Some Literary Fellows.
There was Prior,[96] for instance, who, from having been the son of a taverner at Whitehall, came to be a polished wit, and at last an ambassador, through the influence of strong friends about the court. In his university days he had ventured to ridicule, in rattling verse, the utterances of the great Dryden. You will know of him best, perhaps, if you know him at all, by a paraphrase he made of that tender ballad of the “Nut-brown Maid,” in which the charming naturalness of the old verse is stuck over with the black patches of Prior’s pretty rhetoric. But I am tempted to give you a fairer and a more characteristic specimen of his vivacity and grace. Here it is:
“What I speak, my fair Chloe, and what I write, shows
The difference 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.
So when I am wearied with wandering 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, and thou art my home.”
Remember, these lines were written by a poet, who on an important occasion represented the Government of Queen Anne at the great court of Louis XIV. of France. This Prior—when Queen Mary died—had his consolatory verses for King William. Indeed that death of Queen Mary set a great deal of poetry upon the flow. There was William Congreve,[97] who though a young man, not yet turned of thirty, had won a great rank in those days by his witty comedies. He wrote a pastoral—cleaner than most of his writing—in honor of William’s lost Queen:
“No more these woods shall with her sight be blest,
Nor with her feet these flowery plains be prest;
No more the winds shall with her tresses play,
And from her balmy breath steal sweets away.
Oh, she was heavenly fair, in face and mind,
Never in nature were such beauties joined;
Without—all shining, and within—all white;
Pure to the sense, and pleasing to the sight;
Like some rare flower, whose leaves all colors yield,
And—opening—is with sweetest odors filled.”
Yet all this would have comforted the King not half so much as a whiff of smoke from the pipe of one of his Dutch dragoons. He never went to see one of Mr. Congreve’s plays, though the whole town was talking of their neatness, and their skill, and their wit. That clever gentleman’s conquests on the stage, and in the social world—lording it as he did among duchesses and countesses—would have weighed with King William not so much as the buzzing of a blue-bottle fly.
Yet Congreve was in his way an important man—immensely admired; Voltaire said he was the best comedy writer England had ever known; and when he came to London this keen-witted Frenchman (who rarely visited) went to see Mr. Congreve at his rooms in the Strand. Nothing was too good for Mr. Congreve; he had patronage and great gifts; it seemed always to be raining roses on his head. The work he did was not great work, but it was exquisitely done; though, it must be said, there was no preserving savor in it but the art of it. The talk in his comedies, by its pliancy, grace, neat turns, swiftness of repartee, compares with the talk in most comedies as goldsmith’s work compares with the heavy forgings of a blacksmith. It matches exquisitely part to part, and runs as delicately as a hair-spring on jewelled pinions.
I gave my readers a bit of the “Pandora Lament,” which Sir Richard Steele thought one of the most perfect of all pastoral compositions. And the little whimsey about Amoret, everybody knows; certainly it is best known of all he did:
“Coquet and coy at once her air,
Both studied, tho’ both seemed neglected;
Careless she is with artful care,
Affecting to seem unaffected.
With skill her eyes dart every glance,
Yet change so soon, you’d ne’er suspect ’em,
For she’d persuade they wound by chance,
Tho’ certain aim and art direct them.”
They are very pretty; yet are you not sure that our wheezing, phlegmatic, business-loving, Dutch King William would have sniffed contemptuously at the reading of any such verselets?