all the distant din that world can keep
Rolls o'er my Grotto, and but sooths my sleep.
There my retreat the best Companions grace,
Chiefs out of war, and Statesmen out of place.
There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl
The feast of reason and the flow of soul:
And he, whose lightning pierced the Iberian lines,
Now forms my Quincunx and now ranks my vines,
Or tames the genius of the stubborn plain,
Almost as quickly as he conquered Spain.

That Naevius is no longer read (Ep. II, i, 53) affects us slightly, for
of Naevius we know nothing; Pope substitutes a writer known and admired
still:

Who now reads Cowley? if he pleases yet,
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit;
Forget his Epic, nay, Pindaric art,
But still I love the language of his heart.

Horace tells how the old rough Saturnian measure gave way to later
elegance (Ep. II, i, 157). Pope aptly introduces these fine resonant
lines:

Waller's was smooth; but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full resounding line,
The long majestic march, and energy divine.

Horace claims for poetry that it lifts the mind from the coarse and
sensual to the imaginative and pure (Ep. II, i, 128). Pope illustrates
by a delightful compliment to moral Addison, with just one little flick
of the lash to show that he remembered their old quarrel:

In our own day (excuse some courtly stains),
No whiter page than Addison's remains.
He from the taste obscene reclaims our youth,
And sets the passions on the side of Truth;
Forms the soft bosom with the gentlest art,
And pours each human virtue in the heart.

Horace, speaking of an old comic poet, Livius (Ep. II, i, 69), whom he
had been compelled to read at school, is indignant that a single neat
line or happy phrase should preserve an otherwise contemptible
composition. This is Pope's expansion:

But, for the wits of either Charles' days,
The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease,
Sprat, Carew, Sedley, and a hundred more,
Like twinkling stars the Miscellanies o'er,
One simile, that solitary shines
In the dry desert of a thousand lines,
Or lengthened thought that gleams through many a page,
Has sanctified whole poems for an age.

Horace paints the University don as he had seen him emerging from his
studious seclusion to walk the streets of Athens, absent, meditative,
moving the passers-by to laughter (Ep. II, ii, 81). Pope carries him
to Oxfor