After early middle life, his writings made him pecuniarily independent, but he suffered much from ill health. In his _Lives of the English Poets_, Dr. Samuel Johnson says of Pope:--
"By natural deformity, or accidental distortion, his vital functions were so much disordered that his life was a long disease... When he rose, he was invested in a bodice made of stiff canvas, being scarce able to hold himself erect till they were laced, and he then put on a flannel waistcoat. One side was contracted. His legs were so slender that he enlarged their bulk with three pair of stockings...
"In all his intercourse with mankind, he had great delight in artifice, and endeavored to attain all his purposes by indirect and unsuspected methods. _He hardly drank tea without a stratagem._"
The publication of his correspondence tangled him in a mesh of deceptions, because his desire to appear in a favorable light led him to change letters that he had sent to friends. His double-dealing, intense jealousy, and irritability, due to his physical condition, caused him to become involved in many quarrels, which gave him the opportunity to indulge to the utmost his own satiric tendency. In one of his late satires, _The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_, he charged Addison with the inclination to--
"Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer."
On the basis of what he wrote, we may divide his life into three periods. During his first thirty years, he produced various kinds of verse, like the _Essay on Criticism_ and _The Rape of the Lock_. The middle period of his life was marked by his translation of Homer's _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. In his third period, he wrote moral and didactic poems, like the _Essay on Man_, and satires, like the _Dunciad_.
[Illustration: POPE'S VILLA AT TWICKENHAM. _From an old print._]
Some Poems of the First Period: Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock.--Pope's first published poem, _The Pastorals_, which appeared in 1709, was followed in 1711 by _An Essay on Criticism_,--an exquisite setting of a number of gems of criticism which had for a long time been current. Pope's intention in writing this poem may be seen from what he himself says: "It seems not so much the perfection of sense to say things that have never been said before, as to express those best that have been said oftenest."