s friends, undisturbed by the distant din of the world.

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 conquer'd Spain.

The grotto, one would fear, was better fitted for frogs than for
philosophers capable of rheumatic twinges. But deducting what we please
from such utterances on the score of affectation, the picture of Pope
amusing himself with his grotto and his plantations, directing old John
Searle, his gardener, and conversing with the friends whom he
compliments so gracefully, is, perhaps, the pleasantest in his history.
He was far too restless and too keenly interested in society and
literature to resign himself permanently to any such retreat.

Pope's constitutional irritability kept him constantly on the wing.
Though little interested in politics, he liked to be on the edge of any
political commotion. He appeared in London on the death of Queen
Caroline, in 1737; and Bathurst remarked that "he was as sure to be
there in a bustle as a porpoise in a storm." "Our friend Pope," said
Jervas not long before, "is off and on, here and there, everywhere and
nowhere, _a son ordinaire_, and, therefore as well as we can hope for a
carcase so crazy." The Twickenham villa, though nominally dedicated to
repose, became of course a centre of attraction for the interviewers of
the day. The opening lines of the Prologue to the Satires give a
vivacious description of the crowds of authors who rushed to "Twitnam,"
to obtain his patronage or countenance, in a day when editors were not
the natural scapegoats of such aspirants.

What walls can guard me, or what shades can hide?
They pierce my thickets, through my grot they glide;
By land, by water, they renew the charge;
They stop the chariot and they board the barge:
No place is sacred, not the church is free,
E'en Sunday shines no Sabbath-day to me.

And even at an earlier period he occasionally retreated from the bustle
to find time for his Homer. Lord Harcourt, the Chancellor in the last
years of Queen Anne, allowed him to take up his residence in his old
house of Stanton Harcourt, in Oxfordshire. He inscribed on a p