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,"
young Master Pope had said, when at sixteen he lisped in numbers, the first fruits of his friendship—"at very unequal years," as the learned 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"[1]—
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
- ↑ Pope's "Pastorals," Spring.
