To Pope, about to leave London to work on his translation of Homer, she was "dear, damn'd distracting town." In an earlier poem she is "Augusta rising in gold"; and in "The Dunciad" he has preserved memories of the degenerate Fleet, king of ditches, rolling dead dogs to the Thames; of the maypole which once stood outside the City's boundaries overlooking the Strand; of the Lord Mayor's Show in the days when it went by water as well as through the streets, and when London had her own poet to write panegyrics on the Lord Mayor.
Like Spenser, Pope has a pageant of the rivers attending Thames. It was written in the generous enthusiasm and hope which comes just after a long war. In that poem he looked forward to the time when Thames should be a free river, when all nations should come to London on her tides to see the glories of England, and when the new world should launch forth to find the old.
Pope could foresee the old world changing, but he never thought that the new world would change too. The new world has come, as he said, to find the old-but not in the form "of naked youths and painted chiefs and feathered people."
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