"_Virgilium tantum vidi!_" Pope said this of Dryden, whom he once saw when a boy. He was wont to say of Betterton, that he had known him from his own boyhood upwards, till the actor died, in 1710, when the poet was twenty-two years of age. The latter listened eagerly to the old traditions which the player narrated of the earlier times. Betterton was warrant to him, on the authority of Davenant, from whom the actor had it, that there was no foundation for the old legend which told of an ungenerous rivalry between Shakspeare and Old Ben. The player who had been as fearless with Dryden as Socrates was with his friend Euripides--"judiciously lopping" redundant nonsense or false and mean maxims, as Dryden himself confesses--was counsellor, rather than critic or censor, with young Pope. The latter, at the age of twelve years, had written the greater portion of an imitative epic poem, entitled _Alcander, Prince of Rhodes_. I commend to artists in search of a subject the incident of Pope, at fifteen or sixteen, showing this early effort of his Muse to Betterton. It was a poem which abounded in dashing exaggerations, and fair imitations of the styles of the then greater English poets. There was a dramatic vein about it, however, or the player would not have advised the bard to convert his poem into a play. The lad excused himself. He feared encountering either the law of the drama or the taste of the town; and Betterton left him to his own unfettered way. The actor lived to see that the boy was the better judge of his own powers, for young Pope produced his _Essay on Criticism_ the year before Betterton died. A few years later the poet rendered any possible fulfilment of the player's counsel impossible, by dropping the manuscript of _Alcander_ into the flames. Atterbury had less esteem for this work than Betterton. "I am not sorry your _Alcander_ is burnt," he says; "but had I known your intentions I would have interceded for the first page, and put it, with your leave, among my curiosities."
Pope remembered the player with affection. For some time after Betterton's decease the print-shops abounded with mezzotinto engravings of his portrait by Kneller. Of this portrait the poet himself executed a copy, which still exists. His friendly intercourse with the half-mad Irish artist, Jervas, is well known. When alone, Pope was the poet; with Jervas, and under his instructions, he became an artist--in his way, but yet an artist--if a copier of portraits deserves so lofty a name. In 1713, he writes to Gay:--"You may guess in how uneasy state I am, when every day the performances of others appear more beautiful and excellent, and my own more despicable. I have thrown away three Dr. Swifts, each of which was once my vanity, two Lady Bridgewaters, a Duchess of Montague, half-a-dozen Earls, and one Knight of the Garter." He perfected, however, and kept his portrait of Betterton, from Kneller, which passed into the collection of his friend Murray, and which is now in that of Murray's descendant, the Earl of Mansfield.