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'd swear
Sancho's dread doctor and his wand were there.24
Between each act the trembling salvers ring,
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,
Sick of his civil pride from morn to eve; 1
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,
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.

23 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: 1
"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 & bridge passed through both Houses. After many debates in the committee,

;

Bid harbours open, public ways extend,
Bid temples, worthier of the god, ascend
Bid the broad arch the dangerous flood contain,
The mole projected break the roaring main;
Back to his bounds their subject sea command,
And roll obedient rivers through the land;
These honours Peace to happy Britain brings,
These are imperial works, and worthy kings.28

Who builds a bridge that never drove a pile ?-
Should Ripley venture, all the world would smile."
See the notes on that place.

29 [An echo of a line in Dryden's Virgil, book vi.-
"These are imperial arts, and worthy thee."]

the execution was left to the carpenter above mentioned, who would have

made it a wooden one; to which our author alludes in these lines:

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EARL OF BURLINGTON.

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ADDITIONAL NOTES.

EARL OF BURLINGTON.

Pope could not have dedicated an Epistle on taste more appropriately than to this nobleman, who, both by his skill and his munificence, did so much for the encouragement of art in this kingdom. Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington, and fourth Earl of Cork, was born in 1695, and, consequently, was in his thirty-sixth year at the date of this poem. He was then engaged

BURLINGTON HOUSE.

in ornamenting his gardens, and building his villa at Chiswick. The celebrated front and colonnade at Burlington House had been erected some years before, in 1718. There is reason to believe that, in this splendid improvement, his Lordship, then very young, had the assistance of a practical architect, Colin Campbell, though Walpole considers that the design is too good for Campbell. The same lively and picturesque writer describes the effect which the Burlington colonnade had upon him when first seen. "Soon after my return from Italy," he says, "I was invited to a ball at Burlington House. As I passed under the gate by night it could not strike me. At daybreak, looking out of the window to see the sun rise, I was surprised with the

vision of the colonnade that fronted me. It seemed one of those edifices in fairy tales that are raised by genii in a night-time." The colonnade still remains, but the dead wall in front conceals from the public all view of the fine architectural structure. The Earl of Burlington was at the expense of repairing St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden, the work of Inigo Jones; and, by his publication of the designs of Jones and Palladio, no less than by his own noble buildings, he revived a taste for architecture in England. Not less honourable to his Lordship is his patronage of that pure and simple-hearted philosopher, Dr. Berkeley, who, being introduced to him by Pope, was so warmly recommended by his Lordship, that he was appointed one of the chaplains to the Duke of Grafton, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and afterwards became Dean of Derry, and Bishop of Cloyne. Lord Burlington died in 1753, and with his demise a title, honoured and ennobled through three generations, by genius, and virtue, and public spirit, became extinct.

BUBB DODINGTON, LORD MELCOMBE.

Ver. 20. Bids Bubo build.] In 1720, George Bubb (the son of an apothe cary at Carlisle) fell heir to a large estate in Dorsetshire, which had belonged to his maternal uncle, George Dodington, Esq., of Eastbury. By the will of his relative, Bubb had to complete the magnificent house at Eastbury, which Vanbrugh designed. It is to this erection that the poet alludes. Like most of the vast and ostentatious structures of that day, the mansion at Eastbury has disappeared. was pulled down by Earl Temple, on whom it was entailed in case of Bubb's having no issue. "Dodington," says Walpole, "had a great deal of wit, great knowledge of business, and was an able speaker in Parliament, though an affected one, and though most of his speeches were premeditated. He was, as his Diary shows, vain, fickle, ambitious, servile, and corrupt. Early in his life he had been devoted to Sir Robert Walpole, and in an epistle to him, which Pope quotes, had professed himself,

'In power, a servant; out of power, a friend.'

"At a much later period of life, he published an Epistle to Lord Bute, whom he styled Pollio. Mr. Wyndham, editor of his Diary, wrote to Dr. Joseph Warton, in 1784, that he had found among Dodington's papers an old copy of that poem, but inscribed to Sir Robert Walpole! He fell more than once under the lash of Pope, who coupled him with Sir William Yonge in this line,

'The flowers of Bubbington and flow of Yonge.'

"Soon after the arrival of Frederick Prince of Wales in England, Dodington became a favourite, and submitted to the Prince's childish horse-play, being once rolled up in a blanket, and trundled down stairs; nor was he negligent in paying more solid court, by lending his Royal Highness money. This is a strange country, this England,' said his Royal Highness once; 'I am told Dodington is reckoned a clever man; yet I got £5000 out of him