[In the following excerpt, Doughty discusses the influence of earlier poets on Prior as well as works by Prior that display a striking modernity.]

Prior lives to-day, not even by his clever and formerly much admired Ode sur la Prise de Namur, but by his light occasional verse. Though Johnson failed to do him justice, Cowper at once stepped into the breach, and admirably defended his idol.¹ "Prior's," says Thackeray, also picking up the glove which Johnsonhad thrown down, "seem to me amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorus of English lyrical poems."² Though by his collaboration in The Country Mouse and the City Mouse Prior had, according to Spence,³ reduced the ageing Dryden to tears, he followed in his Pindaric odes, before the close of the seventeenth century, the literary fashion of Cowley and Dryden. He even contributed to Dryden's Miscellanies, and in 1693 prepared for the music of Purcell a New Year's Hymn to the Sun.

But the singing of hymns, whether in life or in art, was less characteristic of Prior than his diplomatic activities. These led him to join the throng of tender-hearted mourners for the death of Queen Mary, and to swell the universal chorus of anguish by a funeral poem. His burlesque Ode sur la Prise de Namur, admirable in its way, was sent by him from The Hague to Tonson, in 1695, and published interleaved with the original ode by Boileau, of which it was a brilliant parody. The recapture of Namur by the English in 1695 enabled Prior to turn the pompous and sycophantic ode of Boileau, celebrating its capture by the French three years before, against the French poet with great effect. With Prior poetry not infrequently went hand in hand with politics, and politics in that benighted age were, it must be admitted, not without occasional material advantages for the politician. To Prior indeed politics brought speedy and substantial prosperity, though fortune was not invariably kind to him. It was during the chief reverse of his career, the two years' imprisonment which began in 1715, that he wrote his Alma; or, Progress of the Mind. In his occasional, social verse we find the real, lovable Prior. Within this narrow sphere of society verse, Prior is a master. He crowned the work of Dryden with a grace and delicacy of versification to which the earlier poet never attained; he brought the familiar style in poetry to a high degree of polish; he became the supreme representative of French influence in English poetry.

Poetry to Prior was merely a diversion. He was too wise in the things of this world to turn professional poet and starve in a garret.

"As to my own part," he says, "I found this impulse [to write verse] very soon, and shall continue to feel it as long as I can think. I remember nothing further in life than that I made Verses.… But I had two Accidents in Youth which hindered me from Being quite possessed with the Muse: I was bred in a College where Prose was more in fashion than Verse, and as soon as I had taken my first Degree was sent the King's Secretary to the Hague: There I had enough to do studying French and Dutch and altering my Terentian and Virgilian Style into that of Articles, Conventions, and Memorials: So that Poetry which by the bent of my Mind might have become the Business of my life, was by the happyness of my Education only the Amusement of it."⁴

But Prior clearly saw that poetry, which worshipped as a deity might have angered Fortuna, could, if courted with discretion, become an ally, and win for him a place, if not in the seats of the mighty, at least of some considerable elevation. Consequently, for reasons of policy, as he candidly avows, he made no attempt to write satire, which might have retarded his advance in the world. In his preface to Poems on Several Occasions, Prior tells us the work consists of:

"Public Panegyrics, Amorous Odes, Serious Reflections, or Idle Tales, the Product of his leisure Hours, who had Business enough upon his Hands, and was only a Poet by Accident."

In these poems Prior reveals himself as an eighteenth-century Herrick, both as man and poet. He has the same light, kindly humour, through which runs a suggestion of irony, deepening sometimes until it is touched to darker thought. We sometimes suspect that the tears of laughter have silently changed into the lacrymce rerum, that the jester's heart is less light than his song. We know that, like Herrick, Prior can laugh at himself, as well as at the rest of the world. Both pay homage to Horace; both are "classical," both "pagan." And this community of taste and spirit clearly reveals itself, despite the newer, less gracious poetic dress of the later poet. Prior, unlike Herrick, is the modern, the man of fashion, the coffee-house wit. He has the new polish which Chesterfield and his brethren of the spirit were importing from France. Nevertheless, when Prior sings—

                     Her Hair,
In Ringlets rather dark than fair,
Does down her Iv'ry Bosom roll
And hiding Half, adoms the Whole.
In her high Forehead's fair half-round
Love sits in open Triumph crown'd:
He in the Dimple of her Chin,
In private State by Friends is seen,⁵

he is only echoing with less charm of expression, the spirit which made Herrick sing:

Then, when I see thy Tresses bound
Into an Ovall, square, or round;
And knit in knots far more then I
Can tell by tongue; or true-love tie:
Next, when those Lawnie Filmes I see
Play with a wild civility:
And all those airie silks to flow,
Alluring me, and tempting so:
I must confesse, mine eye and heart
Dotes less on Nature then on Art.⁶

Both poets delight in the society of women, nor is their devotion confined to a single Julia or Cloe. The more sophisticated ladies of the later age seem to have been less placable than their predecessors, and the same, apparently, may also be said of the two poets.

When Julia chid, I stood as mute the while,
As is the fish, or tonguelesse Crocodile,⁷

says the peaceable Herrick; but Prior, with a felicity of phrase and measure which makes the lines a model of the familiar style in verse, replies to his fair accuser:

To be vext at a Trifle or two that I writ,
 Your Judgment at once, and my Passion You wrong:
You take that for Fact, which will scarce be found Wit:
 Od's Life! must one swear to the Truth of a Song?⁸

Then he recovers his temper, and tries to soothe Cloe in such delightful stanzas as these:

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.

In persuading Cloe, he almost begins to believe this elaborate apologia himself, as he continues:

So when I am weary'd with wand'ring all Day;
 To Thee, my Delight, in the Evening I come:
No Matter what Beauties I saw in my Way:
 They were but my Visits; but Thou art my Home.

Cloe is apparently sufficiently worked upon by this, to accept a story which she does not really believe; whereupon Prior, perhaps himself not sure of its truth or fiction, resumes his usual bantering tone, quotes Horace and Lydia, and concludes with a ludicrous and no doubt intentionally ungrammatical couplet, which is to bring back the smiles to the tear-stained face of Cloe. It is in similar vein that Prior sings:

The Merchant, to secure his Treasure,
 Conveys it in a borrow'd Name:
Euphelia serves to grace my Measure;
 But Cloe is my real Flame.⁹

And in like manner are The Question, to Lisetta, and Lisetta's Reply.

Prior also shared Herrick's devotion to the bowl. To both men the bowl is something almost sacred, part of the mystic rites of Bacchus. How cordially would Prior have endorsed Herrick's noble resolve:

But lle spend my comming houres,
Drinking wine, and crown'd with flowres.¹⁰

But Julia and Cloe would have had to share the banquet. There is the same pseudo-paganism, born of Horace and the Greek Anthology, in the following Song by Prior:

If Wine and Musick have the Pow'r,
To ease the Sickness of the Soul;
Let Phacbus ev'ry String explore;

And Bacchus fill the sprightly Bowl.
Let them their friendly Aid imploy,
To make my Cloe's Absence light;
And seek for Pleasure to destroy
The Sorrows of this live-long Night.

But She to Morrow will return:
Venus be Thou to Morrow great;
Thy Myrtles strow, Thy Odours bum;
And meet Thy Fav'rite Nymph in State.
Kind Goddess, to no other Pow'rs
Let Us to Morrow's Blessings own:
Thy darling Loves shall guide the Hours;
And all the Day be Thine alone.

Similar, too, are Herrick's Cheat of Cupid and Prior's Cupid Mistaken.

Forthwith his bow he bent,
 And wedded string and arrow,
And struck me, that it went
 Quite through my heart and marrow,

sings the earlier poet, describing Cupid's attack. Prior seeks to bring all the famed smoothness of Waller into his description:

With Skill He chose his sharpest Dart:
 With all his Might his Bow He drew:
Swift to His beauteous Parent's heart
 The too well-guided Arrow flew.

At times the familiar refrain of Carpe Diem is the common burden of their song.

For what To-morrow shall disclose,
 May, spoil what You To-night propose:
England may change; or Cloe stray:
 Love and Life are for To-day,

Prior exclaims in a quatrain entitled Quid sit futurum Cras fuge quwrere, just as Herrick had preached the same doctrine in his famous Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may, and similar verses.

The inextricably mingled humour and pathos which forms perhaps Prior's greatest charm, finds delightful expression in the verses For My Own Monument.

Fierce robbers there are that infest the highway,
  So Matt may be kill'd, and his bones never found,
False witness at court, and fierce tempests at sea,
  So Matt may yet chance to be hang'd, or be drown'd.

If his bones lie in earth, roll in sea, fly in air,
  To Fate we must yield, and the thing is the same,
And if passing thou giv'st him a smile, or a tear,
  He cares not—yet pr'ythee be kind to his Fame.

Like Herrick, too, Prior sang of children long before children had become a part of the poet's stock-in-trade.

Prior, then, carries into the eighteenth century, in a very real manner, the spirit of Herrick. We find indeed, in the lesser known verses of the earlier poet, the germ of those characteristics of eighteenth-century occasional verse which are usually regarded as belonging to that century alone. It is undoubtedly true that Herrick's greatest qualities as a poet—his tenderness, his love of nature, his childlike simplicity, his delicate cadences of expression—die with him. But though the quaint dress of his thought and feeling is discarded for the more formal, more elaborate brocade of the later age, his lines Upon a Painted Gentlewoman, On a Perfum'd Lady, Upon Some Women, and similar productions, are in the same line of development as much Restoration verse, a somewhat milder foretaste of Swift's Lady's Dressing Room. It cannot be denied that to proceed from some of the lyrics of Herrick, to the occasional verse of the Restoration and eighteenth century, is merely to turn from what was done in the green tree to its counterpart in the dry.

But if Prior represents a transitional stage in English verse, pointing backward to preceding poets, he also points forward along the road of poetic evolution. There is a strangely modern note, a suggestion of Tennyson's manner in such a stanza as this:

Yet car'd I not, what might presage
 Or withering Wreath, or fleeting Youth:
Love I esteem'd more strong than Age,
 And Time less permanent than Truth.¹¹

In his delightful poem The Female Phaeton, Prior enters the borderland of Swift's lyrical narrative verse, and points to Cowper. Prior did a number of foolish things in poetry as in life. At times he tries to be conventional and to write odes in the manner of Cowley. But perhaps the most foolish of his poetic transgressions was his attempt to alter the Spenserian stanza, an attempt which was doomed to failure.

Prior's great virtue as a poet is an intense realism. He has too vital a personality to be restrained by the current poetic theories. For him abstractions have no meaning. He demands life with all its colour, noise, change, reality, crudity. In one point Prior was far removed from the typical Augustan, for he preferred passion to stagnation, emotion to reason. He has no sympathy for the "sauntering Jacks and idle Joans" of the world.

Nor Good, nor Bad, nor Fools, nor Wise;
They wou'd not learn, nor cou'd advise:
Without Love, Hatred, Joy, or Fear,
They led—a kind of—as it were:
Nor Wish'd, nor Car'd, nor Laugh'd, nor Cry'd:
And so They liv'd; and so They dy'd.¹²

Prior had no intention of making his own life "a kind of—as it were"; his sympathies are rather with those like his typical heroine "Jinny the Just," who—

… read and Accounted & payd & abated
Eat and drank, Play'd & Work't, laugh't & Cry'd, lov'd & hated,
As answer'd the end of her being Created.

This delight in life, in all its aspects, was rank heresy against those principles of the fashionable commonsense philosophy which made reason supreme, and the separation of the elect from common humanity a fundamental rule. That of his own free-will a man should leave the world of wit and fashion to snatch a few moments among humble folks in an ale-house was incomprehensible to the exalted devotees of reason, and the explanation of this practice of Prior was at once found in his humble ancestry. On the score of birth, Lord Strafford declined to act with the poet in negotiating the Treaty of Utrecht. In two poems, The Old Gentry, and an Epitaph Extempore, Prior replied to such, in verse full of the laughter of his light-hearted scorn:

Heralds and Statesmen, by your leave,
 Here lye the Bones of Matthew Prior;
The Son of Adam and of Eve,
 Can Bourbon, or Nassau, go higher?¹³

But even for Prior song, woman, and wine could not entirely banish deeper questionings, and at times a touch of fatalism creeps into his verse. There is a deeper note, an undertone of sadness in the lines to his monument already quoted. The same tinge of regret turns his Parting with Elavia to darker hues:

You sigh and weep: the Gods neglect
 That precious dew your eyes let fall:
Our joy and grief with like respect
 They mind; and that is, not at all.

We pray, in hopes they will be kind,
 As if they did regard our state:
They hear; and the return we find
 Is, that no prayers can alter Fate.

Something of this darker mood finds expression, though somewhat weakened by a touch of the sentimental and artificial, in The Garland. In this poem the writer tells us how—

The Pride of ev'ry Grove I chose,
 The Violet sweet, and Lilly fair,
The dappl'd Pink, and blushing Rose,
 To deck my charming Cloe's Hair.

But the flowers fade, and the sentimental Cloe weeps over their decay.

She sigh'd; She smil'd: and to the Flow'rs
 Pointing, the Lovely Moralist said:
See! Friend, in some few fleeting Hours,
 See yonder, what a Change is made.

Ah Me! the blooming Pride of May,
 And That of Beauty are but One:
At Morn Both flourish bright and gay,
 Both fade at Evening, pale, and gone.

There is too a very modern touch in the following stanza from some lines to "The Honourable Charles Montagu":

Our Hopes, like tow'ring Falcons, aim
 At Objects in an airy height:
The little Pleasure of the Game
 Is from afar to view the Flight.

Is it merely fanciful to see in the following verses

The ancient Sage, who did so long maintain,
That Bodies die, but Souls return again,
 With all the Births and Deaths He had in store,
Went out Pythagoras, and came no more,¹⁴

a foretaste in both form and spirit of:

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about; but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went?¹⁵

Surely too there is the bitterness of personal sorrow, a trace of passing sadness in those verses of Prior which found their way to the heart of Sir Walter Scott¹⁶:

The Man in graver Tragic known
(Tho' his best Part long since was done)
Still on the Stage desires to tarry:
And He who play'd the Harlequin,
After the Jest still loads the Scene,
Unwilling to retire, tho' Weary.¹⁷

Can it be that the years changed for Prior the emphasis of those thoughtless verses of his earlier days … ?

Notes

¹ Letter to the Rev. Wm. Unwin, January 5, 1782.

²English Humorists, ed. W. L. Phelps, 1908, p. 152.

³Anecdotes, ed. S. W. Singer, 1858, p. 47.

⁴An Essay upon Learning.

⁵Her Right Name.

⁶Teares are Tongues.

⁷Art above Nature: To Julia.

⁸Cloe Jealous: A Better Answer.

⁹An Ode.

¹⁰On Himselfe.

¹¹Cloe Jealous.

¹²An Epitaph.

¹³Epitaph Extempore.

¹⁴Ode to the Memory of Hon. Col. George Villiers.

¹⁵ Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám.

¹⁶ Lockhart's Life of Scott, 2nd ed., 1853, pp. 738-9.

¹⁷ Lines written in the beginning of Mezeray's History of France.