s the fourteenth century, its actual pursuits and
genuine tastes, while the modernised version of Pope is stripped of
circumstantial realities, and exhibits only an impassive, artificial
pedantry.

The architecture of Pope's Temple and Chaucer's House presents the same
difference which distinguishes the respective poems throughout. The
House is in the magnificent Gothic of the time, with its multiplied
buttresses, niches, images, pinnacles, and traceried windows. The Temple
is a building which resembles nothing that ever existed. One face is
Grecian architecture, a second Eastern, a third Egyptian, and a fourth
Northern. Warton, in a note to the poem, says that Pope's "knowledge and
taste in the fine arts were unquestionable." Had he possessed the
crudest ideas of architecture he could not have affirmed that so
hideous, and indeed so impossible a combination, surpassed in beauty
whatever had been "beheld in proud Rome, or artful Greece, or elder
Babylon." The details are worthy of the general conception. The northern
side is said to be "of Gothic structure,"--not the glorious style which
commonly bears the name, a style for which Pope had no eyes, since with
Chaucer's description before him he ignores the mediaeval Gothic
altogether, but a structure lustrous as glass, and "overwrought with
ornaments of barbarous pride." "Huge colosses rise" upon its face, and
around the statues are "engraved Runic characters." This part of the
design appears to be an importation from the south. In the Egyptian
temples colossal figures are often attached to the piers, and at the
top, bottom, and sides of the piers there is a border of hieroglyphics.
With his statues Pope has conjoined "rude iron columns smeared with
blood" upon which stand the "horrid forms of Scythian heroes," and in a
note he gravely asserts that this medley "is agreeable to the
architecture of the northern part of the world." In the text he has
ventured upon the no less extraordinary statement that all the facades
were of "equal grace" or in other words that his barbarous and
chimerical northern side was of equal grace with the architecture of
Greece.

Johnson remarks that the learning and observation exhibited in the
Temple of Fame were uncommon for a youth of twenty-two. The authority
for Pope's age was an expression in his letter to Steele, Nov. 16, 1712,
where he says of his work, "I was so diffident of it as to let it lie by
me these two years just as you now s