Pyramid of Cestius an essential sight for many who undertook the Grand Tour in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was much admired by architects, becoming the primary model for pyramids built in the West during this period. Percy Bysshe Shelley described it as "one keen pyramid with wedge sublime" in "Adonaïs", his 1821 elegy for John Keats. In turn the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy saw the pyramid during a visit to the nearby Protestant Cemetery in 1887 and was inspired to write a poem, "Rome: At the Pyramid of Cestius near the Graves of Shelley and Keats", in which he
Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady above in his "Journal" on more than one occasion [see December 5, 1750 and July 4, 1786].) Samuel Johnson in his "Lives of the Poets" also faulted the "Elegy" on similar grounds, referring to "the illaudable singularity of treating suicide with respect." A different kind of criticism, one on artistic grounds, is made by Maynard Mack in his important biography "Alexander Pope: A Life." Mack acknowledges that there are beautiful passages in the poem, but also finds that it is marked by a certain incoherence between elements and attitudes which are not fully reconciled, such as the idea of Roman