doctor who sends successive dishes away on the
grounds that they are unhealthy, with the tap of his
whalebone wand.
162 God bless the king the toast at the end of the meal.
176 Ceres the Roman goddess of agriculture and
fertility.
194 Vitruvius M.Vitruvius Pollio of the Augustan age,
author of a famous treatise on architecture.
204 imperial works a conscious echo of Dryden’s
translation of a famous passage in Virgil’s Aeneid in
which Rome’s imperial destiny is articulated:
These are imperial arts, and worthy thee.
(VI, 1177)
In Virgil the imperial arts are the arts of government
and the establishment of peace; in Pope it is the arts
themselves which are to express and impress an
imperial destiny of grandeur, refinement, and beauty.TO DR ARBUTHNOT, 26 JULY 1734 [ON HIS SATIRE]Sherburne, III, 417. Arbuthnot in his last illness had written:
‘I make it my last request that you continue that noble disdain
and abhorrence of vice which you seem naturally endued
with, but still with a due regard to your safety, and study
more to reform than chastise, though the one cannot be
effected without the other.’
66 Boileau had written at the court of Louis XV.
75 Nero reigned from AD 54–68 and Domitian from AD
81–96. Both emperors terrorized their subjects. Aulus
Persius (AD 34–62) covertly attacked Nero. Juvenal’s
dates are uncertain, but it is believed that his sharp
satire of Domitian was written after his reign was
over. Lucan (AD 39–65), author of an epic poem on
Caesar and Pompey called the Pharsalia, was required
to commit suicide after being implicated in the
conspiracy of Piso against Nero.