nearer and nearer every hour. The birds are paying their thanksgiving
songs for the new habitations I have made them. My building rises high
enough to attract the eye and curiosity of the passenger from the river,
where, upon beholding a mixture of beauty and ruin, he inquires, 'What
house is falling, or what church is arising?' So little taste have our
common Tritons for Vitruvius; whatever delight the poetical gods of the
river may take in reflecting on their streams, my Tuscan porticos, or
Ionic pilasters."

Pope's architecture, like his poetry, has been the subject of much and
vehement dispute. On the one hand, his grottos and his buildings have
been vituperated as most tasteless and childish; on the other, applauded
as beautiful and romantic. Into neither of these disputes need we enter.
In both poetry and architecture a bolder spirit and a better taste have
prevailed since Pope's time. With all his foibles and defects, Pope was
a great poet of the critical and didactic kind, and his house and place
had their peculiar beauties. He was himself half inclined to suspect the
correctness of his fancy in such matters, and often rallies himself on
his gimcracks and crotchets in both verse and prose....

Pope's building madness, however, had method in it. Unlike the great
romancer and builder of our time, [Footnote: Sir Walter Scott] he never
allowed such things to bring him into debt. He kept his mind at ease by
such prudence, and soothed and animated it under circumstances of
continued evil by working among his trees, and grottos, and vines, and
at his labors of poetry and translations. At the period succeeding the
rebellion of 1715, when that event had implicated and scattered so many
of his highest and most powerful friends, here he was laboring away at
his "Homer" with a progress which astonished every one. Removed at once
from the dissipations and distractions of London, and from the agreeable