I may have more to say of her when we shall have brought the literary current of our story more nearly abreast of her times.
There was not much of literary patronage flowing out from King William. I think there was never a time when he would not have counted a good dictionary the best of books, not excepting the Bible; and I suspect that he had about the same contempt for “literary fellers” which belongs to our average Congressman. Yet there were shoals of poets in his time who would have delighted to burn incense under the nostrils of the asthmatic King.
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,