Note 20 — THE TEMPLE OF FAME.

Though a strict verisimilitude be not required in the descriptions of this visionary and allegorical kind of poetry, which admits of every wild object that fancy may present in a dream, and where it is sufficient if the moral meaning atone for the improbability, yet men are naturally so desirous of truth that a reader is generally pleased, in such a case, with some excuse or allusion that seems to reconcile the description to probability and nature. The simile here is of that sort, and renders it not wholly unlikely that a rock of ice should remain for ever by mentioning something like it in our northern regions agreeing with the accounts of our modern travellers.—Pope.