Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose

gold (the aspiration of the poets) in which mercenary
values are supreme. A couplet of pregnant wit.
18 all below revealed Compare the ancient adage ‘The
higher you climb, the more you show your arse’
(1743).
24 Rhetoric eloquence, much prized by Renaissance
humanists aspiring to the Ciceronian ideal of the
good man skilled in speaking.
28 Chicane fine linen here associated with a bishop’s
sleeve indicating corruption in the Church and
state.
30 Page a hanging judge in Pope’s day.
48 in toupee a fashionable dunce wearing the latest
artificial hairpiece.
51 revive the wits republish distinguished writers but
only after they have been bowdlerized.
53 Medea the sorceress who rejuvenated her father-in-
law Aeson by boiling him in a cauldron of herbs.
63 a spectre Richard Busby, headmaster of Westminster
School in the mid-seventeenth century.
64 the wand the cane, also suggested in ‘birchen’.
65 beavered The beaver is a hat.
68 Winton Winchester school.
75 Samian letter the letter Y, used by Pythagoras of
Samos as an emblem of the different roads of virtue
and vice.
88 Aristotle’s friends those who clung to Aristotle’s
natural philosophy ignoring the advances of
Descartes and Newton.
89 Aristarch Aristarchus was the most famous textual
critic of antiquity who had fearlessly emended the
text of Homer. Under his name Pope is satirizing the
foremost classical textual critic of his day, Richard
Bentley, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
See Critical commentary pp. 245–6.
92 Walker the Vice-Master of Trinity and supporter of
Bentley in his battle with the other Fellows of the
college.
97 scholiast in antiquity one who writes marginal notes