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Spontaneous beauties all around advance,

Start ev'n from difficulty, strike from chance;
Nature shall join you; Time shall make it grow
A work to wonder at-perhaps a Stowe.8

Without it, proud Versailles! thy glory falls;
And Nero's terraces desert their walls:

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The vast parterres a thousand hands shall make,

Lo! Cobham comes, and floats them with a lake:

Or cut wide views through mountains to the plain,9

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You'll wish your hill or shelter'd seat again.

Even in an ornament its place remark,

Nor in an hermitage set Dr. Clarke.10
Behold Villario's ten years' toil complete;

His quincunx darkens, his espaliers meet;

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The wood supports the plain, the parts unite,

And strength of shade contends with strength of light;
A waving glow the bloomy beds display,

Blushing in bright diversities of day,

With silver-quivering rills meander'd o'er

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His son's fine taste an opener vista loves,
Foe to the Dryads of his father's groves;
One boundless green, or flourish'd carpet views,11
With all the mournful family of yews:

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8 The seat and gardens of the Lord Viscount Cobham, in Buckinghamshire.

9 This was done in Hertfordshire by a wealthy citizen, at the expense of above £5000, by which means, (merely to overlook a dead plain,) he let in the north wind upon his house and parterre, which were before adorned and defended by beautiful woods.

10 Dr. S. Clarke's busto, placed by the Queen in the Hermitage, while the Doctor duly frequented the Court.

11 The two extremes in parterres, which are equally faulty: a boundless green, large and naked as a field, or a flourished carpet, where the greatness and nobleness of the piece is lessened by being divided into too many parts, with scrolled works and beds, of which the examples are frequent.

12 Touches upon the ill taste of those who are so fond of evergreens,

The thriving plants, ignoble broomsticks made,

Now sweep those alleys they were born to shade.
At Timon's villa let us pass a day,13

Where all cry out, "What sums are thrown away!"
So proud, so grand: of that stupendous air,
Soft and agreeable come never there.

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Greatness with Timon, dwells in such a draught

As brings all Brobdignag before your thought.
To compass this, his building is a town,
His pond an ocean, his parterre a down:

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Who but must laugh, the master when he sees,
A puny insect, shivering at a breeze!
Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!
The whole, a labour'd quarry above ground,14
Two cupids squirt before: a lake behind
Improves the keenness of the northern wind.
His gardens next your admiration call,
On every side you look, behold the wall!
No pleasing intricacies intervene,

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No artful wildness to perplex the scene:
Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other.

The suffering eye inverted Nature sees,

Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees;

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With here a fountain, never to be play'd;

And there a summer-house, that knows no shade:

Here Amphitrite sails through myrtle bowers;
There gladiators fight, or die in flowers;

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(particularly yews, which are the most tonsile,) as to destroy the nobler foresttrees, to make way for such little ornaments as pyramids of dark green continually repeated, not unlike a funeral procession.

18 This description is intended to comprise the principles of a false taste of magnificence, and to exemplify what was said before, that nothing but good sense can attain it.

[Supposed to be a satire on the Duke of Chandos's seat of Canons, destroyed in 1747. See Additional Notes.]

14 [This phrase Pope applies in one of his letters to Blenheim House. The heaviness of Blenheim was often brought against Vanbrugh, its architect, and Dr. Evans, the Oxford epigrammatist, has embodied the charge in the lines,

"Lie heavy on him, earth, for he

Laid many a heavy load on thee."]

15 The two statues of the Gladiator pugnans and Gladiator moriens.

Unwater'd see the drooping sea-horse mourn,
And swallows roost in Nilus' dusty urn.

My Lord advances with majestic mien,

Smit with the mighty pleasure to be seen:

But soft-by regular approach—not yet

First through the length of yon hot terrace sweat;16

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And when up ten steep slopes you've dragg'd your thighs,
Just at his study-door he'll bless your eyes.

His study with what authors is it stored ? 17
In books, not authors, curious is my Lord;
To all their dated backs he turned you round;
These Aldus printed, those Du Sueïl has bound.
Lo, some are vellum, and the rest as good
For all his Lordship knows, but they are wood.
For Locke or Milton 'tis in vain to look,
These shelves admit not any modern book.

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And now the chapel's silver bell you hear,1 That summons you to all the pride of prayer: Light quirks of music, broken and uneven, Make the soul dance upon a jig to Heaven. On painted ceilings you devoutly stare,19

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Where sprawl the saints of Verrio or Laguerre,20

Or gilded clouds in fair expansion lie,

And bring all Paradise before your eye.

To rest, the cushion and soft dean invite,
Who never mentions hell to ears polite.21

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16 The approaches and communications of house with garden, or of one part with another, ill-judged, and inconvenient.

17 The false taste in books; a satire on the vanity of collecting them, more frequent in men of fortune than the study to understand them. Many delight chiefly in the elegance of the print, or of the binding; some have carried it so far, as to cause the upper shelves to be filled with painted books of wood; others pique themselves so much upon books in a language they do not understand, as to exclude the most useful in one they do.

18 The false taste in music, improper to the subject, as of light airs in churches, often practised by the organists, &c.

19 And in painting (from which even Italy is not free) of naked figures in churches, &c., which has obliged some Popes to put draperies on some of those of the best masters.

20 Verrio (Antonio) painted many ceilings, &c., at Windsor, Hampton Court, &c., and Laguerre at Blenheim Castle and other places.

21 This is a fact; a reverend dean preaching at Court, threatened the

;

But hark! the chiming clocks to dinner call
A hundred footsteps scrape the marble hall:
The rich buffet well coloured serpents grace,22
And gaping Tritons spew to wash your face.
Is this a dinner? this a genial room ?23
No, 'tis a temple, and a hecatomb.
A solemn sacrifice, perform'd in state,
You drink by measure, and to minutes eat.
So quick retires each flying course, you'
Sancho's dread doctor and his wand were there.24
Between each act the trembling salvers ring,

'd swear

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From soup to sweet-wine, and God bless the king.
In plenty starving, tantalized in state,
And complaisantly help'd to all I hate,

Treated, caress'd, and tired, I take my leave,

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Sick of his civil pride from morn to eve;

I curse such lavish cost, and little skill,

And swear no day was ever pass'd so ill.

Yet hence the poor are clothed, the hungry fed; 25

Health to himself, and to his infants bread,

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The labourer bears: what his hard heart denies,
His charitable vanity supplies.

Another age shall see the golden ear Imbrown the slope, and nod on the parterre, Deep harvest bury all his pride has plann'd, And laughing Ceres reassume the land.26

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sinner with punishment in a " place which he thought it not decent to name in so polite an assembly."

22 Taxes the incongruity of ornaments (though sometimes practised by the ancients), where an open mouth ejects the water into a fountain, or where the shocking images of serpents, &c., are introduced in grottos or buffets.

28 The proud festivals of some men are here set forth to ridicule, where pride destroys the ease, and formal regularity all the pleasurable enjoyment of the entertainment.

24 See Don Quixote, chap. xlvii.

25 The moral of the whole, where Providence is justified in giving wealth to those who squander it in this manner. A bad taste employs more hands, and diffuses expense more than a good one. This recurs to what is laid down in Book I. Ep. II. ver. 230-7, and in the Epistle preceding this, ver. 161, &c. 26 [On this passage Warburton remarked: "Had the poet lived three years longer, he had seen this prophecy fulfilled." This was an acknowledgment,

Who then shall grace, or who improve the soil ?—
Who plants like Bathurst, or who builds like Boyle.
"Tis use alone that sanctifies expense,
And splendour borrows all her rays from sense.
His father's acres who enjoys in peace,
Or makes his neighbours glad, if he increase:
Whose cheerful tenants bless their yearly toil,
Yet to their lord owe more than to the soil;
Whose ample lawns are not ashamed to feed
The milky heifer and deserving steed;
Whose rising forests, not for pride or show,
But future buildings, future navies, grow:
Let his plantations stretch from down to down,
First shade a country, and then raise a town.

You too proceed! make falling arts your care,
Erect new wonders, and the old repair;
Jones and Palladio to themselves restore,
And be whate'er Vitruvius was before:
"Till kings call forth the ideas of your mind,27
(Proud to accomplish what such hands design'd,)

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unconsciously made, that Timon's villa and the Duke of Chandos's seat of Canons were the same. Canons was pulled down three years after Pope's death, and the parterres again reverted to arable land. Warburton afterwards altered the note to avoid the inference. "Had the poet lived but three years longer, he had seen his general prophecy against all ill-judged magnificence fulfilled in a very particular instance."]

27 The poet, after having touched upon the proper objects of magnificence and expense, in the private works of great men, comes to those great and public works which become a prince. This poem was published in the year 1732, when some of the new-built churches, by the Act of Queen Anne, were ready to fall, being founded in boggy land (which is satirically alluded to in our author's imitation of Horace, Lib. ii. Sat. 2:

"Shall half the new-built churches round thee fall;")

others very vilely executed, through fraudulent cabals between undertakers, officers, &c. Dagenham-breach had done very great mischiefs; many of the highways throughout England were hardly passable; and most of those which were repaired by turnpikes were made jobs for private lucre, and infamously executed, even to the entrance of London itself. The proposal of building a bridge at Westminster had been petitioned against and rejected ;. but in two years after the publication of this poem, an act for building a bridge passed through both Houses. After many debates in the committee,

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