[In the following essay, Merians contends that Prior deliberately adopted a style of letter-writing incorporating metaphor and persona. She also explores possible personal, professional, and political reasons for Prior's deliberate adoption of this mode of correspondence.]

The purpose of my paper is to demonstrate how Matthew Prior used his public and private correspondence to become the last English poet-courtier who successfully promoted and maintained himself by linking his poetry and his political friendships. Past commentators on Prior's letters have not regarded them as (literary) documents that could shed light on his poetry, and as a result have dismissed them as simple letters of flattery written by a struggling young diplomat. This approach is wrong-headed because it fails to take into account how Prior deliberately devised literary strategies in his letters that would help him to gain the favour of the noblemen in the court of King William III. Unlike any of his contemporaries in similar circumstances, Prior managed to solve the dilemma faced by any ambitious but unconnected young diplomatist: how could he write formal letters and dispatches which would satisfy his professional obligations but would also be familiar enough to win him the friends and patrons he so desperately needed without being branded an impertinent flatterer?

The first decade of Prior's professional career, from 1690 to 1700, was spent overseas, when he served as secretary to the English envoy at The Hague, secretary of the embassy at The Hague, secretary to the English plenipotentiaries at the Ryswick peace treaty negotiations, and secretary of the English embassy in Paris. As a secretary, Prior was, of course, expected to be a consistent and skilful writer. He realised, however, that dry and precise prose would not on its own win him the friends he sought nor would it bring him any special recognition from the monarch. It took him just a couple of years to discover an appropriate style for his official correspondence, one that would lend his letters a tone and pace usually reserved for familiar letters.

In order to achieve an 'easy' tone in his letters, Prior looked to his light occasional verse as opposed to his heavy panegyrics. From them he adapted his use of metaphor in such a way as to allow distinct personae to emerge in his letters. Each persona was shaped and determined by his relationship with the particular man to whom he was writing, and thus every letter communicated a sense and a context of their relationship. Prior's self-serving hope was that his noblemen 'friends' would not fail to do him the service that an aristocrat could easily deny a social inferior. On a parallel level of meaning, the use of personae also helped Prior to create a partially fictive appearance, one that was not necessarily restrained by the history of the personal relationship or by social protocol. Thus, Prior did not have to employ the hyperbolic language that other courtiers were bound to use. Indeed, in this regard Prior's letters have a unique style and sound. His strategy was a daring one, but it succeeded far more often than it failed. By 1697 Prior was held in high estimation by King William and most, if not all, of his important counsellors, and as a result he received the choicest appointments available to men of his rank andexperience.

Over the course of his career, Prior, like anyone, had periods of triumph and failure, and his letters and literary works record these moments. An interesting pattern emerges if we look at the totality of his correspondence, which amounts to over 3000 letters written to or by him between 1685 and 1721. We see that Prior consistently employed metaphor and persona in his letters, which suggests that he was quite aware of its beneficial effect, and that an extraordinarily high percentage of his correspondents were enchanted and entertained by his somewhat unorthodox style of letter-writing. All this is to say that Prior's letters helped to bring him what he hoped they would; that is, when he died in 1721 he was rich and (in)famous.

Those of us who are students of eighteenth-century British literature know that the assuming of personae (for example, Mr Spectator, Isaac Bickerstaffe, and Martinus Scriblerus) and the assigning of personae (for example, Cibber as the Prince of Dulness) was a particular trait of Restoration and early eighteenth-century writers. Whether devised to increase one's personal stature or to offer political satire, the personae often show the author at his or her inventive best. Unlike writers who preceded or succeeded them, English Augustan writers enjoyed experimenting with the idea of 'selves', knowing full well that their pens afforded them a flexibility that the rest of British society did not have. On paper they could be anybody they wanted to be. Indeed, as Prior's letters show, in his case the mask made the man.