friends, epilogues to plays, tales, love-"Gives sacred morals to a vicious age, To temples zeal, and manners to the stage; Prior was not a dramatist and could afford to throw stones at the theatre; but when he talks of the "chaste Muse" we Tales more obscene in motive than his seem to hear him laughing in his sleeve. The poet's orthodoxy and even devoutness are highly edifying. Commencing with an ode on the name of the Deity, the profane leaves of the volume are intermingled with judicious care. In the lines to Dr. Sherlock, on his discourse concerning Death, that excellent divine is besought to remain on this degenerate earth a little longer: "O! want thy Heaven till we have learnt the way: Refuse to leave thy destin'd charge too soon; And for the Church's good defer thy own. O live and let thy works urge our belief; Live to explain thy doctrine by thy life, Till Christians, yet unborn, be taught to die!" "Solomon" is as unexceptionable as the Book of Ecclesiastes on which it is founded, and oppressively didactic in its enunciations that all is vanity. 66 Ungodly Woolston," the Deist, is the subject of a side-thrust in another poem ; and in "Alma," sceptical as it is in tone, and materialistic in tendency, all risk of serious offence to the Church is removed by the concluding reference to the immortal destiny of the soul. In theory, too, no one can be more moral than Prior. Among the blessed prospects of William III.'s reign, celebrated in the "Carmen Seculare," is the patronage which will be extended to those who "To morals shall recall the age, "And purge from vicious dross the sinking stage." and, in the address to Queen Anne on her birthday, the continent is commanded to witness the spectacle of her who "The Old Gentry." 66 Dove,' ganti," were never written or printed out 66 which he proposes as "a posy for a wedLove is a jest; its vows are wind". ding ring that the marriage tie is a condition demanded by social laws as a preliminary sanction for the satisfaction of desire, but that when it becomes irksome, as it is sure soon to do, it may be practically disregarded—such appears to be the gist of his real belief upon the subject which chiefly interests him. That his Chloe was no donna di mente, but a kept mistress we are not left to ascertain from the information of his contemporaries.* The lack of moral refinement which allows him to disclose her real character † contrasts curiously with the intellectual refinement of much of the language addressed to her. His own faithlessness to her and every other mistress in turn, he takes no pains to conceal, and is never more happily inspired than by the theme. If she now and then triumphed over a rival. and was duly flattered by a poem inscribed to her on the occasion, she was soon displaced, and a poem scarcely less pretty recording her fall, was dedicated to her rival Lisetta. This and other infidelities, real or boasted having aroused Chloe's jealousy, * "To be vext at a trifle or two that I writ, Your judgment at once, and my passion you wrong: You take that for fact, which will scarce be found wit: he appeased her in the celebrated verses | real feeling still less. Without being absowhich have charmed hundreds as they lutely heartless, he sometimes shows an charmed Thackeray by their grace and insensibility truly amazing. In the middle "modern air" of expression. A stanza of a Hudibrastic tale, called "The Two or two will recall them to the reader's Mice," inscribed to his secretary on the memory: subject of their several fortunes, he thrusts in an apostrophe to the spirit of his mother in heaven! Another Hudibrastic poem -hardly less coarse than Chaucer's "Wife of Bath," from which it is imitated-wherein a sparrow tries to comfort a bereaved turtle-dove by recounting its own connubial experiences, he entitles "An Elegiac Tale, occasioned by the Death of Prince George, 1708." Without his own assurance for the fact it would have been incredible that a Court poet could address such consolation to a widowed queen. The bad taste-to use the mildest term of reprobation which actuated him in this instance is ex Od's life! must one swear to the truth of a song? "The God of us Verse-men (you know, child), the Sun, How after his journeys he sets up his rest: If at morning o'er Earth 'tis his fancy to run, At night he declines on his Thetis's breast. "So when I am wearied with wandering all day, To thee, my delight, in the evening I come; No matter what beauties I saw in my way : They were but my visits, but thou art my home. "Deeper to wound she shuns the fight; She drops her arms to gain the field; Secures her conquest by her flight, And triumphs when she seems to yield. "So when the Parthian turn'd his steed, And from the hostile camp withdrew, With cruel skill the backward reed He sent ; and as he fled he slew." This airy touch and arch assumption of sentiment display Prior in his best mood. Of genuine sentiment he has but little; of • "English Humorists," Lect. IV. hibited in a less painful but very offensive form, in his "Henry and Emma" wherein the tender, simple pathos of "the Notbroune Mayde" is barbarously travestied into cold, rhetorical sentiment, and its gracious ballad-music formalized into tensyllabled couplets and drawling Alexandrines. * Prior's philosophy of life is not very abstruse, Under the guidance of a "lovely moralist," we may now and then ponder on the transience of beauty and joy; but il faut vivre, and by means of such "working hypotheses" as party politics and "public employments" provide, and such solaces as "the mistress, the friend, and the bottle," life, although an illusion, need not be an unpleasant one. "The only wretched are the wise;" and the illusion must be kept up. The night cometh when no man can work- or play; therefore, carpe diem.‡ Whether as a diplomatist on foreign service, a placeman in town, or a man of lettered leisure in the country, his life, if we may trust his own chronicles of it, was uniformly easy and sensual. At the Hague he tells us how he he contrived In town, as he assures his Chloe, her] He found less unworthy prey in the chatcharms seduce him from "Whate'er the world thinks wise or grave, The mirth of feasts and joys of wine.”* His country life, as described in an epistle to one of his patrons, was not a whit more Spartan. His activity in the pursuit of pleasure and his apprehension of the limits beyond which it became open to ridicule, seem to have been equally keen. For the fashionable round of frivolity he professes to entertain the profoundest contempt. This "mingled mass" of London society, even when youth and health are at flood-tide, is nothing but "A dull farce, an empty show, Powder and pocket-glass and beau; Where sighs and looks are bought and sold, While for the miserable slaves of the world who have outgrown their attractions, he has no shafts of satire too galling. The woes of ladies whose mouse-skin eyebrows have been left behind with their complexion at Calais," or purloined by the kitten, "as fees belonging to her prey; "and the yet sadder fate of those like "poor Nell," who 66 ter-boxes and quid-nuncs of the coffeehouse, the boorish country squire, or the carnal and covetous priest;* and flew at the noblest quarry when attacking Marlborough's rapacity.t or burlesquing Boileau's rhetoric. His vein of satire is selwith the acrid rancour of Pope, or the dom unkindly, and compares favourably savage malignity of Swift. For the bucolic type of mind he had a true townsman's contempt,§ and for the "people in the abstract a genuine Tory's loathing but like a good many townsmen and Tories modified his theories in pracflected in Down Hall," a narrative in tice. His geniality of temper is well reballad metre of his journey into Essex (accompanied by a country squire) in search of the villa which Lord Oxford had recently given him. How the travellers chatted en route; how at the first inn they rallied the landlady on her youthful looks and her ancient cookery; how she answered their tender enquiries after her relations and neighbours; how one of the travellers (the poet declares it was his friend) lovingly whispered the maid;" how they lost their way with a guide who depended on his wife's information, aud how the poet bantered him in revenge this and much more is told with such a sprightly humour and bonhomie as to leave the pleasantest impression of the writer, his comrade, and all with whom they came in contact. Occasional poems addressed to children one, "To a Child of Quality, five years old," very daintily humorous in its pretence of passion for the " bright eyes that cannot read," and regret that the writer will be 66 -past making love When she begins to comprehend it;" - gossiping epistles to friends, and extempore invitations to patrons, leave the same impression of Prior's good-natured amiability. Though a ready flatterer, he was rarely obsequious, and though raised from a humble station to be domiciled with the epi-Cecils at Burleigh or the Harleys at Wimpole, could write with manly pride as his own epitaph: Prior was too doughty a sportsman to spend all his shot on such poor game as the dupes of Madame Rachel's predecessors in the art of "beautifying for ever." "Nobles and Heralds, by your leave, Here lies what once was Matthew Prior; The son of Adam and of Eve: the publication of his letters, a dignitary of the Church and a writer so eminent as Swift could play false to two fond women at once - when the infection of the coarser al-vices spread from the Court downward-when four of our kings in succession were notoriously unfaithful husbands Can Bourbon or Nassau go higher?" If not too modest a suppliant, he was most as prompt to beg for needy "Dick Shelton" and "Will Piggot" as for himself. Pope, Wycherley, Congreve, Southerne, Kneller, Verelst, Howard, and Vertue, among his contemporaries, all come in for a word of generous praise or friendly recognition. Upon the whole, unearnest and loose-lived as he was, Prior contrives to make his readers part on good terms with him, nor indisposed to comply with the request which he desired should be inscribed on his tomb : "If passing thou giv'st him a smile or a tear, He cares not-yet prithee be kind to his fame." - when drunkenness intruded itself on high festivals at the Palace - when a Princess of Wales, to the "great satisfaction" of her attendants and herself, could witness such a play as "The Wanton Wife or Amorous Widow". "not more obscene than old comedies are, and often bespoke by the ladies "t-when the supply of such representations was so equal to the demand that Addison could affirm, "Cuckoldom is the basis of most of our held "the mirror up to nature," that men modern plays "t-when the stage so far of high breeding boasted "before women In the strangely opposed characteristics of their intrigues," and (if the novelists of his intellectual and moral nature, in his are to be trusted) ladies of equal breeding brightness of wit and grace of expression, were in the habit of recounting in comhis insincerity, impurity, unspirituality, pany the stories of attempts upon their callousness, and bad taste, as well as in virtue.§ To the prevailing frivolity of the his geniality and esprit de corps, Prior society which enjoyed such literary food seems to furnish a very truthful reflection as the comedies of Dryden, Wycherley, of the age which produced him. An age and Congreve, and the novels of Aphra of splendid achievement-political, mili- Behn and Mrs. Manley, the "Spectator' tary, scientific, literary, and artistic- bears ample witness. The extravagancies which numbered men of great intellect by of dress and the arts of allurement, the scores, but men of great virtue by units inanities of the idle and the devices of an age which, with such teachers as Til- the profligate, are among the tritest lotson, Baxter, and Sherlock among di- themes of its essays and letters. The vines, and Butler, Young, and Pope among delicacy of the workmanship only brings moralists, did not fail for lack of sound out more clearly the flimsiness of the maprinciples, but might have taken for its terial. Though they doubtless honestly motto, "Video meliora proboque; dete- intended to satirize the folly of their time, riora sequor." An age deeply branded the writers seem constrained by the neceswith insincerity, when conspiracy and in- sity of ministering to it. Yet to the same trigue were the ordinary tools of state-readers whom they amuse with elaborate craft-perfidy and corruption the common triflings about Picts" and "Starers,' shame of politicians when officers and " Peepers" and "She-romps," the political statesmen high in place and power, as import of patches and the strategic manMarlborough, Peterborough, and Russell, ipulation of fans, are addressed criticisms Godolphin, Shrewsbury, and Bolinbroke, so just as those on Milton, such charming were at the same time servants of the sketches of character as those on Sir reigning and of the dethroned sovereign Roger de Coverley and his country life, -when Arians such as Clarke and Whis- and such graceful fictions as " Inkle and ton held ecclesiastical prefermenta free- Yarico" and "The Vision of Mirza." A thinker such as Bolingbroke was a society that could appreciate this, and the nominal High-Churchman an apparently still more vivid and sparkling literature independent patriot as De Foe was se- which Pope and Swift provided for it, cretly in the pay of the Government- cannot be excused for want of intellectual when great corporations like the City of faculty. Obtuseness in moral sense must London and the East India Company could surely be predicated of an appetite so peroffer bribes, and exalted officials like the Speaker of the House of Commons and the President of the Council could accept them when a poet so distinguished as Pope could stoop to tricks and lies about Lady Cowper's Diary quoted in Forsyth's "Novels and Novelists of the 18th Century," p. 96.. ↑ Ib.. p. 32. #Spectator," 1712. Forsyth, pp. 24-27. verse as to devour with equal zest the may be plausibly ascribed to the influence choicest dainties, the vapidest trash, and of that great Revolution which had recentthe foulest offal. The same explanation ly united the nation.* In spite of some will extend to the tone in which, from inevitable reaction, the consciousness of some of the first wits downward (Steele co-operation in the establishment of conhonourably excepted) men commonly dis- stitutional liberty, and of satisfaction at cussed the relations of sex. They "talked the victories which secured it, appears to of love as something that burns them," have diffused a mutual confidence among and besought "the women of their heart all classes to which Englishmen had long to ease their pains;" they engraved the been strangers. The evidences of national name of the "reigning beauty" on drink- good temper unanimously exhibited in the ing glasses, made of her chemise a wine- grave crises of 1696 and 1697 † - and strainer and of her boots a fricassee; † and the light which contemporary literature yet with this fulsome sentiment were as- throws upon the position occupied by the sociated such an exaltation of the sensu- squire in regard to his tenants, and by ous, such a depreciation of the spiritual the master and mistress in regard to their elements of love, that "if a man of any servants,§ indicate that whatever sectional delicacy" (says Steele) "were to attend jealousy and discontent may still have exto the discourse of the young fellows in isted in theory, there was in practice a this age, he would believe that there were vast preponderance of cordial sympathy. none but prostitutes to make the objects The relations between the aristocratic and of passion." Prior's strange want of the literary class illustrated in Prior's life feeling in consoling a widowed queen with and writings ought not to be forgotten at a an impure tale, may compare with the in- time when the House of Lords is on its congruity of his graver contemporary trial. With all the inducements to exYoung in preluding a solemn elegy on the exclusiveness derived from pride of birth death of a saint, by complimenting his and eligibility without apprenticeship to patroness on her appearance as Cynthia the highest offices of State, the nobility at a recent masquerade.§ The free indul- of this period are memorable not as mogence in personalities, extending even to nopolists and nepotists, but for their eagthe ridicule of physical infirmity, which erness to lavish preferment upon men of the critics of that age allowed themselves, the humblest station who gave proof of indicates yet more plainly the prevalent ability. Wit, not blue blood, was then the grossness of taste. No such general ex-passport to place and fortune and the pression of surpise or reprobation as a public breach of good manners is certain to provoke in our own day, appears to have followed the perpetration of these literary indecencies; and it is reasonable therefore to hold the society of the time rather than the individual responsible for the low standard of sensibility that rendered their occurrence possible. In like manner the barbarism which dictated the composition of Prior's "Henry and Emma" was akin to that which induced Dryden and Pope to modernize Chaucer, and the playwrights to employ their unhallowed hands in "improving" the tragedies of Skakespeare. claims of men of letters and artists upon their protection seem to have been recognized by the well-born and wealthy generally as foremost among the liabilities to which "noblesse oblige." This state of things was doubtless healthier for the donors than the donees; but however the Grub Street writers may have merited the censure which Macaulay passes upon the profession of authorship in the reign of Charles II., we are aware of no adequate evidence for charging the great wits of the age of Anne with anything like servility or lack of self-respect. The terms upon which Pope and Swift consorted with Bolingbroke, Oxford, and Peterborough; AdIt is pleasant to remember that Prior's dison and Steel with Somers and Halifax, redeeming qualities were not less repre- were surely mutually honourable. But sentative than his vices and shortcomings. even if the direct tendency of the system The geniality of temper which distin- of patronage was to encourage sycophanguished him always one of our boasted cy, its indirect tendency to obliterate convirtues seems to have specially charac-ventional distinctions of rank, and estabterized his epoch, and its development Macaulay's "History of England." Edition, I. De Quincey's Essay on Schlosser's Literary pp. 520-1, 654-6. History of the 18th Century." + See citations in Forsyth, pp. 22-3. "The Tatler," ubi supra. "Night Thoughts," III. "Narcissa." t Ib. II., pp. 584, 594, 631. "Spectator," No. 112. & Swift's "Hamilton's Bawn," and "Mrs. Harris's Petition." |