"Making 'Intrest and freedom agree': Matthew Prior and the Ethics of Funeral Elegy," in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 29, No. 3, Summer, 1989, pp. 431-45.

Queen Mary's death in December 1694 called forth the British muse. While the likes of Dennis, Walsh, Stepney, Congreve, and Steele rose—or sank—to the literary occasion, the diplomat and poet Matthew Prior remained conspicuously silent for more than two months after Mary's funeral. As the leading English poet in public life and unofficial "laureate" of William III's reign, Prior experienced pressure to elegize the late queen, and his hesitation is surprising considering his position and taste for occasional verse.¹ Although several scholars have remarked upon this episode, its implications for understanding Prior's career as a whole have never been explored.² By defining what he would and would not write under duress, Prior's reluctance to compose an elegy for Queen Mary helps to clarify his poetic values, while circumstances informing his behavior evoke ethical issues related to those of his philosophical verse and prose. Viewed alongside later ethical works, Prior's responses to Queen Mary's death and funeral suggest continuity among aspects of his life, thought, and expression difficult to reconcile in literary criticism.

In some ways typical of the thirty years following William III's succession, Prior's career raises questions concerning the value he accorded to poetry.³ Neither hack nor belletrist, he never served officially as laureate and, except for scattered political squibs, rarely took up the satirist's lance. Broad learning and worldly experience enriched his intellectual and human perspective but qualified his poetic role and probably his sense of poetry's importance. Mixing literature with diplomacy and courtiership with philosophy, his career exemplifies the marriage of politics and literature, action and contemplation, in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England. Such variety calls for spacious principles of evaluation and analysis, but studies of Prior's life and writing have been hemmed in by disciplinary boundaries. For the biographer he is above all a shrewd but beleaguered diplomat; for the historian of ideas, a seventeenth-century skeptic and "harbinger of future dissatisfactions"; for the prosodist, a master of the anapest and octosyllabic couplet; for the modern critic, a practitioner of elegant vers de societe.⁴ So many varied perspectives are not readily subsumed under a broad intellectual framework, and truly comprehensive appreciation of Prior's career may lie beyond the reach of individual scholarly arts.

Economic factors, however, provide one unifying element. As hisfirst modern biographer was aware, the question of "ways and means" touched Prior's existence at many levels, sharpening his instincts for survival, quickening his moral sense, and often informing his utterance.⁵ Events surrounding Queen Mary's funeral, which occurred during his financially troubled tenure at The Hague, help illustrate the effect of poverty on Prior's moral and intellectual life.⁶ Straitened circumstances as well as grief affected his reaction to the Queen's death and prompted him to examine the motives informing his attitudes and expression. In a climate of grief, poverty, ethical self-consciousness, and concern for the nation, the funeral elegy became a focus of Prior's mixed motives and emotions.

The immediate problem occasioned by Mary's death was how to reconcile sincerity of feeling and expression with unwelcome demands of patronage and solicited publication, and letters and poems of the period witness Prior's efforts to give his emotions meaningful form. The larger issue of reconciling ideals with material realities, however, was to be an enduring concern of Prior's career, one dramatized in poems and philosophical prose written near the end of his life. "The Turtle and the Sparrow," a metrical tale chronologically and thematically related to Prior's dialogues in prose, explores the possibility of sincere elegiac poetry—and of disinterested emotion generally—and sheds a retrospective light on Prior's reluctance to elegize the late queen. Viewed alongside documents of 1694-95, "The Turtle and the Sparrow" appears a fictionalized recapitulation of themes of interest to Prior during his period of mourning for Queen Mary, a final denial of prospects for sincere feeling and expression in an imperfect word that involved the poet in moral ambiguity.

Queen Mary died 28 December 1694, and the distraught King William postponed her funeral until 5 March.⁷ Events surrounding Mary's death and funeral illustrate forces at work in Prior's career. As a talented poet then serving as Lord Dursley's secretary at The Hague, he was expected to furnish a poem in the queen's memory. At first Prior demurred, remarking caustically upon the poor quality of the funeral verse then appearing in Holland. "We have had nothing new," he wrote to the Earl of Dorset, "but volumes of bad poetry upon a blessed queen. I have not put my mite into this treasury of nonsense, having been too truly afflicted by the subject to say anything about it."⁸ On this occasion Prior apparently found silence more decorous than poetry as an observance of Mary's death, a stance Lord Dorset seems to have countenanced.

But matters were not to rest here. By the last decades of the seventeenth century, public poetry had become a quasi-official obligation of preferment, one which Prior's political masters expected him to fulfill. Two who exacted verse from Prior in the 1690s were James Vernon, private secretary to the Duke of Shrewsbury, and Sir William Trumbull, a Secretary of State under William III and in retirement a friend of the youthful Pope.⁹ When Prior attempted to discharge his responsibility toward the late queen by designing a medal with a Horatian inscription in her memory, Vernon chastized him: "If you think this will acquit you from the expectations people have of a poem from you, you will be mistaken, for they say you are not to come off with a posey and a shred of Horace."¹⁰

Proving more influential than Vernon, Trumbull succeeded where the former apparently failed. Prior ultimately consented to furnish a poem—though not the funeral elegy expected of him—and responded to Trumbull's entreaties with deference toward the aristocratic patron combined with disdain for the bookseller Joseph Tonson: "Sir," writes Prior, "I yield the question, and have a poem on the stocks to be given to his majesty at his arrival here, and since that cur [Tonson] instigated the writing of it, I hope it may be unsold, and contribute to the breaking of him."¹¹

The poem in question—"To the King, An Ode on His Majesty's Arrival in Holland, After the Queen's Death"—appeared in May 1695, two months after Mary's funeral (2:869). The epigraph, from Horace's Ode 1.4, gives traditional expression to the problem-atic nature of elegy, invoking Melpomene's aid in controlling—and thus giving form to—boundless grief.¹² The poem itself witnesses Prior's effort to engage the limitations of artistic form suggested in the epigraph. Having donned Horace's mantle, he casts his poem in iambic-tetrameter quatrains, creating in the opening lines a dignified elegiac tone:

At Mary's Tomb, (sad, sacred Place!)
 The Virtues shall their Vigils keep:
And every Muse, and every Grace
 In solemn State shall ever weep.
(lines 1-4)

This beginning, however, soon proves misleading, for in the fifth quatrain the tone shifts abruptly from elegiac to hortatory:

But let the King dismiss his Woes,
 Reflecting on his fair Renown;
And take the Cypress from his Brows,
 To put his wonted Lawrels on.
(lines 17-20)

The poem continues in this vein, with Prior urging the king to resume his offensive against the French. In finally taking up his pen, he had awaited an occasion—King William's arrival in Holland—that justified a mode of expression that avoids the machinery and alters the tone of funeral elegy.

Like his other responses to Mary's death cited here, Prior's 1695 ode to William III is in one sense evasive, its elegiac opening serving as point of departure for an appeal to William III. His initial silence and effort to substitute a medal for a poem have within two months of Mary's funeral given way to a martial ode that answers to the occasion but leaves the issue of funeral elegy largely in abeyance. Evidently Prior had found the prospect of writing elegy uncongenial, though he is never explicit about the causes of his reserve. Although a number of factors probably contributed, the most revealing touch upon aesthetic and ethical issues emanating in part from Prior's status as a dependent poet.

To seek the grounds of his diffidence is to explore layers of sensibility, loyalty, civic humanism, and self-interest that helped shape Prior's public poetry. Sexual attitudes might have been one contributing factor. Frances Mayhew Rippy has recently noted that Prior likely derived more powerful inspiration from the "warrior king" William III than from his Stuart consort Mary. Prior's characteristic attitude toward women is one of worldly—and witty—condescension, a note scarcely adaptable to funeral elegy.¹³ Though no stranger to occasional poetry in either the honorific or the pastoral mode, on this occasion Prior may have found himself thwarted by his feminine subject.

Circumstances surrounding the observance of Mary's death also seem to have posed objections. Three months elapsed between Mary's death and funeral, a protracted time of mourning incompatible with vigorous pursuit of national policy. As both diplomat and poet, Prior demonstrated instincts for decisive, unambiguous action by an unfettered monarch, a trait illustrated in the Horatian ode of 1695. The lassitude accompanying King William's grief was potentially threatening to England's efforts against Louis XIV, and Prior used his role as unofficial laureate to counteract the debilitating effects of personal and public malaise.

Sufficient in themselves to account for his avoidance of elegy, Prior's putative sexism, personal loyalty to William III, and public spirit merge with social, literary, and ethical factors in shaping his literary responses to Queen Mary's death. As previously observed, Prior's aristocratic biases were apparently at odds with the literary demands of preferment over the issue of writing an elegy on the late queen. As a protege of the Earl of Dorset, a former Restoration wit who had survived to become William III's Lord Chamberlain, Prior was conditioned by literary training and social up-bringing to resist the overtly commercial aspects of publication.¹⁴ His reaction to Sir William Trumbull's entreaties mingle respect for the patron with contempt for the "cur" publisher and, by inference, for the entrepreneuer's role in soliciting verse on so unhappy an occasion. Presumably the public-spirited message of the ode Prior finally offered for print helped to offset in his mind the grubbier aspects of its publication.

Even more fundamental objections appear to have resided in pastoral elegy itself. When Prior writes to Dorset of being "too truly afflicted" to write poetry, his remark seems aimed at the artificiality of pastoral poetry. Among the most formalized of poetic kinds, pastoral transforms warm emotion into cold art, thus inviting charges of insincerity.¹⁵ His remarks suggest that Prior found contrived expression utterly incompatible with authentic grief experienced on the occasion of Mary's death. In a letter to Lord and Lady Lexington penned a few days before Mary's funeral, he reiterates his claim that grief accounts for his not writing poetry: "I am as yet so afflicted for the death of our dear mistress, that I cannot express it in bad verse, as all the world here does; all that I have done was today on Scheveling Sands, with the point of my sword." He encloses the following chaste lines:

Number the sands extended here;
So many Mary's virtues were:
Number the drops that yonder roll;
So many griefs press William's soul.¹⁶

Prior's epigram enclosed in a familiar letter contrasts with the fustian then appearing in print, suggesting that only minimal, unadorned expression shared privately was consistent with genuine grief.¹⁷ The apparent distaste for commercial publication informing Prior's remarks to Trumbull here joins with a general skepticism toward poetic artifice adding another layer of motive to Prior's evasion of funeral elegy.

We can be skeptical in turn, however, as to the real springs of Prior's emotion, which were not clear even to him. Although an inauspicious occasion for sublime poetry, Queen Mary's death nonetheless did furnish Prior opportunity to reflect upon the possible origins of his own grief. Mary's passing had deprived him of a small sinecure, and in a letter to Lord and Lady Lexington Prior complains of his fate: "I have written nothing but nonsense, which is a present I humbly offer some of my correspondents, but it is not very proper for you. Upon this occasion I have lost my senses and £100 a year, which is something for a philosopher of my circumstances." Poverty, 'Prior suggests, renders him insusceptible to philosophic consolation. He goes on to explore the sources of his emotion: "I am so much in earnest in this sad affair that people think I am something very considerable in England, that have such a regard to the public, and it makes me cry afresh when they ask me in what country my lands are. Whether this proceeds from loyalty or interest God knows, but I have truly cried a basin full."¹⁸

Prior's tone here, as elsewhere in his letters, is not fullyintelligible, partially because it emanates from a psychological and ethical muddle.¹⁹ As a loyal subject he probably did mourn for the queen, and the loss of his sinecure occasioned hardship. Though merely suggestive, the reference to "loyalty" and "interest" as possible sources of emotion implies that poverty and social insecurity had created in Prior a state of mind that rendered unselfish motives hard to distinguish from selfish ones. The letter to Lord and Lady Lexington, along with others of the period, is valuable because it suggests how socio-economic factors influenced the consciousness of an English poet in the era of political patronage.²⁰

Rather than entirely visceral, however, such utterances seem partially conditioned by learning, for learning and experience played complementary roles in shaping Prior's attitudes. Prior's well-known intellectual affinities sanction the idea that circumstances shape thoughts and feelings. His most important debt in this regard is to Montaigne.²¹ Like Montaigne, Prior stresses the influence of the body on the mind, distrusts philosophical systems, and relies heavily on ordinary experience. Evocative of Montaigne's Essais, Prior's prose treatises convey a sense of life's plentitude, portraying intellect amidst its human surroundings rather than in isolation. The essay "Opinion," for example, remarks upon the "many external Objects" which "have an influence" upon the mind. Although his language sometimes becomes vaguely Lockean, Prior's notion of the mind's relationship to experience comprehends more than sensory impressions per se. Among several "external Objects" influencing thought, he broadly includes the "too frequent Excitation or Disuse of any Passion from the Neighbourhood, or abcence of its Object, The Favour of Fortune or the hand of Adversity" (1:592). In thus noting mind's responsiveness to the vicissitudes ("fortune" and "adversity") of complex human experience, Prior takes issue with the Stoic Epictetus, shifting ground by conflating epistemology with ethics: "Our Opinion for all what EPICTETUS says must be directed by something without us, for Opinion it self is really nothing else but the effect of that impression, which an External or Intellectual object makes upon our Thoughts" (1:594).²²

Here, again, Prior's thinking seems to reflect personal experience, even if that experience is itself shaped by learning. If the mind of man is never free of external influences, Prior's own mind habitually inquires into the worldly circumstances that affect its attitudes. In December 1694, for example, he wrote to Trumbull from The Hague complaining of financial neglect by the ministry in England: "Necessity, Sir, has as little manners as it has law, and when one is really starving, 'tis in vain to be told one is impertinent.… There is a great correspondence between the stomach and the heart: one is out of humor when one is hungry; and it is time to think what friends I have at Whitehall when Famine sits triumphant on the cheeks of my two footmen and the ribs of my two horses."²³ "Correspondence" between "stomach" and "heart," "interest" and "loyalty," intellect and environment are recurring, analogous themes of Prior's letters, poetry, and philosophical prose, the comico-philosophical fusion of body and mind in "Alma" being entirely consistent with the material and ethical concerns of a dependent life.²⁴

Self-interest is a motive closely associated with such dependence. Among the sources of human "opinion" outlined in Prior's treatise, it plays a central, if imprecisely defined, role. Connected with the mind's capacity for self-preservation, self-interest responds to the "beauty of deformity of the Images placed before it" [the mind], those conceptions that attract the mind or repel it. Abandoning the optical metaphor, Prior goes on in homelier terms to describe self-interest as a predisposition to judge things as harmful or hurtful: "This in plainer English is before we judge of things we are already determined to shun what we think hurtful, and to embrace what we esteem Good, so that under the Denomination of profit or pleasure we always pursue our Interest, or gratify our Vanity, and this single thought thrown into different forms gives us all that ROCHFOCAULT ever writ" (1:594-95).

Self-interest certainly helped motivate Prior's diplomatic career, as well as his poetry, often written under straitened circumstances with an eye toward improving his worldly prospects. Speaking of poetry as an "Amusement," not the "business" of his life, he adds, "and in this too, having the Prospect of some little Fortune to be made, and Friendship to be cultivated with the great Men, I did not launch much out into Satyr," much too dangerous a venture to provide a secure basis for worldly success (1:583). Poetry, then, early became a means of cultivating "the assistance and countenance of Men in favour" and panegyric his characteristic mode of poetic address.²⁵

Even Prior's panegyrics, however, are often more than self-serving exercises. In addition to self-interest, he attached high value to patriotism, remarking in his "Preface" to Solomon that "I had rather be thought a good English-man than the best Poet, or greatest Scholar that ever wrote" (1:309). Public spirit is one saving grace of the panegyrics, helping to mute the personal hopes implicit in most honorific forms and very explicit in some of Prior's public verse.²⁶ Along with the utilitarian functions of poetry in his career, furthermore, Prior paradoxically sustained an idealistic sense of the poet's calling. Whereas "every Man is obliged to speak and write prose," he writes in the "Heads for a Treatise upon Learning," "as to Poetry I mean the writing of Verses, it is another thing, I would advise no Man to attempt it except he cannot help it, and if he cannot it is in vain to disswade him from it" (1:583). The distinction between poetry andprose is a recurring theme in Prior's works, which often assign poetry the higher value. "An Ode, Humbly Inscrib'd to the Queen" (1706), a poem commemorating the Duke of Malborough's victory at Blenheim, speaks of Horace's having redeemed "fair actions from degrading Prose" (line 7) in Augustus's reign, an achievement Prior seeks to emulate in Queen Anne's. "Prose, and other Human Things may take what Turn they can," he explains in the "Postscript" to the 1718 edition of his Poems, "but Poetry, which pretends to have something of Divinity in it, is to be more permanent" (1:440). In the much earlier "An Ode in Imitation of.…Horace" (1692), which glances at the corrupt practices of French court poets, heroic "virtue" and "verse" combine to resist time's depredations:

Virtue to Verse the real Lustre gives,
Each by the others mutual Friendship lives:
The Heros Acts Sustain the Poets Thought,
Aeneas suffer'd and Achilles fought,
Or Virgils Majesty, and Homers rage
In vain had strove to Vanquish Envious Age.
(lines 108-13)

Patriotism, loyalty, permanence, divinity, virtue—these are the personal ideals and enabling literary fictions which, even in the absence of "a central poetic conception," lend a dignity unattainable in prose to public themes and achievements.²⁷

Such sentiments, however, do not represent a stable or ultimate position as to the relative value of poetry and prose in Prior's works. Capable of dignifying public acts, "poetry" becomes for Prior highly suspect in the sphere of private emotions, where "prose" connotes not "the mundane" but "the true." "A Better Answer" (1718) undermines a beautiful cycle of pastoral love lyrics by denying authenticity to verse while locating emotional truth in human speech and "Prose":

What I speak, my fair CLOE, and what I write, shews
 The Diff rence there is betwixt Nature and Art:
I court others in Verse; but I love Thee in Prose:
 And They have my Whimsies; but Thou hast my Heart.
(lines 13-16)²⁸

While rendering the term "love poetry" virtually an oxymoron, this passage nonetheless finds grounds for such poetry in verse that approximates human speech. Though more difficult, the problems of elegy were in some respects analogous to those of Prior's love poetry and represent a bridge between his public and private verse. The death of a queen called for dignified public expression, but no poetic fiction could adequately represent grief, which, belonging to the world of "Prose" and "Human Things," was solvent to literary artifice. Poverty, furthermore, conspired to render Prior'semotions ambiguous, contributing in turn to his evasive but fundamentally conscientious responses to Mary's death.

However elusive in the real world, the ideal of pure emotion and its corresponding poetic expression nonetheless remained a feature of Prior's thought. Elegy resounds in the imaginary garden of "The Turtle and the Sparrow" (1720), a poem once erroneously thought to be associated with Prince George's death in 1708 (2:986). Among the last of his fourteen metrical tales, "The Turtle and the Sparrow" belongs to a period of philosophical reflection at the end of Prior's life. As a dialogue in verse, it resembles in both form and content the four prose dialogues completed during the same period—works which dramatize intellectual and ethical conflicts reminiscent of Prior's career.²⁹ Evocative of "A Dialogue between the Vicar of Bray, and Sir Thomas More," "The Turtle and the Sparrow" dramatizes an encounter between a passionate and idealistic wife (the aggrieved Turtle) and a prudent, calculating, essentially corrupt antagonist (the Sparrow), and thus belongs to the eighteenth-century debate concerning the appropriate roles of reason and passion in human life.³⁰ The fable's ethical issues, furthermore, carry specifically literary significance. Prior's turtle is an elegist, her cry modeled on Bion's lament for Adonis, and, like poems and letters already cited, "The Turtle and the Sparrow" explores the motives of elegiac poetry.

Although the preamble assures that "SPARROWS and TURTLES" "Can think as well as You or I" (lines 9-10), the obvious fiction of the beast fable initially distances the poem from the human world. Within the fable's imaginary kingdom, turtles are poets, and Turturella's lament for the dead "COLUMBO" invokes the tradition of funeral elegy:

My hopes are lost, my Joys are fled,
Alas! I weep COLUMBO dead:

Sing, Philomel, his Funeral Verse,
Yee pious Redbreasts, deck his Herse.
(lines 13-18)

Although her self-interested allusion to lost "hopes" and "Joys" (line 13) gives reason for pause, Turturella insists upon the purity of her emotion and calls upon the sparrow to join in her lament:

And hast Thou lov'd and can'st Thou hear
With piteous heart a Lover's care?
Come then, with me thy Sorrows join,
And ease my Woes by telling Thine:
For thou, poor Bird, perhaps may'st moan
Some PASSERELLA dead and gone.
(lines 73-78)

A reluctant elegist, however, the Sparrow regards Turturella's behavior as both imprudent and ethically suspect. Poetry, he argues, "neither Suits the Place nor time" (line 80). The reasons are practical:

That Fowlers hand, whose cruel Care,
For Dear COLUMBO set the Snare,
The Snare again for Thee may set;
Two Birds may perish in one Nett.
(lines 81-84)

When the Turtle ignores the Sparrow's argument, he questions her motives:

When Widdows use this Canting strain
They seem Resolv'd to wedd again.
(lines 89-90)

Counseling that "sorrow shou'd to prudence yield" (line 86), the Sparrow at this stage appears to offer a legitimate counter-perspective on the limits of self-sacrifice and grief, much as Prior himself had counseled King William to "dismiss his Woes" in the 1695 ode. In refusing to give up her "BION-style" (line 182), the Turtle's behavior seems excessive and self-indulgent, if not downright perverse. When the Sparrow pragmatically recommends a second marriage, the Turtle demurs:

            No, SPARROW, No,
Let me indulge my pleasing Woe:
Thus Sighing, Coeing, ease my pain;
But never wish nor Love again.
(lines 166-69)

If, at such moments within the poem, the aggrieved Turtle clearly protests too much, the Sparrow's rationalizing behavior soon appears even more suspect. Prudence quickly yields to corruption during the Sparrow's lengthy account of his six marriages (lines 197-419). Unlike the Turtle, whose grief bars consolation and thwarts practicality, the Sparrow leans to an opposite extreme, too easily dismissing the loss of his second wife. Prior's octosyllabic couplets echo the click of the Sparrow's self-interested calculation:

Well, rest her bones, quoth 1, she's gone:
But must I therefore lye alone?
What, am I to her Memory ty'd?
Must I not live, because She dy'd?
And thus I Logically said,
('Tis good to have a Reas'ning head)
Is this my Wife, probatur, Not;
For Death dissolv'd the Mariage Knot.
(lines 245-52)

During the Sparrow's libertine narrative, the poem gradually moves from the idealized realm of the turtle-poet to a recognizably human, courtly world where self-interest taints all passions. The marriage bond itself represents for the Sparrow a mere commodity in the quest for worldly advantage:

Cuckoo! Cuckoo! that Echo'd word
Offends the Ear of Vulgar Bird;
But those of finer Tast have found
There's nothing in't beside the sound.
(lines 315-18)

Sentiments like these earn the Sparrow a rebuke from the Turtle, momentarily restored to moral superiority. His cynicism and self-interest "defile" the "Sacred Groves" (line 422) of "Faithful Loves" and unsullied expression, earning him banishment "To Cities and to Courts" (line 434) whence his sentiments derive:

There all thy wretched Arts employ,
Where Riches triumph over Joy.
Where Passion does with Int'rest Barter,
And HYMEN holds by MAMMON's Charter.
(lines 436-39)

If the Sparrow's confusion of "Passion" and "Int'rest" ties him to the world of men, the Turtle's display of loyalty distances her from it at the end of the poem. Circumstances surrounding the poem—including the birthday of six-year-old Margaret Harley—called for an exemplary model, and the coda provides it (1:987). Addressing a "Dearest Daughter of Two dearest Friends" (line 442), Prior urges the "Immortal Charms" of "constant Virtue" and bids her "Imitate the TURTLES Fame" (line 453). This verbal gesture seems intended to mute lingering doubts about the Turtle, doubts which survive as the sordid residue of an imperfect world that implicates even the poet himself.

Accomplished only through rhetorical sleight-of-hand, the Turtle's moral victory over the cynical sparrow is highly tenuous, the fable's attempt to suspend disbelief incomplete and unconvincing. The human world, where motives are suspect and poetry disingenuous, encroaches upon the Turtle's pastoral shades, allowing moral ambiguity to overshadow the poetic fiction of untainted passion. This overshadowing of idealism by moral ambiguity figures aspectsof Prior's career, one that mingled the practical with the ideal and, on the occasion of Queen Mary's death, emotion with self-interest. Sufficient for panegyric, civic and literary ideals proved unable to legitimize funeral elegy, a poetic form rendered especially problematic by poverty and the poet's regret at losing a sinecure. Prior's much later inability to provide a convincing exemplary model of perfect grief in a fable written for Margaret Harley provides distant commentary upon his own ambiguous feelings and avoidance of elegiac verse in the real kingdom of William III.

Notes

¹ For discussion of Prior's "laureate" role see Frances Mayhew Rippy, Matthew Prior, Twayne's English Authors Series no. 418 (Boston: Twayne, 1986), pp. 44-56.

² Charles Kenneth Eves, Matthew Prior: Poet and Diplomatist, Columbia Univ. Studies in English and Comparative Literature No. 144 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939), pp. 93-96. Ronald Eugene Rower, "Matthew Prior: A Critical Study" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia Univ., 1968), pp. 91 and 102. The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H.B. Wright and Monroe K. Spears, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 2:868-69. (All references to Prior's works are from this edition,. cited hereafter as "Literary Works." All citations of prose are by volume and line. Line numbers for poetry will be given in the text.) Rippy, pp. 48-50.

³ On Prior's representativeness see William Stebbing, Some Verdicts of History Reviewed (London: John Murray, 1887), p. 88. For an interesting modern assessment, see Pat Rogers, The Augustan Vision (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974), pp. 116-21.

⁴ The best biography is by Eves, cited above. For discussion of Prior and modern discontents, see Monroe K. Spears, "Matthew Prior's Attitude toward Natural Science," PMLA 63 (June 1948): 485-507. George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1906-1910), 2:423-35, discusses Prior's use of the anapest and octosyllabic couplet. Admiration for Prior's social verse is expressed by Oswald Doughty, "The Poet of the 'Familiar Style'," ES 7 (February 1925): 5-10. Maynard Mack endorses Prior's lyrics in "Matthew Prior: Et Multa Prior Arte …," Collected in Himself: Essays Critical, Biographical, and Bibliographical on Pope and Some of His Contemporaries (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1982), pp. 81-89; rpt. from SR 68 (1960): 165-75. For additional views of Prior see Rippy, pp. 154-61.

⁵ Francis Bickley, The Life of Matthew Prior (London: Pitman, 1914), p. 47.

⁶ See Eves, pp. 57-67, for an account of Prior's financial difficulties at The Hague.

⁷ See Nesca A. Robb, William of Orange: A Personal Portrait, 2 vols. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1966), 2:354-66.

⁸ Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Bath, 3 (Prior Papers):49. Cited in Literary Works, 2:868.

⁹ "Trumbull, Sir William" and "Vernon, James," DNB, 1949-50 edn. For Trumbull's friendship with Pope, see George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), pp. 41-42.

¹⁰Prior Papers, p. 50. Cited in Literary Works, 2:869.

¹¹H.M.C. Downshire, 1:465. Cited in Literary Works, 2:869.

¹²Literary Works, 1:130.

¹³ Rippy, p. 49.

¹⁴ According to J. W. Saunders, Prior later found subscription "a decorous half-way house between the amateurism he could not afford and the professionalism he abhorred." The Profession of English Letters (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1964), p. 134.

¹⁵ See Samuel Johnson's strictures against "Lycidas" in Lives of the English Poets, intro. L. Archer Hind, 2 vols. (London: J.M. Dent; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1954), 2:95-96.

¹⁶The Lexington Papers, ed. H. Manners Sutton, 1851, p. 63. Cited in Literary Works, 2:868.

¹⁷ In his distrust of elegiac fictions, Prior demonstrates a trait also observed in one of his literary models, Edmund Spenser. See Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 38-63.

¹⁸The Lexington Papers, p. 46, cited in Eves, p. 94. Eves notes the "strange mingling of self-interest and grief in Prior's behavior.

¹⁹ See H.B. Wright's comments on Prior's letters to Elizabeth Singer, "Matthew Prior and Elizabeth Singer," PQ 24 (1945): 81.

²⁰ According to W.B. Coley, social dependency "entered into the very mind of the writer and gave him a certain kind of matter and a castof thought." "Notes toward a 'Class Theory' of Augustan Literature: The Example of Fielding," Literary Theory and Structure: Essays in Honor of William K. Wimsatt, ed. Frank Brady, John Palmer, and Martin Price (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), p. 131.

²¹ See W.P. Barrett, "Matthew Prior's 'Alma'," MLR 27 (October 1932): 454-58.

²² See Monroe K. Spears, "Some Ethical Aspects of Matthew Prior's Poetry," SP 45 (1948): 606-29.

²³Prior Papers, p. 39.

²⁴ See Monroe K. Spears, "The Meaning of Matthew Prior's 'Alma'," ELH 13 (1946): 266-90.

²⁵ "Things Relative to Myself About and after the Treaty of Ryswick," cited in Bickley, p. 85.

²⁶ W.J. Courthope, A History of English Poetry, 6 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1911), 5:28. For a negative view of Prior's panegyrics, see Mack, p. 82.

²⁷ My understanding of "fiction" as "something we know does not exist, but which helps us to make sense of and to move in the world" comes from Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 37. For the absence of unifying patterns in Prior's political verse see Rower, "Matthew Prior," p. 96.

²⁸ See Ronald Eugene Rower, "Pastoral Wars: Matthew Prior's Poems to Cloe," Ball State University Forum 19 (Spring 1978):3 9-49.

²⁹ For suggestions concerning the relationship between life and thought in Prior's prose dialogues, see John Higby, "Ideas and Art in Prior's Dialogues of the Dead," Enlightenment Essays 5 (Summer 1974): 62-69.

³⁰ For discussion see Spears, "Some Ethical Aspects of Matthew Prior's Poetry," cited above. Spears does not mention "The Turtle and the Sparrow."