No river in the world can show so wonderful a gallery of great names, or so noted a collection of world's men, in connection with it. Perhaps the two names which arise at once to everyone's mind are those of Pope and Walpole, who lived so near one another at Twickenham. Pope was at Twickenham from 1719-44, and produced here his most famous works, including the last books of the _Odyssey_, the _Dunciad_, and the _Essay on Man_, but he is not by these remembered on the river, his claim to notice is that he made a curious underground grotto, of which he wrote:-- From the River Thames you see through my arch up a walk of the wilderness to a kind of open temple, wholly composed of shells in the rustic manner, and from that distance under the temple, you look down through a sloping arcade of trees, and see the sails on the river, passing suddenly and vanishing as through a perspective glass. When you shut the doors of this grotto it becomes on the instant from a luminous room a camera obscura, on the walls of which all objects of the river, hills, woods, and boats, are forming a moving picture in their visible radiation. Pope had known the river from his birth. His parents lived at Binfield, about nine miles from Windsor. Part of Windsor Forest is still called Pope's Wood, and his poem on Windsor Forest must contain some of his earliest impressions. He was two years at Chiswick, after leaving Binfield, and then bought the house at Twickenham with which his name is chiefly associated. Long before this, however, he had been a popular visitor at Mapledurham, where the glorious old Elizabethan mansion near the church still shelters Blounts as it did in his day and long before. Two pretty daughters of the house, described by Gay as-- The fair-hair'd Martha and Teresa brown, competed for the honour of Pope's attentions, even though he was "a little miserable object, so weak that he could not hold himself upright without stays, so sickly that his whole life was a continued illness"; his genius, early recognized, concealed by its blaze such trifles. His poems in many places keep alive the sisters' names, and in the Mapledurham MS Collection much of his correspondence is preserved. There does not seem to have been any question of his marriage with either of the girls, and it is doubtful if his connection with them was altogether for their good; but at any rate it has added lustre to the family records. Teresa once assured him, he tells us, "that but for some whims of that kind (propriety) she would go a-raking with me in man's clothes". [Illustration: PANGBOURNE] One detail of Pope's garden is so peculiarly associated with the river that it must be mentioned. It is said that the weeping willow grown by him was the parent of all the weeping willows in England, and if so many a Thames vista owes an added touch of beauty to him.