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 pane of
glass in an upper room, "In the year 1718 Alexander Pope finished here
the fifth volume of Homer." In his earlier days he was often rambling
about on horseback. A letter from Jervas gives the plan of one such
jaunt (in 1715) with Arbuthnot and Disney for companions. Arbuthnot is
to be commander-in-chief, and allows only a shirt and a cravat to be
carried in each traveller's pocket. They are to make a moderate journey
each day, and stay at the houses of various friends, ending ultimately
at Bath. Another letter of about the same date describes a ride to
Oxford, in which Pope is overtaken by his publisher, Lintot, who lets
him into various secrets of the trade, and proposes that Pope should
turn an ode of Horace whilst sitting under the trees to rest.
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