clerk, in particular, said he could hardly utter the words as he gave them out. The Hon. Mrs. Norton thus touchingly apostrophizes the memory of this excellent man; Oh, Watts gentle-hearted old man! Did you ever foresee the universal interest which would link itself to your name among the innocent hearts of earth? Did angels reveal to you in your death-hour, how many a dying child would murmur your pleasant hymns as its farewell to earth? how many living creatures repeat them as their most familiar notions of prayer? Did you foresee that in your native land, and wherever its language is spoken, the purer and least sinful portion of the ever-drifting generations would be trained with your words? And now, in that better world of glory, do the souls of young children crowd round you? Do you hold sweet converse with those who, perhaps, were first let into the track of glory by the faint light which the spark of your soul left on earth? Do they recognize you, the souls of our departed little ones-souls of the children of the long ago dead-souls of the children of the living-lost and lamented, and then fading from memory like sweet dreams? It may be so; and that when the great responsible gift of authorship is accounted for, your crown will be brighter than that bestowed upon philosophers and sages! POPE'S SCHOOLS AND SELF-TUITION. Alexander Pope has been ably characterized by his latest biographer to have followed closely and reverently in the footsteps of Dryden, "copying his subjects, his manner and versification, and adding to them original powers of wit, fancy, and tenderness, and a brilliancy, condensation, and correctness which even his master did not reach, and which still remain unsurpassed." Pope was born in London, in the memorable year of the Revolution, 1688. His father carried on the business of a linen-merchant in Lombard-street: he was "an honest merchant, and dealt in Hollands wholesale," as his widow informed Mr. * Mr. Robert Carruthers, in his Life of Pope. 2nd edit. 1857. Spence. The elder Pope was a Roman Catholic, and having been successful in business, when the Revolution endangered the lives and property of the sect to which he belonged, he withdrew from trade and the city, first to Kensington, and afterward to Binfield, a skirt of Windsor Forest. The Pope dwelling, a little low house, has been transformed into a villa; but the poet's study has been preserved, with a cypress-tree on the lawn, said to have been planted by him. "From his infancy, Pope was considered a prodigy," says Mr. Carruthers. "He ha inherited from his father a crooked body, and from his mother a sickly constitution, perpetually subject to severe headaches; hence great care and tenderness were required in his nurture. His faithful nurse, Mary Beach, lived to see him a great man; and when she died, in 1725, the poet erected a stone over her grave at Twickenham, to tell that Alexander Pope, whom she nursed in infancy, and affectionately attended for twenty-eight years, was grateful for her services. He had nearly lost his life when a child. from a wild cow, that threw him down, and with her horns wounded him in the throat. He charmed all the household by his gentleness and sensibility, and in consequence of the sweetness of his voice was called the Little Nightingale.' He was taught his letters by an old aunt, and he taught himself to write by copying from printed hooks. This art he retained through life, and often practiced with singular neatness and proficiency. His letters to Henry Cromwell (the originals of which still exist), his letters to ladies, and his inscriptions in books presented to his friends, are specimens of fine, clear, and scholar-like penmanship." In his eighth year Pope was put under the tuition of the family priest, who taught him the accidence and first parts of grammar, by adopting the measure followed in the Jesuits' schools of teaching the rudiments of Latin and Greek together. He then attended two little schools, at which he learned nothing. The first of these, Mr. Carruthers considers to have been the Roman Catholic seminary, at Twyford, on the river Loddon, near Binfield: here "he wrote a lampoon upon his master for some faults he had discovered in him, so early had he assumed the characters of critic and satirist!" He was flogged for the offense, and his indulgent father removed him to a school kept by a Roman Catholic convert named Deane, who had a school, first, in Marylebone, and afterward at Hyde Park Corner, at both which places Pope was under his charge. "I began writing verses of my own invention," he says, "farther back than I can well remember." Ogilby's translation of Hmer was one of the first large poems he read, and, in after-life, he spoke of the rapture it afforded him. "I was then about eight years old. This led me to Sandy's Ovid, which I liked extremely, and so I did a translation of a part of Statius by some very bad hand. When I was about twelve I wrote a kind of play, which I got to be acted by my school-fellows. It was a number of speeches from the Iliad, tacked together with verses of my own." Ruffhead says, the part of Ajax was performed by the master's gardener. Deane had been a Fellow of University College, Oxford, deprived, declared "non socius," after the Revolution. Wood says: "Deane was a good tutor in the College;" Pope, that he was a bad tutor out of it, for he nearly forgot under him what he had learnt before; since, on leaving school, he was only able, he says, to construe a little of Tully's Offices. Pope was better acquainted with Dryden than with Cicero, and his boyish admiration and curiosity led him to obtain a sight of the living poet. "I saw Mr. Dryden when I was twelve years of age. (This must have been in the last year of Dryden's life.) I remember his face well, for I looked upon him even then with veneration, and observed him very particularly." Dr. Johnson finely remarks: "Who does not wish that Dryden could have known the value of the homage that was paid him, and foreseen the greatness of his young admirer?" "My next period," says Pope, "was in Windsor Forest, where I sat down with an earnest desire of reading, and applied as constantly as I could to it for some years. I was between twelve and thirteen when I went thither, and I continued in close pursuit of pleasure and languages till nineteen or twenty. 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 these my chief way of getting them was by translation." He afterward said of himself, Bred up at home, full early I begun To read in Greek the wrath of Peleus's son. 66 This scheme of self-instruction in the language of Homer did not, however, perfectly succeed; and we agree with Mr. Carruthers, that Pope's case may be held to support the argument in favor of public schools; but at the same time it affords an animating example to the young student who has been denied the inestimable advantage of early academical training and discipline." To vary the studies, Pope's father used to set him to make verses, and he often sent him back to "new turn" them, as they were not "good rhymes." The pupil, however, soon shot ahead of his master. His Ode on Solitude was written before the age of twelve, his satirical piece on Elkanah Settle at the age of fourteen; and some of his translations, of nearly the same period, are skillfully polished in versification. "Pope as a versifier was never a boy," says Mr. Carruthers: "he was born to refine our numbers, and to add the charm of finished elegance to our poetical literature, and he was ready for his mission at an age when most embryo poets are laboring at syntax, or struggling for expression. Waller, Spenser, and Dryden were Pope's favorite poets, and when a boy, he said he could distinguish the difference between softness and sweetness in their versification. The Eclogues of Virgil he thought the sweetest poems in the world. Pope tells us that a little after he was twelve he began an epic poem, Alexander, Prince of Rhodes, which occupied him two years: the aim was to collect all the beauties of the great epic poets in one piece; he wrote four books toward it, of about a thousand verses each, and had the copy by him till he burnt it. His next work was his Pastorals; and about this time he translated above a quarter of the Metamorphoses, part of Statius, and Tully's piece De Senectute. Such were the early tastes and indefatigable application of Pope. None of his juvenile poems, however, were published before he was in his twentieth year; and they are thought to have been first carefully corrected. Pope has himself told us thut he "lisp'd in numbers." The Ode to Solitude, he said, in a letter to Cromwell, was written when he was not twelve years old. Dodsley, however, who was intimate with and indebted to Pope, mentioned that he had seen several pieces of an earlier date, and it is possible that the following may have been one of them, although, according to the literal interpretation of the words of the poet prefixed, it must rank the second of his known works. The copy before us is in that beautiful print hand, with copying which Pope all his life occasionally amused himself.* A PARAPHRASE on Thomas à Kempis ; L. 3, C. 2. Done by the Author at 12 years old. SPEAK, Gracious Lord, oh speak: thy Servant hears : Nor speak alone, but give me grace to hear Let it not stop when entred at the Ear But sink, and take deep rooting in my heart. Nor with the Israelites shall I desire Thy heav'nly word by Moses to receive, Lest I should die; but Thou who didst inspire Rather with Samuel I beseech with tears Speak, gracious Lord, oh speak; thy Servant hears. Moses indeed may say the words, but Thou Must give the Spirit, and the Life inspire But 'tis thyself alone can give the fire; They preach the Doctrine, but thou mak'st us do 't Let them be Silent then; and thou alone (My God) speak comfort to my ravish'd ears; Light of my eyes, my Consolation, Speak when thou wilt, for still thy Servant hears. *From the Athenæum, No. 1394. |