Hampton Court ... Illustrated with forty-three drawings by Herbert ...

206 HAMPTON COURT
Luxurious, there, rove through the pendent woods
That nodding hang o'er Harrington's retreat.
And stooping thence to Ham's emboweringwalks,
Now let us trace the matchless vale of Thames,
Fair windingup to where the Muses haunt
InTwitnam's bowers, and for their Popeimplore
The healinggod — to Royal Hampton's pile."
The home of the court for so many years, the
interests of politics and literature met within its walls.
It would be difficult to say whether it was better
known as thehome of statesmen or the resort of wits.
But one distinctionit enjoys which no other royal palace
can rival. It is the scene of the most characteristic,
and in its way the most perfect, poem of the age,
"The Rape ofthe Lock."
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' Close by those meads, for ever crown'd with flow'rs,
Where Thames withpride surveys hisrising tow'rs,
There stands a structure of majestic frame,
Which from theneighb'ring Hampton takes itsname.
Here Britain's statesmenoft the fall foredoom
Of foreign Tyrants, and of Nymphs at home;
Here thou, great Anna,whom three realmsobey,
Dost sometimes Counsel take — and sometimesTea."
A generation which ignores Pope, as it has forgotten
Dryden, should yet find time to read, in the
summer afternoons on the terrace by the Thames, the
poem in which the former has given Hampton Court
a literary immortality.