indulge their benevolent instincts undisturbed by civil broils. To the hearts of all such readers the sentiment of Pomfret's poem appealed directly. Equally felicitous was the form in which the sentiment was conveyed. The Choice is the first poem in the English language written in the conversational style of Horace's Satires and Epistles. Just as the Roman poet had breathed a prayer for "a piece of land not over large, with a garden, a clear spring of water near the house, and beyond it a strip of wood,"1 so Pomfret's English idea was to have A little garden grateful to the eye, Horace's praises of the golden mean; his invitation to Mæcenas to come and drink his well-stored Sabine vin ordinaire in moderate cups; and his contrast of the sweet country quiet with the bloated ostentation of Roman "smart society," all find their counterparts in Pomfret's hospitable cellar, his enjoyment of the conversation of his male friends, and his horror of litigation as the enemy of "quiet," (For what do we by all our bustle gain But counterfeit delight for real pain ? ); and these echoes of Latin sentiment are admirably reproduced in his treatment of the heroic couplet. No English poet had yet caught so much of Horace's easy epistolary style in this metre. He never repeated his success. His other poems are written in facile and agreeable verse; but the best of them-his Epistles and Vision--are spoiled by an air of sham pastoralism. Pope, however, who could always discover the excellences of minor poets, studied him carefully, and has done him the honour of appropriating one of the lines in his Vision for Eloisa to Abelard.2 The Choice, then, embodied a new ideal of simplicity 1 Horace, Satires, ii. vi. 2 "Which breeds such sad variety of woe." Compare Eloisa to Abelard, 36. in life, thought, and language for Englishmen at large, and more especially for the dwellers in the country. But the Revolution settlement exercised indirectly a still more potent influence on the imagination by its effects on the inhabitants of the town, and especially on the men of poetic genius whom the exigencies of the time involved in State employments. Brought into immediate touch with the chief orators and statesmen of the day, forced to study all the arts of expression adapted to convince or persuade the public, and ever observant of the drift of social taste, it was inevitable that such writers should discard the comparatively abstract ideals of style hitherto cultivated, and should attempt to mould metrical forms more and more to suit the bent of their own characters and the idioms of polite conversation. The various results of this tendency are visible in the verse of the remarkable triumvirate who must now come under our notice, Prior, Swift, and Gay. Matthew Prior, of whom as a panegyrical poet I have already said something, was born at Wimborne Minster in Dorsetshire on the 21st of July 1664; his father, according to the local tradition, being a carpenter. While he was a boy his father moved to London, and Matthew was sent to school at Westminster. Soon afterwards the elder Prior died, and his son was left to the charge of an uncle who was a vintner in Channel (Cannon) Row, Westminster, and who took the boy away from school to help him in his wine-house. Here he was one day found by Lord Dorset reading Horace. The Earl, struck with his intelligence, persuaded his uncle to let him return to Westminster, and helped to pay for his schooling until his election as King's Scholar. From Westminster Prior passed to St. John's College, Cambridge, choosing a scholarship in that College rather than at Christ Church, Oxford, because he wished to be at the same University with his school-fellow, James Montague, younger brother of Charles, afterwards Lord Halifax, who was also a fellow-student with Prior both at Westminster and Cambridge. Prior took his B.A. degree in 1686, and in the following year joined Charles Montague in writing the parody on Dryden's Hind and Panther. Though Montague was naturally the first to obtain preferment, as a reward for this service, Prior's turn soon came. He was appointed in 1690 Secretary to Lord Dursley (afterwards Earl of Berkeley), William III.'s Ambassador to the Hague; and in that capacity was often brought into communication with the King. It was during this period of his life that most of his panegyrical poems, specimens of which I have given in an earlier chapter, were written. But as his Epistle to Fleetwood Sheppard shows, he had already begun to cultivate the familiar style, and his parody on Boileau's Ode in 1695, as well as The Secretary, written at the Hague in 1696, must have revealed where his real strength lay. Nevertheless during William's reign there was little opportunity for him to follow his bent. "I had enough to do," he says of himself, "in studying French and Dutch and altering my Terentian and original style into articles and conventions." In 1697 he acted as Secretary, first during the negotiations for the Treaty of Ryswick, and in the following year to the Embassy of Lord Portland to Paris respecting the Partition Treaty, to which he alludes in his Conversation. In 1699 he wrote his official Carmen Seculare, for which variety of service he was rewarded in 1700 with the Commissionership of Trade and Plantations just vacated by John Locke. He was elected M.P. for East Grinstead in 1701, and in Anne's reign gradually detached himself from the Whigs to act with Harley and St. John. His wide knowledge of official business caused him in 1711 to be employed in the arrangement of preliminaries to the Treaty of Utrecht, and in 1712 he was sent as Ambassador to Paris for the completion of the Treaty. On his return to England in 1715 he was impeached, and was sent to the Tower for two years, during which he wrote his Alma. His numerous employments in affairs of State had not enriched him, and when released from confinement, having no means of subsistence beyond the Fellowship at commended to himself by the more solemn aspiration with which he closes his Solomon : Now, Solomon, remembering who thou art, Supreme, all wise, eternal Potentate! Whom no man fully sees, and none can see! Reading these lines, evidently written with emotion, we seem to feel the sincerity of the simple and pious verses to Lady Margaret Cavendish Holles Harley in her childhood: : My noble, lovely, little Peggy, Let this, my first epistle, beg ye, In double beauty say your prayer: If to these precepts you attend, But though, for the purpose of discovering the true character of his poetical genius, it is certainly necessary to study his serious as well as his lighter verse, injustice is done him by subjecting his poetry to solemn canons of criticism, whether applied for the purpose of blame or praise. An example of the former kind of injustice remains in Johnson's judgment on Henry and Emma :— The greatest of all his amorous essays is Henry and Emma, a dull and tedious dialogue which excites neither esteem for the man nor tenderness for the woman. The example of Emma, who resolves to follow an outlawed murderer wherever fear and guilt shall drive him, deserves no imitation; and the experiment by which Henry tries the lady's constancy is such as must end either in infamy to her, or in disappointment to himself.1 Here it is evident that Johnson is judging by a moral and not by a poetical law. But Cowper, in defending Prior on poetical grounds, does not greatly improve the cause of his client. He says of Johnson's criticism : But what shall we say of his old, fusty, rusty remarks upon Henry and Emma? I agree with him that, morally considered, both the knight and his lady are bad characters, and that each exhibits an example which ought not to be followed. The man dissembles in a way that would have justified the woman had she renounced him; and the woman resolves to follow him at the expense of delicacy, propriety, and even modesty itself. But when the critic calls it a dull dialogue, who but a critic will believe him? There are few readers of poetry, of either sex, in the country who cannot remember how that enchanting piece has bewitched them-who do not know that, instead of finding it tedious, they have been so delighted with the romantic turn of it as to have overlooked all its defects, and to have given it a consecrated place in their memories without ever feeling it a burden.2 Prior's error was Fancying that he As Spenser says, "Thoughts of men do as themselves decay." While probably almost all modern readers will agree with Johnson's low estimate of Henry and Emma rather than with Cowper's, they will certainly dissent from the grounds of the former's judgment. one not so much of morals as of taste. could improve the ballad of The Nut-brown Maid, he endeavoured to rationalise and, as he thought, to harmonise one of the most artlessly beautiful and melodious 2 Letter to Unwin, January 5, 1782. 1 Lives of the Poets: Prior. VOL. V I |