Note 28 — Are these Things So?

For a full account of the ways in which Pope's actual retired life in his Twickenham villa, garden, and grotto became, in the 1730's, emblematic of the ideal of cultivated virtue, see Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City, especially Chapter VI. According to Mack, Pope becomes "spiritual patron of the poetical opposition to Walpole" (p. 190).