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Luxurious, there, rove through the pendent woods

That nodding hang o'er Harrington's retreat.

And stooping thence to Ham's embowering walks,

Now let us trace the matchless vale of Thames,

Fair winding up to where the Muses haunt

In Twitnam's bowers, and for their Pope implore

The healing god—to Royal Hampton's pile."

The home of the court for so many years, the interests of politics and literature met within its walls. It would be difficult to say whether it was better known as the home of statesmen or the resort of wits. But one distinction it enjoys which no other royal palace can rival. It is the scene of the most characteristic, and in its way the most perfect, poem of the age, "The Rape of the Lock."

II

A generation which ignores Pope, as it has forgotten Dryden, should yet find time to read, in the summer afternoons on the terrace by the Thames, the poem in which the former has given Hampton Court a literary immortality.