Note 7 — CHAPTER 10
Reading edition
The portal of the palace appears to have been the bard’s post. Pope gives the same position to his historic bards in ‘the Temple of Fame’:
“Full in the passage of each spacious gate,
The sage Historians in white garments wait;
Grav’d o’er their seats the form of Time was found,
His scythe revers’d, and both his pinions bound.” [l. 145-8.]