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For this, ere Phoebus rose, he had implored Propitious heaven, and every power adored, But chiefly Love—to Love an altar built, Of twelve vast French romances, neatly gilt. There lay three garters, half a pair of gloves; And all the trophies of his former loves. With tender billets-doux he lights the pyre, And breathes three amorous sighs to raise the fire.. Meaning. As the Baron watches Belinda sail down the Thames towards Hampton Court in Canto II, the narrative jumps back to before dawn (“Phoebus” is another name for Apollo, the sun god), when the Baron had prayed to “heaven” and specifically to “Love” to be able to win Belinda’s lock. Earlier on, Pope poked fun at Belinda for metaphorically building a pagan-seeming altar out of her dressing table as she prepared for her day at court. But here, the Baron, a man who is supposedly without the “female errors” (such as vanity) to which Belinda is supposedly extra susceptible, makes his own pagan altar. In Pope’s Christian, age pagan worship was considered to be morally bankrupt, rejecting Christian mores. So it’s noteworthy that Pope emphasizes to the reader that that, despite the fact that this is a world in which female morality is thought to be less robust than male morality (as demonstrated by Belinda’s specifically “female errors”), the Baron is engaging in the same kind of morally questionable pagan-inspired activities. The pagan motif is ultimately also quite a comical one. In epic poetry, pyres are usually rather serious affairs, used to cremate bodies or to make important sacrifices to the gods. The Baron’s pyre is effectively a light-hearted parody of a classical pyre, constructed with trivial tokens of love like “French romances” and “billet-doux” (love-letters), meaning that Pope is once again able to draw a comical comparison between the lofty world of epic poetry and the superficial and silly world of the court to highlight just how superficial and silly it is.