. . .He denied the hatter, and said his father was of the family of the Earls of Downe; but on this p. 52statement being communicated to a relative of the poet, the brutal fellow, who was probably without a tincture of polite learning, said he heard of the relationship for the first time!  ‘Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure,’ sang one of Pope’s too numerous enemies in the easy numbers he had taught his age.  It is, however, now taken as settled that the elder Pope, like Izaak Walton and John Gilpin, and many other good fellows, was a linen-draper.  He made money, and one would like to know how he did it in the troublesome times he lived in; but his books have all perished.  He was a Roman Catholic, as also was the poet’s mother, who was her husband’s second wife, and came out of Yorkshire.  It used to be confidently asserted that the elder Pope, on retiring from business, which he did early in the poet’s ch. . . Read More