"I must needs have tired you by this long description; but what engaged me in it was a generous principle to preserve the memory of that which must itself soon fall into dust; nay, perhaps, part of it, before this letter reaches your hands. Indeed, I owe this old house the same gratitude that we do to an old friend, who harbors us in his declining condition, nay, even in his last extremities. I have found this an excellent place for retirement and study, where no one who passes by can dream there is one inhabitant; and even any body that could visit me does not venture under my roof. You will not wonder that I have translated a great deal of Homer in this retreat; any one that sees it will own that I could not have chosen a fitter or more likely place to converse with the dead." No one, after reading this, can doubt that Pope possessed that rare talent of painting in words which Thomson called so truly "the portrait painting of Nature," and which, in a letter to Doddington from Italy, he justly laments as so rare a faculty. "There are scarcely any to be met with who have given a landscape of the country through which they traveled, seen thus with the mind's eye, though that is the first thing which strikes, and what all readers of travels demand." "We must lament," says Warton, "that we have no more letters of Bishop Berkeley, who, we see by this before us (from Naples), possessed the uncommon talent of describing _places_ in the most _lively_ and _graphical_ manner, a talent in which he has only been equaled or excelled by _Gray_, in many of those lively and interesting letters published by Mason; those especially written during his travels." The want continues to the present hour; the want of the art of bringing the things you speak of livingly before the reader. It is this want, which can only be supplied by the same principles of study in the writer as in the painter, which first suggested to me the necessity of "Visits to Remarkable Places." No one could have made such visits more effectual than Pope. This is a merit for which he yet has received little or no praise; and yet no talent is rarer, and few more delightful. In his letters, especially those addressed to his two lovely, charming, and life-long friends, Martha and Teresa Blount, such living portraitures of places abound. His description of Sir Walter Raleigh's old mansion and gardens at Sherbourne is a master-piece of the kind. You are now at Letcombe, in Berkshire, with Swift, where the author of Gulliver used to run up a hill every morning before breakfast; now at Bevis Mount, near Southampton, with his friend Lord Peterborough, the conqueror of Spain; and in his journeys to Bath, or to Lord Cobham's at Stowe, you peep in at a number of country houses, and rich peeps they are. Bath and London society is sketched with great vivacity and gusto; but such sketches are more common than these peeps into aristocratic country life. Thus