happily ridiculed; but the interest of the satire has largely passed away. It opens thus: Speak, goddess! since 'tis thou that best canst tell Not far from that most celebrated place The Old Bailey Now she unfolds the faint and dawning strife While the more loose flow from the vital urn, To extend its recent form, and stretch to man; . Hence 'tis we wait the wondrous cause to find But now no grand inquiries are descried; Feuds are increased, and learning laid aside; The poem proceeds to show how the slumbers of the god are effectively and finally disturbed. The Sloane named so disrespectfully is the famous Sir Hans, who was one of the first subscribers to the Dispensary. On Death. 'Tis to the vulgar death too harsh appears; The ill we feel is only in our fears. To die is landing on some silent shore, Where billows never break, nor tempests roar : Ere well we feel the friendly stroke, 'tis o'er. The wise through thought the insults of death defy, 'Tis what the guilty fear, the pious crave; (From Canto iii.) Often-quoted fragments of the Dispensary are: Though possession be the undoubted view, Garth wrote the epilogue to Addison's tragedy In the same poem occurs the couplet : The woes of wedlock with the joys we mix; 'Tis best repenting in a coach and six. Richard Duke (1659?-1711), the son of a substantial London citizen, studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, lived for a time a dissolute life with the courtiers, wits, playwrights and actors, and wrote a good many poems which Dr Johnson found 'not below mediocrity.' There are translations from Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, and Theocritus; epistles or addresses to Waller, Dryden, Otway, Creech, and others; The Review, an unfinished political satire; poems on the birth, death, marriage, or accession of princes and private persons, and a number of songs. Duke was one of the wits when Swift was a child, as Swift said, but took orders before 1685, held with credit several cures, published sermons, and was by-and-by chaplain to the Queen's Most Gracious Majesty as well as to the Bishop of Winchester, with the rich living of Witney in Oxfordshire. To Mr Waller. When shame for all my foolish youth had writ Kings, heroes, nymphs, the brave, the fair, the young, Two things divine, Thee and Herself, does choose. To join with and complete th' ethereal choir ! William Walsh (1663-1708) was the son of the lord of the manor of Abberley in Worcestershire, left Wadham College without a degree, and in 1698 was sent to Parliament for his native county. Throughout life he supported the Whig and the Honoverian interest. Johnson honoured him with a place among the poets, though in his judgment he had 'more elegance than vigour,' and seldom rises higher than to be pretty. He was for a while Master of the Horse, and was a man of fashion, 'ostentatiously splendid in his dress.' He is known chiefly through his connection with Pope, whom, when still a young man, he helped with encouragement, advice, and criticism, for which Pope was very grateful. It was he who gave Pope the famous advice to try and be a correct poet, as this was now the only way of excellency. His own poems comprise pastorals, eclogues, imitations of Virgil and Horace, and a variety of love poems and occasional verses, some of them sprightly enough. The Unrewarded Lover. Let the dull merchant curse his angry fate, And from the winds and waves his fortune wait: I wage no war, I plead no cause but Love's; Written in a Lady's Table-book. With what strange raptures would my soul be blest, Death. What has this bugbear Death that 's worth our care? After a life in pain and sorrow past, After deluding hope and dire despair, Death only gives us quiet at the last. How strangely are our love and hate misplaced! Freedom we seek, and yet from freedom flee ; Courting those tyrant sins that chain us fast, And shunning Death, that only sets us free. 'Tis not a foolish fear of future pains, (Why should they fear who keep their souls from stains?) That makes me dread thy terrors, Death, to see : 'Tis not the loss of riches, or of fame, Or the vain toys the vulgar pleasures name; 'Tis nothing, Calia, but the losing thee. Phyllis's Resolution. When slaves their liberty require, They hope no more to gain, But you not only that desire, But ask the power to reign. Think how unjust a suit you make, Then you will soon decline; Your freedom when you please pray take, But trespass not on mine. No more in vain, Alcander, crave, I ne'er will grant the thing, That he who once has been my slave Should ever be my king. John Dunton (1659–1733), son of the rector of Graffham, Hunts, was apprenticed to a London bookseller, and acquired much varied knowledge, in spite of love, politics, and other distractions. He took a shop, married happily, made some lucky ventures, but was involved in financial troubles as security for relatives. He visited America, Holland, and Cologne, settled with his creditors, and kept shop for ten years with fair prosperity, his Athenian Gazette (afterwards Athenian Mercury, 1691-97) being specially successful as one of the earliest journals devoted to answering correspondents. He wrote political pamphlets on the Whig side, satires, &c., to the number of forty, published six hundred books, and carried out a few of the 'six hundred projects' he cherished. He married a second time unhappily, and under the real and imaginary troubles of his later years his mind seems to have crossed the line between crackbrained flightiness and sheer lunacy, as may be gathered from his extraordinary Life and Errors of John Dunton (1705). An abridgment of the Athenian Oracle, Dunton's own fourvolume selection of articles from the Athenian Mercury, was edited by John Underhill in 1892. George Stepney (1663-1707) was one of Johnson's poets, reported in youth to have made grey authors blush,' but adjudged by Johnson to have 'little either of the grace of wit or the vigour of nature.' And time has confirmed this judgment: Stepney's poems figure in collections like Chalmers's British Poets, but nobody reads them, and his name is all but forgotten. Of Pembrokeshire stock, he was the son of a groom of the chamber to Charles II., became famous at Cambridge as a writer of Latin verse, and chose a diplomatic career. Than this envoy to the Emperor, to the Elector Palatine, the Electors of Brandenburg, Saxony, Mainz, Treves, and Cologne, and the Landgrave of Hesse, 'no Englishman knew the affairs of Germany so well and few Germans better.' His work is but small in volume. He made some free translations or imitations from Juvenal, Horace, and Ovid, praised William III. and Mary in neat and commonplace verses as he had done James II., and wrote 'occasional poems,' like so many of his contemporaries. Dreams. At dead of night imperial Reason sleeps, Which passion form'd, and still the strongest reigns. And generals fight again their battles won. John Pomfret (1667-1702) was the son of the rector of Luton, Bedfordshire, and himself a clergyman. In 1695 he became rector of Maulden, also in Bedfordshire, and had the prospect of preferment; but the Bishop of London, absurdly regarding as immoral in the mouth of a married clergyman the gently cynical wish to have no wife, expressed in The Choice, considered and rejected the poetical candidate. Detained in London by this unsuccessful negotiation, Pomfret caught smallpox and died. His works comprise occasional poems and some 'Pindaric Essays' in Cowley's manner; Cruelty and Lust, on Colonel Kirke's proceedings; and Reason: a Poem upon the Divine Attributes. The only piece of Pomfret's now remembered-we can hardly say read-is The Choice. Dr Johnson said that perhaps no poem in our language had been oftener perused; and Southey still asked why Pomfret was the most popular among the English poets. It is difficult nowadays to conceive that The Choice could ever have been a truly popular poem. It is a graceful but tame and monotonous celebration, in neat verse, of the mild joys of a country retirement, a modest dwelling, with wood, garden, and stream, a clear and competent estate, and the enjoyment of lettered ease and happiness -a subject sufficiently often handled by Pomfret's contemporaries; and Thomson and Cowper, one might have thought, would long ere Southey's time have obliterated all but the dim memory of Pomfret's commonplaces. From The Choice.' If Heaven the grateful liberty would give On this side fields, on that a neighbouring wood. On whose delicious banks a stately row A little more, sometimes to oblige a friend. Nor should the sons of poverty repine Too much at fortune; they should taste of mine; Should be relieved with what my wants could spare; To feed the stranger, and the neighbouring poor. Matthew Prior. Matthew Prior was born 21st July 1664, probably at Wimborne Minster in East Dorsetshire, but was brought up at Westminster, and sent to the school there. His father, a Nonconformist joiner, died, and Matthew was adopted by an uncle, Samuel Prior, who kept the Rhenish Wine House in Channel (now Cannon) Row, Westminster. The Earl of Dorset here found him once reading Horace, and got his uncle to send the lad back to Westminster; in 1681 he became a king's scholar, and in 1683 was elected to a scholarship at St John's College, Cambridge. Here he distinguished himself, and amongst other verses, produced (1687), in conjunction with Charles Montagu (afterwards Earl of Halifax), a no-popery skit entitled the City Mouse and Country Mouse, burlesquing Dryden's Hind and Panther, in which Bayes figures somewhat as in the Rehearsal. The Earl of Dorset subsequently obtained for him an appointment as secretary to Lord Dursley, afterwards Earl of Berkeley, ambassador to the Hague. In this post Prior showed gifts unusual in successful poets, and secured the approbation of King William, who made him one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber. In 1697 he was appointed secretary to the embassy on the treaty of Ryswick; and next year he was secretary of embassy at Paris. Johnson relates that, viewing at Versailles Le Brun's pictures of the victories of Louis, Prior, on being asked whether the King of England's palace had any such decorations, happily replied: "The monuments of my master's actions are to be seen everywhere but in his own house.' After his return to England Prior was appointed a Commissioner of Trade and Plantations. In 1701 he entered the House of Commons for the borough of East Grinstead, and abandoning his former friends, the Whigs, joined the Tories in impeaching Lord Somers. This came with a bad grace from Prior, for the charge against Somers was that he had advised that partition treaty in which the poet himself had had a share. He showed his patriotism by afterwards celebrating in verse the battles of Blenheim (1704) and Ramillies (1706). When the Whig Government was overturned, Prior became attached to Harley's administration, and went with Bolingbroke to France in 1711 to negotiate a treaty of peace. He lived in splendour in Paris, was a favourite of the French monarch, and enjoyed all the honours of ambassador. He was recalled, sore against his will, to London in 1715. Queen Anne being dead, and the Whigs again in office, Prior was committed to custody on a charge of high treason. The charge was that he had held clandestine conferences with the French plenipotentiary though, as he justly replied, no treaty was ever made without private interviews and preliminaries; it was suggested, too, that Bolingbroke and he were intriguing for the Pretender. The Whigs were indignant at what they regarded as the disgraceful treaty of Utrecht; Prior only shared in the blame of the Government and the unpopularity of Bolingbroke. After two years' confinement, the poet was released without a trial. He had in the interval written his poem of Alma; and being now left without any other support than his fellowship of St John's, and very improvident to boot, he produced Solomon, the most elaborate of his works. He further issued a collected edition of his poems (1718), which was sold to subscribers for two guineas a copy and realised four thousand guineas. An equal sum was presented to Prior by Lord Oxford's son, Lord Harley, now Earl of Oxford, and thus he had laid up a provision for old age. He was now ambitious only of comfort and private enjoyment—or said so. Even these he did not long possess; he died on the 18th of September 1721, at Lord Harley's seat at Wimpole, in the fifty-eighth year of his age. The Duchess of Portland, Lord Harley's daughter, said Prior made himself beloved by every living thing in the house-master, child, and servant, human creature or animal.' To this lady as a child he had addressed his well-known verses beginning: My noble lovely little Peggy, Let this, my first epistle, beg ye, At dawn of morn and close of even He was said to have been fond of toping and of low company, and at the time of his death was, according to Arbuthnot, on the point of marrying a certain Bessy Cox, who kept an alehouse in Long Acre. To this person and to his secretary, Prior left his estate. Arbuthnot, writing to a friend the month after Prior's death, says: 'We are to have a bowl of punch at Bessy Cox's. She would fain have put it Lewis that she was his (Prior's) Emma : upon she owned Flanders Jane was his Chloe.' To this doubtful Chloe some of his happiest verses were MATTHEW PRIOR. From the Portrait by Jon. Richardson in the National Portrait Gallery. devoted; even high-born ladies might well have envied such compliments as these: What I speak, my fair Chloe, and what I write, shows I court others in verse, but I love thee in prose; They were but my visits, but thou art my home. To Chloe was inscribed his Henry and Emma, a poem upon the model of the Nut-brown Maid; but in discarding the simplicity of the original, Prior sacrificed much of its charm. The works of Prior range over a variety of styles and subjects-odes, songs, epistles, epigrams, and tales; he was unquestionably versatile, though not always equal to himself in grace. His longest poem, Solomon on the Vanity of the World, was by its author thought his best, and so too thought Cowper. It is free, of course, from the objections that can be raised against some of the others, and is perhaps the most carefully written; but the tales and lighter pieces of Prior are undoubtedly his happiest efforts. In these he displays that 'charming ease' Cowper commends, together with the lively illustration and colloquial humour of his master, Horace. Few poets have possessed in greater perfection the art of graceful and fluent versification. His narratives flow on like a clear stream, without break or fall, and interest us by their perpetual good-humour and vivacity, even when they wander into metaphysics, as in Alma, or into coarseness, as in his tales-though Johnson called Prior's works 'a lady's book.' Alma is still read by those who like its model, Hudibras; but Henry and Emma, also very popular at first, is forgotten. The Secretary, The Female Phaeton, and the lines To a Child of Quality, all famous in his lifetime, were not included in the poems of 1718. Pope and Beattie praised four (unprinted) prose Dialogues of the Dead by him; an interesting 'History of his own Time,' printed amongst his works, is of doubtful authenticity. Prior, who was tall and lank in person, and in manner usually somewhat solemn, was vain of his gifts, though he constantly professed that his poetry was but the accident of a busy life. Thackeray thought highly of his work: 'Prior's seem to me,' he says, 'amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorous of English lyrical poems.' His classical allusions and images-in the fashion of the day-seem not to carry with them the air of pedantry or restraint. Like Swift he liked to versify the common occurrences of life and relate personal feelings and adventures; but he had none of the Dean's bitterness or misanthropy, and employed no stronger weapons of satire than raillery and arch allusion. He contrived to combine playfulness with grace and even a measure of dignity. His verses to children-a department in which he was a pioneer-are delightful. sported on the surface of existence, noting its foibles, its pleasures, and eccentricities, but without the power of penetrating into its recesses or evoking the nobler passions of our nature. He was the most natural of artificial poets-a seeming paradox, yet as true as the old maxim that the perfection of art is the art of concealing it. For My Own Monument. He As doctors give physic by way of prevention, Then take Matt's word for it, the sculptor is paid; |