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Matthew Prior.

AMONG the men of letters who have made the reign of the "good Queen Anne" (good perhaps, but dull certainly) so famous in our annals, it is remarkable that Pope alone can be said to have wholly dedicated his life/ to literature. For him there was no meaning in life apart from poetry, and the noble fame which poetry brought with it. His wretched physical condition and his proscribed creed were dead against him in the race for preferment and popularity. In his body he was one of the feeblest of men, so helpless that he had to be dressed by a servant, so much of a cripple that his enemies, with the gross lack of good feeling frequently displayed in that age, sneered at him as a hunchback. But Pope possessed invincible courage, and knowing well his powers, and seeing that there was but one road open to him, resolved to rise in it above all competitors. With his poetical contemporaries, on the other hand, literature, although in some cases heartily appreciated, was used as a means rather than an end. It was the ladder by which they hoped to ascend to competence or fortune, not the goal towards which they directed their most wistful glances. In those days the first rungs of this ladder were usually climbed by verse-making. Addison, who is probably the only writer that ever gained an official post by a simile, having compared Marlborough's "mighty soul" at Blenheim to an angel who

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pleased th' Almighty's orders to perform Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm,"

advanced, a conqueror himself, from one position to another until he reached his highest elevation as Secretary of State; Tickell, who also gained place by his verses, was Under-Secretary. Steele held three or four offices, and had no one but himself to blame for his pecuniary misfortunes. Congreve, thanks to the Old Bachelor, received from Government an income of twelve hundred a year, and was supposed at least to perform certain duties in return. Yalden and Atterbury were successively bishops of Rochester. John Hughes, whose friendship with Addison does him far more honour than his verses, was Secretary to the Commissions of the Peace; Rowe, the author of Jane Shore and the Fair Penitent, held for three years of Anne's reign the post of Under-Secretary, and at the accession of George I. was made one of the Land Surveyors of the Port of London and Clerk to the Council of the Prince of Wales. Nor was this all, for the Lord Chancellor Parker, "as soon as he received the Seals, appointed him, unasked, Secretary of the Presentations." Swift, the most robust intellect of the age, was also the most neglected. His position was

as strange as his genius was extraordinary. During the Administration of Harley and St. John he was probably the most influential man in the country. Those Ministers treated him as their intimate friend, called him by his Christian name, made abundant use of his marvellous ability, and at last, as a reward for his services, sent him into exile to live on the income of a poor Irish deanery. But Swift, unfortunately for his prospects of advancement, was a clergyman, and the Queen's repugnance to the author of A Tale of a Tub was too invincible to be overcome. Although Swift, in telling Stella of his promotion, says he is less out of humour than she would imagine, he finds it difficult to conceal his disgust. "I confess," he wrote, "I thought the Ministry would not let me go, but perhaps they can't help it." This was no doubt the case. Swift could push the fortunes of other people, but not his own, and it is not to he wondered at that so respectably pious a queen as Anne should have disliked the author of what she must have regarded as a profane book, a book, too, the wit of which she was quite unable to appreciate. It was thus that Swift missed the preferment attained by almost all his literary contemporaries, whether clergymen or laymen, and no doubt Mr. Henry Morley is right in saying that if the Dean had not written The Tale of a Tub he would have died a bishop.

Perhaps in all that circle of wits there was no man whose advancement from a low estate to high official honours was more signal than that of Matthew Prior. He was, indeed, apart from his literary gifts, a man of considerable ability, ready with speech as with pen. His address must have been winning, his skill as a diplomatist considerable, and his general culture entitled him to respect at a time when even statesmen were very partially educated, and when one of the reasons given for making St. John Secretary of State was, that he was the only person about the Court who understood French. Men of what we are accustomed to call low origin have always been able to rise in England, since, notwithstanding our class distinctions, the field for determination and genius is a wide one in a free country. Matthew Prior, or "Mat Prior," as he was familiarly called by his associates, came of so obscure an origin that his birthplace, like that of Congreve, is open to conjecture. He was born in 1664, and placed by his uncle, a tavern-keeper near Charing Cross, at Westminster School, then under the charge of the renowned Dr. Busby. Samuel Prior's tavern appears to have been frequented by the nobility, and there the young scholar and poet was discovered by the Earl of Dorset, reading Horace. Lord Dorset, himself a small poet and a splendid patron of poets, was afterwards praised by Prior in language which may have been sincere, but which to modern ears sounds ridiculously extravagant. "The manner in which the Earl wrote," he says, "will hardly ever be equalled; every one of his pieces is an ingot of gold, such as, wrought or beaten thinner, would shine through a whole book of any other author; his verses have a lustre like the sun in Claude Lorraine's landscapes; his love poems convey the wit of Petronius in the softness of Tibullus; his

satire is so severely pointed that in it he appears what his great friend the Earl of Rochester (that other prodigy of the age) says he was—

'The best good man, with the worst natur'd Muse.'

Yet so far was this great author from valuing himself upon his works that he cared not what became of them, though everybody else did. There are many things of his not extant in writing, which, like the verses and sayings of the ancient Druids, retain an universal veneration, though they are preserved only by memory." Moreover his virtues, according to his panegyrist, were as conspicuous as his genius; he was the model of all that is great and noble; and for his charity, we can scarce find a parallel in history itself. That Prior, like Dryden, should have absurdly praised the man who had done his best to serve him was in accordance with the taste of the age, and the poet who found a patron was bound to render him such return as a poet best could. Prior was transferred by his munificent friend from the "Rummer Tavern" to St. John's College, Cambridge, where a far greater poet gained, a hundred years later, such education as a university could impart to a Wordsworth. One of his first literary efforts at the university was in conjunction with an acquaintance whose advancement in the State was destined to be yet more distinguished than his own. In 1687 John Dryden, who had discovered the truth of the Roman Catholic faith soon after the accession of a Roman Catholic king, published his famous poem The Hind and the Panther. It called forth a number of replies, both serious and burlesque, of which one only, entitled The Country Mouse and the City Mouse, written by Charles Montague and Matthew Prior, can be said to have survived. Montague was the son of a younger son of a nobleman, and, like Prior, was educated under Busby. The two Westminster boys went to Cambridge in the same year, and the good fortune of Montague, like that of his friend, appears to have been due in the first instance to a knack of verse-making. To call him a poet would be as absurd as to call an organ-grinder a musician, but his lines on the death of King Charles started him on the road to fortune. He was born for the House of Commons, and once there, as Macaulay observes, his life during some years was a series of triumphs. "At thirty he would gladly have given all his chances in life for a comfortable vicarage and a chaplain's scarf. At thirty-seven he was First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a Regent of the Kingdom."

Prior, who knew that as a poet he was beyond comparison superior to Montague, and that even of this parody the best part was his work, grumbled at the speedy promotion of his literary partner. But his own advancement was at hand. In 1691 he was appointed secretary to the Embassy which joined the Congress at the Hague, and afterwards received the post of Gentleman of the Bedchamber to King William. When Mary died he wrote an elegy on her death, addressed to the King in an exhausting number of stanzas. It is after the manner of such loyal poems, and no doubt Dr. Johnson is right in his conjecture that William

never read it, for Prior himself complains. that the King did not understand poetical eulogy. If he had read this threnody he would have learnt that he was the sun whose auspicious light could alone give joy to the mourning nations, and whose sublime meridian course must atone for Mary's setting rays; that half of him was deified before his death; that from Mary's glory angels trace the beauty of her partner's soul; and how, to quote the final stanza

Alone to thy renown 'tis given

Unbounded through all worlds to go,

While she, great saint, rejoices Heaven;
And thou sustain'st the orb below.

It seems impossible to conceive that anyone, whether king or commoner, would care to read a mechanical piece of verse like this, but such poems were then the fashion, and were written and endured, no doubt, simply because they were fashionable. Prior, a courtier by nature, never lost an opportunity of discovering and celebrating kingly virtues, and his Carmen Seculare, a poem published five years later, "one of his longest and most splendid compositions," according to Dr. Johnson's verdict, is perhaps as good a specimen as the age could show of encomiastic verse. But it is a dreary specimen notwithstanding.

Biography was an art little practised in Prior's time, and the characteristic details handed down to us respecting the poet's official life are comparatively few and insignificant. What there are, however, will be worth recording, for they show that he filled the posts assigned to him with dignity and tact. In 1697 Prior was appointed secretary to the English negotiators at the Treaty of Ryswick, the conclusion of which caused such abounding joy in England. The same year he was nominated principal Secretary of State in Ireland, and in 1698 he was secretary to the Embassy in France under the Earl of Portland and the Earl of Jersey. Lord Macaulay has described this embassy, "the most magnificent that England had ever sent to any foreign Court," with his accustomed wealth of detail and picturesqueness of style. The passage referring to Prior, however familiar, deserves to be transcribed, since it is impossible to relate the anecdotes contained in it more briefly or in such felicitous language :

"Prior was Secretary of Legation. His quick parts, his industry, his politeness, and his perfect knowledge of the French language marked him out as eminently fitted for diplomatic employment. He had, however, found much difficulty in overcoming an odd prejudice which his chief had conceived against him. Portland, with good natural abilities and great expertness in business, was no scholar. He had probably never read an English book; but he had a general notion, unhappily but too well founded, that the wits and poets, who congregated at Will's, were a most profane and licentious set; and being himself a man of orthodox opinions and regular life, he was not disposed to give his confidence to one whom he supposed to be a ribald scoffer. Prior, with much address, and, per

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haps, with the help of a little hypocrisy, completely removed this unfavourable impression. He talked on serious subjects seriously, quoted the New Testament appositely, vindicated Hammond from the charge of Popery, and, by way of a decisive blow, gave the definition of a true Church from the nineteenth article. Portland stared at him. 'I am glad, Mr. Prior, to find you so good a Christian. I was afraid you were an atheist.' 'An atheist, my good Lord?' cried Prior. 'What could lead your Lordship to entertain such a suspicion?' Why,' said Portland, 'I knew that you were a poet, and I took it for granted that you did not believe in God.' My Lord,' said the wit,' you do us poets the greatest injustice. Of all people we are farthest from atheism. For the atheists do not even worship the true God whom the rest of mankind acknowledge; and we are always invoking and hymning false gods whom everybody else has renounced.' This jest will be perfectly intelligible to all who remember the eternally recurring allusions to Venus and Minerva, Mars, Cupid, and Apollo, which were meant to be the ornaments, and are the blemishes, of Prior's compositions. But Portland was much puzzled. However, he declared himself satisfied; and the young diplomatist withdrew, laughing to think with how little learning a man may shine in courts, lead armies, negotiate treaties, obtain a coronet and a garter, and leave a fortune of half a million."

Prior's wit and readiness of repartee were not always exercised on men as thick-headed as Portland, and it was during this residence in Paris that he received attentions from distinguished Frenchmen like the Prince of Condé and Bossuet. Then, too, it was that on seeing at Versailles the pictures painted by Le Brun to commemorate the victories of Louis XIV., he was asked whether King William's palace was similarly adorned? and made the famous reply, "The monuments of my master's actions are to be seen everywhere but in his own house." At all times and in all places the poet proved himself a distinguished courtier, and his conversation and manners were warmly praised by the French King, а circumstance," says Macaulay, "which will be thought remarkable when it is remembered that his Majesty was an excellent model and an excellent judge of gentlemanlike deportment, and that Prior had passed his boyhood in drawing corks at a tavern, and his early manhood in the seclusion of a college."

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It has been said, on grounds that will scarcely bear examination, that he was not a good man of business. Pope says Prior was nothing out of verse, but then Pope disliked Prior. Swift, a far better judge, writes highly of his abilities in the management of affairs, and Lord Bolingbroke, addressing Queen Anne, states that Prior is "the best versed in matters of trade of all your Majesty's servants," a remark which it is probable Lord Macaulay had in his mind when he observes that, like Montague, Prior was distinguished by an intimate knowledge of trade and finance. That King William, who cared not a jot for literature, and was, therefore, not likely to be prejudiced in Prior's favour in consequence of his genius as a poet, did

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