This was Pope's verdict on a friend at court and it began with the words:-



But the verse was in fact dedicated to devoted friend Martha Blount to whom he left all his worldly goods. He declared his passion to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and was rewarded with a burst of laughter.

His translation of Homer took ten years and one wit said "it is a pretty poem Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer" but later Dr Johnson praised to the skies ..

Modern taste prefers his mock-heroic Rape of the Lock and the Essay on Man, with its hints of life on other worlds, while in his Dunciad he heralded the reign of George II with the words "still Dunce the second reigns, like Dunce the first."

This presentation by Karin Fernald and Colin Pinney follows the life of "The Little Nightingale", as Sir Joshua Reynolds called him, from his childhood in Windsor Forest to the coffee-houses of eighteenth century London in the age of Swift's Gulliver and John Gay's Beggars' Opera.