...could be excluded. A grotto is not often the wish or pleasure of an Englishman, who has more frquent need to solicit than exclude the sun ; but Pope's...inconvenience, and vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage. It may be frequently remarked of the studious and speculative, that they are proud...

...dignified it with the title of a grotto; a place of silence and retreat, from which he endeavoured to persuade his friends and himself that cares and...the wish or pleasure of an Englishman, who has more frquent need to solicit than exclude the sun ; but Pope's excavation was requisite as an entrance to...

...dignified it with the title of a grotto — a place of silence and retreat, from which he endeavoured to persuade his friends and himself that cares and...inconvenience, and vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage." After all, therefore, there was some excuse for Pope's folly, but what can be...

...dignified it with the title of a grotto; a place of silence and retreat, from which he endeavoured Lord! but let thy will be done." With which expression...was to speak only these few words: " Good Doctor, enforced a passage. It may be frequently remarked of the studious and speculative, that they are proud...

...Johnson's reflections on the apparently trivial subject of Pope's grotto. "A grotto," Johnson observes, "is not often the wish or pleasure of an Englishman,...more frequent need to solicit than exclude the sun." Johnson then begins to pursue the thought, by providing possible answers to the implied question he...

..."relaxation." The precise nature of the contradiction inherent in the grotto is made clear by Johnson: "Pope's excavation was requisite as an entrance to...inconvenience, and vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage" (LP 135; italics mine). At once an ornament and an inconvenience, the grotto simultaneously...

...London road on his estate, Twickenham—and he makes this simultaneously astute and arch pronouncement: "As some men try to be proud of their defects, he extracted an ornament from an inconvenience [that of having to go under the London road] and vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced...

...frequent need to solicit than exclude the sun; but Pope's excavation was requisite as an entrance to the garden, and, as some men try to be proud of their...inconvenience, and vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage.173 Johnson blinds himself to Pope's merging of geological verisimilitude with a...

...disparate as Stowe and Stourhead, The Leasowes and Twickenham. 29 Dr Johnson famously decried this feature: 'but Pope's excavation was requisite as an entrance...inconvenience, and vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage'. Dr Johnson is heing a little unfair on Pope, who right from the start envisaged...

...vanity. In his Life of Pope, for example, he observes of Pope's grotto with a modicum of contempt, "as some men try to be proud of their defects, he...inconvenience, and vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage." 1 1 The biographer's studied disavowal, his reduction to "vanity," in the coupletlike...