Note xii — THE ART of POLITICKS, In Imitation of HORACE's ART of POETRY.
Reading edition
line 12. Maypole: This remarkable barometer of intellectual history was razed by the Puritan parliament in 1644. A new one, 134 feet tall, was set up at the Restoration; it, or a successor, had decayed to a height of twenty feet in 1717 when Sir Isaac Newton acquired it and presented it to James Pound to use as a telescope mount.