One of them, an Abbe Southcote, applied for advice to the
celebrated Dr. Radcliffe, who judiciously prescribed idleness and
exercise. Pope soon recovered, and, it is pleasant to add, showed his
gratitude long afterwards by obtaining for Southcote, through Sir Robert
Walpole, a desirable piece of French preferment. Self-guided studies
have their advantages, as Pope himself observed, but they do not lead a
youth through the dry places of literature, or stimulate him to severe
intellectual training. Pope seems to have made some hasty raids into
philosophy and theology; he dipped into Locke, and found him "insipid;"
he went through a collection of the controversial literature of the
reign of James II., which seems to have constituted the paternal
library, and was alternately Protestant and Catholic, according to the
last book which he had read. But it was upon poetry and pure literature
that he flung himself with a genuine appetite. He learnt languages to
get at the story, unless a translation offered an easier path, and
followed wherever fancy led "like a boy gathering flowers in the fields
and woods."
It is needless to say that he never became a scholar in the strict sense
of the term. Voltaire declared that he could hardly read or speak a
word of French; and his knowledge of Greek would have satisfied Bentley
as little as his French satisfied Voltaire. Yet he must have been fairly
conversant with the best known French literature of the time, and he
could probably stumble through Homer with the help of a crib and a guess
at the general meaning.
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