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

208 HAMPTON COURT
society indeed were centred, during the first half of
the eighteenth century, round the Thames valley.
From Pope, in his villa at Twickenham, when he had
left
"Thy forests, Windsor, and thy green retreats,
At once the monarch's and the Muses' seats," 1
to Horace Walpole, in his Gothic castle, is a step
which includes all the literature and much of the
learning of a brilliant age. It is a dazzling prospect
which combines memories ot Gibbon and Lord Hervey,
Swift and Arbuthnot, Steele and Addison, Chesterfield
and George Selwyn, essayists and poets, wits and
historians. It would be interesting to inquire, too,
how much of the rural poetry of the age 2 owed its
inspiration to the banks of the Thames, or how many
a Strephon had wandered beyond the woods and fields
which skirt its
" Swelling waters and alternate tides,"
when he began to hymn the charms of his Chloe in
strains which seemed to his age to express the very
genius of country life. Pope himself can never get
far beyond the Thames or its tributaries. When he
is in his tower at Stanton Harcourt, telling the pretty
tale of the two innocent rustic lovers struck by
lightning, it is in the water-meadows which that
1 "Windsor Forest."
2 And, of course,of the preceding age. Cf. Dunciad,iii.19-20: —
" Taylor,their better Charon, lendsan oar,
Once swan of Thames, tho' nowhe sings no more."