warning to Ophelia: "Be thou as chaste as ice and as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny." It is said that representations were made in his behalf to Compton, Bishop of London, but that the latter was scandalised by the reference in The Choice to the "fair creature" and the resolution to have "no wife"; so that, though in this respect the poet had already changed his mind and was married, he was never moved from Malden, where he died and was buried, 1st December 1702.

Nothing could have been more innocent than Pomfret's poem. When it first appeared it was without the author's name, and announced itself to be the work of "A Person of Quality." And indeed it might have proceeded from any quarter in the ranks of intellectual society, for, as Johnson says, it exhibited "a system of life adapted to common notions, and equal to common expectations, such a state as affords plenty and tranquillity, without exclusion of intellectual pleasures." To no society that ever existed would an ideal like this have offered more attractions than to the England of the early eighteenth century. Sixty years of civil war, or factious conflict, had distracted the mind of the nation, and, like the country-loving Romans after the battle of Actium, all classes welcomed the prospect of settled government. Only a few years before the publication of The Choice, moderate men had felt their duty divided between allegiance to their Sovereign and attachment to their National Church;

Loyal and pious, friends to Cæsar; true
As dying martyrs to their Maker too.

With Falkland many had sighed for "Peace"; with
Cowley others dreamed of a retirement that should

Pleasures yield

Horace might envy in his Sabine field;

men such as "humble Allen," "the Man of Ross," and a multitude who "did good by stealth and blushed to find it fame," longed for a state of quiet in which they might

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," so Pomfret's English idea was to have

A little garden grateful to the eye,
And a cool rivulet run murmuring by,
On whose delicious banks a stately row
Of shady limes or sycamores should grow.

1

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

St. John's to which he had been elected in 1688, he printed in 1719 a volume of his poems by subscription, which brought him 4000 guineas. In addition to this, his friend Lord Harley bought for him the little estate of Down Hall, which Prior describes in the lively ballad with that title, and on which he spent the short remainder of his life. He died on the 18th of September 1721.1

To appreciate fully the character of Prior's familiar style, we ought also to consider the serious side of his genius. He was, as he describes himself in an ante-dated epitaph, essentially a two-sided man :—

Yet counting as far as to fifty his years,

His virtue and vice were as other men's are;

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

Nor 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!

In the same way he could think and write gravely as well as wittily, and (as often happens with men) believed his grave inspirations to be his best: "What do you tell me of my Alma?" said he to Pope, who had preferred that poem to Solomon, "a loose and hasty scribble to relieve the tedious hours of my imprisonment while in the messenger's hands." The world has never been persuaded to think as well of Solomon as the author did ; but any reader who studies the poem with attention will see that Prior valued it because it was written from his heart. It is the work of a man who has seen much of the world, and has that much right to judge it from Solomon's point of view. The following lines on the vanity of science, so called, put into the mouth of the Hebrew King, reflect the Pyrrhonism of the seventeenth century in England:

1 A fuller account of Prior's life will be found in the Selected Poems of Matthew Prior, by Mr. Austin Dobson, who has performed the parts of Editor and Biographer with all the refinement, thoroughness, and sympathy, to be expected from a kindred spirit.