S4 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS The quiet, orderly household in Windsor Forest received but few visitors, and those chiefly of the family faith. Such, for example, were the Carylls of West Gnnstead, and the Blounts of Mapledurham, where there were two bright-eyed daughters of Pope's own age, the " fair-hair'd Martha and Teresa brown," whose names, linked in Gay's dancing verse, were afterward to be indissolubly connected with that of their Binfield neighbor. At this date, however, they must have been school-girls at Hammersmith, under some pre-Thackerayan Miss Pinkerton, or else were being " finished " at that Paris establishment whence they derived the foreign cachet which is said to have been part of their charm. Another friend was the ex-statesman and ambassador, Sir William Trumbull of East H amp- stead, who compared artichokes with the father and read poetry with the son. To Trumbull Pope submitted some of his earliest verses, and from him, it seems, received much valuable advice, including a recommendation to translate Homer Another acquaintance was the minor poet and criticaster, William Walsh, who gave his young friend that memorable (and somewhat ambiguous) injunction to " study the ancients " and " be correct." He had been introduced to Walsh by another man of letters, whose acquaintance he must have made during one of his brief excursions to London, the whilom dramatist Wycherley now a broken septuagenarian, but still retaining a sort of bankrupt bel air. To Wycherley, who could not tear himself from his favorite St. James's, the youthful Pope wrote lit- erary letters, being even decoyed into patching and revising the old beau's senile verses. .Another of his correspondents was Henry Cromwell Gay's " honest, hatless Cromwell, with red breeches," who at this time was playing the part of an elderly Phaon to the Sappho of a third-rate poetess, Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas. The epistles of the boy at Binfield to these battered men about town, when not discussing metres and the precepts of M. the Abbe" Bossu, in a style modelled upon Balzac and Voiture, are sometimes sorry reading. But both Wycherley and Cromwell were wits and men of education, and it is not difficult to pardon that morbid, over-active mind for occasional vagrancy in its efforts after some con- genial escape from the Tory fox-hunters of Berkshire and the ribald drinking songs of Durfey. By 1 71 1, when Pope was three-and-twenty, his intercourse with Wycherley and Cromwell had practically ceased, and " knowing Walsh " was dead. But he had already obtained a hearing as a poet. He had written a series of " Pastorals" in the reigning taste, a taste which, under guise of imitating Theocritus and Vir- gil, not only transferred to our bleaker shores the fauna and flora of Italy and Greece, but brought along with them the light-clad (and somewhat embarrassed) Delias and Sylvias of those sunnier lands. Pope, indeed, partly modified this. He drew the line at wolves, for instance, though (as Mr. Leslie Stephen suggests) this mattered little when altars and milk-white sacrificial bulls were still " perpetu- ally retained." But the main feature of the " Pastorals" was less their subject than their versification, which in these earliest efforts was already as finished and as artful as anything Pope ever wrote, and was far above the- work of his contem- poraries. Lansdovvne (" Granville the polite "), Congreve, Garth, Halifax, and
