entertain splendidly, in the possession of a bailiff's man; with a crowd of little creditors,-grocers, butchers, and small-coal men-lingering round the door with their bills and jeering at him. Alas! for poor Dick Steele! For nobody else, of course. There is no man or woman in our time who makes fine projects and gives them up from idleness or want of means. When Duty calls upon us, we no doubt are always at home and ready to pay that grim tax-gatherer. When we are stricken with remorse and promise reform, we keep our promise, and are never angry, or idle, or extravagant any more. There are no chambers in our hearts, destined for family friends and affections, and now occupied by some Sin's emissary and bailiff in possession. There are no little sins, shabby peccadilloes, importunate remembrances, or disappointed holders of our promises to reform, hovering at our steps, or knocking at our door! Of course not. We are living in the nineteenth century; and poor Dick Steele stumbled and got up again, and got into jail and out again, and sinned and repented, and loved and suffered, and lived and died, scores of years ago. Peace be with him! Let us think gently of one who was so gentle: let us speak kindly of one whose own breast exuberated with human kindness.

PRIOR, GAY, AND POPE

ATTHEW PRIOR was one of those famous

MAT

and lucky wits of the auspicious reign of Queen Anne, whose name it behoves us not to pass over. Mat was a world-philosopher of no small genius, good nature, and acumen.1 He loved, he drank, he sang. He describes himself, in one of his lyrics, "in a little Dutch chaise on a Saturday night; on his left hand his Horace,

1

Gay calls him-" Dear Prior .... beloved by every muse."-Mr. Pope's Welcome from Greece. Swift and Prior were very intimate, and he is frequently mentioned in the "Journal to Stella." 66 'Mr. Prior," says Swift, "walks to make himself fat, and I to keep myself down. . . . We often walk round the park together." In Swift's works there is a curious tract called " Remarks on the Characters of the Court of Queen Anne" [Scorr's edition, vol. xii.]. The "Remarks" are not by the Dean; but at the end of each is an addition in italics from his hand, and these are always characteristic. Thus, to the Duke of Marlborough, he adds, "Detestably covetous," &c. Prior is thus noticed

“MATTHEW PRIOR, Esq., Commissioner of Trade.

“On the Queen's accession to the throne, he was continued in his office; is very well at court with the ministry, and is an entire creature of my Lord Jersey's, whom he supports by his advice; is one of the best poets in England, but very facetious in conversation. A thin, hollow-looked man, turned of forty years old. This is near the truth."

66

Yet counting as far as to fifty his years,

His virtues and vices were as other men's are.

High hopes he conceived and he smothered great fears,
In a life party-coloured-half pleasure, half care.

"Not to business a drudge, nor to faction a slave,
He strove to make interest and freedom agree;
In public employments industrious and grave,
And alone with his friends, Lord, how merry was he!

"Now in equipage stately, now humble on foot,

Both fortunes he tried, but to neither would trust;
And whirled in the round as the wheel turned about,
He found riches had wings, and knew man was but dust."
PRIOR'S Poems. [For my own monument.]

and a friend on his right," going out of town from the Hague to pass that evening, and the ensuing Sunday, boozing at a Spielhaus with his companions, perhaps bobbing for perch in a Dutch canal, and noting down, in a strain and with a grace not unworthy of his Epicurean master, the charms of his idleness, his retreat, and his Batavian Chloe. A vintner's son in Whitehall, and a distinguished pupil of Busby of the Rod, Prior attracted some notice by writing verses at St. John's College, Cambridge, and, coming up to town, aided Montague' in an attack on the noble old English lion John Dryden; in ridicule of whose work, "The Hind and the Panther," he brought out that remarkable and famous burlesque, "The Town and Country Mouse." Aren't you all acquainted with it? Have you not all got it by heart? What! have you never heard of it? See what fame is made of! The wonderful part of the satire was, that, as a natural consequence of "The Town and Country Mouse," Matthew Prior was made Secretary of Embassy at the Hague! I believe it is dancing, rather than singing, which distinguishes the young English diplomatists of the present day; and have seen them in various parts perform that part of their duty very finely. In Prior's time it appears a different accomplishment led to preferment. Could you write a copy of Alcaics? that was the question. Could you turn out a neat epigram or two? Could you compose "The Town and Country Mouse?" It is manifest that, by the possession of this faculty, the most difficult treaties,

"They joined to produce a parody, entitled the Town and Country Mouse,' part of which Mr. Bayes is supposed to gratify his old friends, Smart and Johnson, by repeating to them. The piece is therefore founded upon the twice-told jest of the Rehearsal.' There is nothing new or original in the idea. In this piece, Prior, though the younger man, seems to have had by far the largest share.”—Scott's Dryden, vol. i. p. 330.

the laws of foreign nations, and the interests of our own, are easily understood. Prior rose in the diplomatic service, and said good things that proved his sense and his spirit. When the apartments at Versailles were shown to him, with the victories of Louis XIV. painted on the walls, and Prior was asked whether the palace of the King of England had any such decorations, "The monuments of my master's actions," Mat said, of William whom he cordially revered, "are to be seen everywhere except in his own house." Bravo, Mat! Prior rose to be full ambassador at Paris,1 where he somehow was cheated out of his ambassadorial plate; and in an heroic poem, addressed by him to her late lamented Majesty, Queen Anne, Mat makes some magnificent allusions to these dishes and spoons, of which Fate had deprived him. All that he wants, he says, is her Majesty's picture; without that he can't be happy.

"Thee, gracious Anne, thee present I adore:

Thee, Queen of Peace, if Time and Fate have power
Higher to raise the glories of thy reign,

In words sublimer and a nobler strain

May future bards the mighty theme rehearse.
Here, Stator Jove, and Phoebus, king of verse,

The votive tablet I suspend."

1" He was to have been in the same commission with the Duke of Shrewsbury, but that that nobleman," says Johnson, “refused to be associated with one so meanly born. Prior therefore continued to act without a title till the Duke's return next year to England, and then he assumed the style and dignity of ambassador."

He had been thinking of slights of this sort when he wrote his Epitaph:

"Nobles and heralds, by your leave,

Here lies what once was Matthew Prior,

The son of Adam and of Eve;

Can Bourbon or Nassau claim higher?"

But, in this case, the old prejudice got the better of the old joke.

With that word the poem stops abruptly. The votive tablet is suspended for ever, like Mahomet's coffin. News came that the Queen was dead. Stator Jove, and Phoebus, king of verse, were left there, hovering to this day, over the votive tablet. The picture was never got, any more than the spoons and dishes: the inspiration ceased, the verses were not wanted-the ambassador wasn't wanted. Poor Mat was recalled from his embassy, suffered disgrace along with his patrons, lived under a sort of cloud ever after, and disappeared in Essex. When deprived of all his pensions and emoluments, the hearty and generous Oxford pensioned him. They played for gallant stakes-the bold men of those days-and lived and gave splendidly.

Johnson quotes from Spence a legend, that Prior, after spending an evening with Harley, St. John, Pope, and Swift, would go off and smoke a pipe with a couple of friends of his, a soldier and his wife, in Long Acre. Those who have not read his late Excellency's poems should be warned that they smack not a little of the conversation of his Long Acre friends. Johnson speaks slightingly of his lyrics; but with due deference to the great Samuel, Prior's seem to me amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humourous of English lyrical poems.1 Horace is always in his mind; and his

'His epigrams have the genuine sparkle:

"THE REMEDY WORSE THAN THE DISEASE.

"I sent for Radcliff; was so ill,

That other doctors gave me over:
He felt my pulse, prescribed his pill,
And I was likely to recover.

"But when the wit began to wheeze,
And wine had warmed the politician,
Cured yesterday of my disease,

I died last night of my physician.”