Concerning other poets—Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare—we feel that, in any age of literature, in any period of taste, under any conventions, they must have been great. Pope, on the other hand, cannot easily be thought of as having the capacity for greatness, except in the literary conditions of the early eighteenth century. But in that period he was supreme.
Prior.
From the galaxy of wits who dined with Harley and St. John and were addressed in that splendid society by their Christian names, Jonathan or Mat, Matthew Prior stands somewhat apart. His duties as a diplomatist carried him abroad; he owed his diplomatic posts to his wit, not to his birth, which Queen Anne spoke of as unpleasantly obscure. He was born on 14 July, 1664, at Wimborne or Winburn, in Dorsetshire; Westminster was his school, and St. John's, Cambridge, his college. Here he took his degree, in 1686, and obtained a fellowship in 1688. He attracted the notice of the Whigs by parodying Dryden's "Hind and Panther," in "The Town and Country Mouse," aided in the jest by Charles Montagu. Dryden is very improbably said to have wept; the Whigs, at all events, laughed, and in 1691 made Prior secretary to the Embassy in Holland. He held the same post at Versailles later; at this time he was a sincere eulogist of our Dutch deliverer, William III, whom he celebrated in "The Carmen Seculare" (1700), indeed constantly, like Horace, he "praising his tyrant sung". Reviewing history, he places William before a number of Roman heroes, and, remembering that William's wife is a Stuart, bids the god Janus
Finding some of Stuart's race
Unhappy, pass their annals by.
But, as thou dwell'st upon that heavenly name
To grief for ever sacred, as to fame,
O! read it to thyself: in silence weep!
Is the name Charles or Mary? At this time there was a fashionable cult of Mary Stuart. This long ode, granting the mythology, has considerable merit, though, says Dr. Johnson, "Who can be supposed to have laboured through it?" Not the Doctor, as he candidly confesses.
Under Queen Anne, Prior was tempted over to the Tory party, and his doings, as a negotiator with France, were thought, and perhaps not unjustly, to smack of Jacobitism. He was in Paris when Beatrix Esmond's Duke of Hamilton was about to go thither on a mission, and there seems little doubt (from a record by Lockhart of Carnwath, the leader of the Scottish Cavaliers) that Hamilton was to bring over to England, in disguise, the exiled son of James II, "the Pretender," as Colonel Esmond does in Thackeray's novel. But Hamilton fell in a duel with Mohun, and that chance was lost.
As acknowledged ambassador, Prior was at the French Court from August, 1712, to August, 1714, when the death of Queen Anne scattered the Tories. Early in 1715 he was locked up on suspicion of treason, and was not released till three years later.
The hope of the Whigs was to decapitate Harley, who lay in the Tower; but Harley could have involved Marlborough, possessing a fatal letter of his, and finally Prior and Harley were released. He had now no resources except his college fellowship, but his friends by securing a large subscription for his poems, and by the generosity of the family of Harley, placed him beyond want. He died on September 18, 1721.
Prior does not live by his "Alma, or the Progress of the Mind," a long poem in rhymed eight syllable couplets, in the manner of Butler's "Hudibras". This work is a kind of comic history of Psychology, and ends with Barry Lyndon's rhyme to Aristotle, "Here, Jonathan, your master's bottle!" Prior's "Solomon," on the vanity of knowledge, pleasure, and power, in heroic rhymed verse, is best remembered for two lines to Abra, and might, so easily does the author take his theme, be called the vanity of melancholy, though it closes in serious admonitions to "the weary King Ecclesiast".
Prior's tales in the manner of Fontaine's "Contes," are lively, like these; and like these, may have seemed coarse to such a moralist as Sir Richard Steele.