ORSET has continued Dorset alone from time immemorial,” and its special character has been more carefully preserved and fixed than that of any other English county in the work of two Dorset poets, William Barnes and Thomas Hardy, one of whom has succeeded, like Mistral in France, in making its native language a literary medium known beyond its spoken limits.
Dorset’s earlier poets,[61] however, have not been “local”; and it is characteristic of Matthew Prior that, in the account drawn up by himself for Jacobs’ Lives of the Poets, he describes his father as a “citizen of London,” and that though the first entry against his name on his admission as pensioner at St. John’s College, Cambridge, is Dorcestr, it has been altered by a later hand into Middlesexiensis. In spite of conflicting entries, it is now generally admitted that Prior, perennis et fragrans—the motto upon the modern brass to his memory in Wimborne Minster[62]—was born at or near Wimborne, in East Dorset, the son of George Prior, who is said to have been a joiner.
“With regard to the family of Prior, the tradition of Wimborne says that his father was a carpenter, and one house he lived in is pointed out: it is close to the present Post Office, and is called the house in which the poet was born. The other was pulled down, but its site is known.”[63]
Local tradition makes Prior a pupil at the free Grammar School; and of the unusually large library of chained books in the old church, one was said to be a standing testimony to his carelessness—a chained folio copy of Ralegh’s History of the World, in which a hole is said to have been burned by the boy when dozing over the book by the light of a smuggled taper. Unfortunately for the floating tradition, it has been stated that this particular defacement is the work, not of a candle, but of a red-hot poker. Still more unfortunately, it has been proved that the History, with other books, was placed in the library[64] at a much later date than Prior’s boyhood.[65]
Almost a century later a poetic “Court” was held at Eastbury, in North Dorset, by George Bubb Dodington, Lord Melcombe, who is not interesting as a poet[66] himself, but as the cause of poetry in others, the last of the patrons, a curious, gorgeous, tawdry figure, fit to be seen through the coloured glass of Macaulay’s ridicule. He was the easy mark for dedications and compliments from many of the best-known writers of the day—poets utterly discrowned, and those on whose brows the laurel grows very thin and brittle; Edward Young, Thomson, and Fielding mention him; while his Great House at Eastbury is celebrated by Thomson, Young, and Christopher Pitt,[67] who writes, somewhat oddly, of this “new Eden in the Wild.” The pleasures of this “Eden” appear, from an epistle of Pitt, to have been smoking and drinking, with conversational intervals. Dr. Young (of the Night Thoughts) sits with “his Dodington,”
Charm’d with his flowing Burgundy and wit,
By turns relieving with the circling draught
Each pause of chat and interval of thought;
Or, through the well-glazed tube, from business freed,
Draw the rich spirit of the Indian weed.