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

POPE 207
Among all the century's delightful legacies, there
is nothing more characteristic or more charming than
"The Rape of the Lock." Most delicious of all
poems of artificial society, most polished, most redolent
of court and fashion, of wit and grace and
insouciant ease, its crisp couplets seem to compress
the very spirit of the life that was so naturally artificial
when Anna took Tea and Pope rhymed and
told scandalous stories.
" Fair Thames, flow gently from thy sacred spring
While on thy banks Sicilian Muses sing,"
voung Master Pope had said, when at sixteen he
lisped in numbers, the first fruits of his friendship —
" at very unequal years," as thelearned Mr. Warburton,
his editor, has it — with Sir William Trumbal, late
Secretary of State to his Majesty King William.
Often, it is likely, the elderly politician had walked
with the clever boy in the gardens of the Palace,
whence he had retired —
Too wise for pride,too good for pow'r,
that he might
" Enjoy the glory to be great no more "'—
telling tales of public business and court intrigue.
The scenes amid which the young poet first tried his
hand at verse-making remained the favourite setting
for his stories all his life long. Public life and
1 Pope's " Pastorals," Spring.