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 of 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
