No More Learning

In 1697, came peace with the treaty of Ryswyk. Prior acted
as secretary during the negotiations, and, for a long time, in
consequence of intervals between the plenipotentiaryships of
Portland, Jersey and Manchester, was virtually in charge. Sir
William Trumbull complimented him on his happy blend of
poetry and business ; but he was not compensated by this for
his lack of pay and definite prospect. He felt aggrieved that he
was not sent envoy to Nancy on the occasion of the duke of
Lorraine's marriage, and would have now been glad to get back to
London ; but he was kept until November, 1699, at Paris, where
he did useful service and whence he wrote highly diverting letters,
mixing persiflage with politics -
In 1699, Prior was made an under-secretary of state, and,
during the latter part of this year, carried on an arduous series
of services, including journeys to and from Paris, in connection
with the second partition treaty. In December? , he produced his
most elaborate 'pindaric' ode, Carmen Seculare for the year 1700,
"To the King,' eulogising William III through forty-two wearisome
stanzas, and comparing him to the sun whose sacred light the
poet contrasts with the arbitrary blaze of comets and meteors.
Honours accumulated upon the poetic official. The university
1 The Hague congress of 1690 is the actual starting-point of a volume published in
1740 by Prior's former secretary and executor Adrian Drift, under the title The History
of His Own Time by Matthew Prior, and professing to be compiled from his own
manuscripts. It is a piece of book-making extraordinary, containing, with a few
original letters to and from Prior (which become rather more numerous in the last
part of the book), a few state-papers that may, at the time, have been otherwise inacces-
sible, and more that were already public property. Prior's Journal at the Court of
France from 31 August to 23 October 1714 is a mere official diary kept by Drift for his
chief; on the other hand, the Account of (Prior's) Examination before the Committee of
Council (1713) is graphic and clear, and full of lively personal touches, illustrating the
foolish and passionate behaviour of some members of the committee (including Lord
Coningsby), who were angered by Prior's mingled freedom and reticence, and the
annoyance of Walpole and Stanhope, conveyed by telegraphic frowns. Prior's Answer
to the Report of the Committee of Secresy, appointed by Order of the House of Commons
contains an important argument in support of the conduct of the first stage of the
peace negotiations without the cognisance of the allies ; but is a fragment only. Some
of the early events of the war are narrated at length by Drift, on the plea that Prior
wrote poems about them. The whole compilation has small historical or biographical,
and less literary, value.
2 Cf. Drift, u. s. p. 144.


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of Cambridge made him an honorary M. A. , and he succeeded
Locke as a commissioner of trade and plantations. Later in this
year, the earl of Manchester was transferred from Venice to
Paris, and Prior returned home with Jersey (who had been
named one of the secretaries of state and whose protégé Prior
now was), to serve under him. In the earlier part of 1701,
before Louis XIV irritated the national pride by his recognition
of James III and alarmed the city by his plain bid for Spanish
trade, a parliamentary storm burst over the partition treaties and
culminated in the impeachment of the whig lords, Portland and
Oxford, Somers and Halifax, who had been in power during the
negotiations. Prior, who was now, for a brief space (February to
June 1701), member for East Grinstead, voted for the impeachment.
Naturally enough, he was accused of treachery; but he was already
showing himself a prerogative and high church man; and, under
Anne, he gradually detached himself from his old whig allies in
order to act with the tory chiefs Harley and St John. During
the early part of Anne's reign, we hear little of him save
occasional poems and celebrations of English victories and an
appeal to Godolphin to settle his debts (£500) and procure him
employment abroad. But, meanwhile, he was cultivating his gift
of trifling in verse, and producing, among short fabliaux, epigrams
and multifarious matter, such little gems as the stanzas, Sir Walter
Scott's favourite, Written in the Beginning of Mezeray's History
of France:
Yet for the fame of all these Deeds,
What Beggar in the Invalides,
With Lameness broke, with Blindness smitten,
Wished ever decently to die,
To have been either Mezeray,
Or any Monarch He has written?
He writes formal odes to the queen, twits, not very worthily,
his fellow panegyrist Boileau with the victory of Blenheim-
Since, hird for Life, Thy servile Muse must sing
Successive conquests, and a glorious King-
and gains increasing mastery over the heroic couplet, as may be
seen by An Ode Inscribed to the Memory of the Honourable
Colonel George Villiers, accidentally drowned in a river near
Friuli in 1703—which contains some of his finest lines, beginning :
Some from the stranded Vessel force their Way:
Fearful of Fate, they meet it in the Sea:
Some who escape the Fury of the Wave,
Sicken on Earth, and sink into a Grave.


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Prior under Queen Anne
151
After Blenheim came Ramillies, to which, in An Ode Humbly
Subscrib'd to the Queen, Prior, as he says, went out of his way to
pay the tribute of some—not very successful—Spenserian stanzas.
But, in 1707, he was compelled by the whig leaders to give up his
public employment, and was imperfectly consoled by a secretary-
ship to the bishop of Winchester. In 1709, he published a first
collection of his verse writings, which he describes as the product
of his leisure hours, as he was only a poet by accident. Next
year, upon the fall of the whigs, he joined Swift, Freind and
others, under the aegis of St John, in setting up The Examiner,
in which he wrote an early paper! His Fable from Phaedrus
also appeared here. He soon came into frequent contact with
Swift, of not a few of whose lampoons he had the first credit
among their friends. Prior, who had been expelled from the
Kitcat club in 1707, was now hailed as one of the seventeen
'brothers, who formed an intimate tory club under that name.
A more substantial recognition soon followed, when, his unusual
proficiency in languages having been noted by St John, he was
made a commissioner of customs. In March 1711, he celebrated
Harley's escape from the knife of the assassin, and before and
afterwards eulogised the minister in various strains of verse? In
June of this year, he was sent across the water to notify England's
preliminary demands. On his return, accompanied by the two
French agents, Mesnager and Gaultier, he was arrested at Can-
terbury by mistake. In September, Swift brought out a fanciful
relation of Prior's journey by which the plenipotentiary's vanity
was much incensed. Frequent secret conferences about the con-
ditions of peace now took place the first at Prior's house on
20 September. He was nominated plenipotentiary in November ;
but, to appease the offended pride of Lord Strafford, another of the
plenipotentiaries, the appointment was cancelled. In August 1712,
however, Prior went to France with Bolingbroke, and was raised
to the position of ambassador, though he did not assume the title
until Shrewsbury's return in the following year. He was equally
popular with Anne and Louis and managed a personal corre-
spondence between them. The peace was signed in April 1713,
and Prior lingered on in Paris, a prey to intense uneasiness as to
1 No. 6, ridiculing some verses by Garth to Godolphin. Addison answered him in
The Whig Examiner. Both pieces are printed by Drift, p. 318, and with Prior's Two
Riddles and Addison's Solution, leave a feeble impression.
? Erle Robert's Mice, 'in Chaucer's Stile,' is not the happiest of these,
3 Drift, u. s. p. 377.
6


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the future of his party, and as to his own. He was in the midst of
an ode imploring a gift of Anne's portrait when the news of her
death reached him. He was at once deprived of his commissioner-
ship. In due course, the earl of Stair, who had been appointed
ambassador in Prior's place, arrived and impounded such of his
papers as he had not previously secured. When, after his
salary (as plenipotentiary) and debts had been paid, he returned
to England, in March 1715, he was arrested by order of
the Commons, and, in June, impeached and handed over to
the custody of the serjeant at arms. Nothing incriminating
either Bolingbroke or Oxford could be extracted from him,
and, after two years of detention, he was released in 1717.
During his confinement, he wrote his second-longest poem, called
Alma: or, the Progress of the Mind. To ease his pecuniary
difficulties, his friends Arbuthnot, Gay and others, but especially
Lords Harley and Bathurst, devised the plan of printing his
poems in a sumptuous folio, three feet by one. All the nota-
bilities subscribed to this edition, which appeared in 1718.
Swift collected many guineas (four thousand were obtained in
all) and took five copies himself. Lord Harley added another
four thousand, for the purchase of Down hall in Essex. He
paid several visits to this house, for the purpose of super-
intending alterations; but most of the time remaining to him
he spent at the houses of friends, especially at Lord Harley's
seat, Wimpole, with an occasional visit to St John's college. He
was harassed by his confinement at the messenger's house, and
by the thought that the manæuvres of his enemies might end in
some betrayal by him of his friends. Yet, during this period, he
touched some of the lightest strings in Alma (the more didactic
Solomon on the Vanity of the World had been originally com-
posed at an earlier date); and, after his release, he could break
forth into almost buoyant gaiety in the ballad Down-Hall, in
which he describes his search for his future residence as
A Place where to Bait, 'twixt the Court and the Grave;
Where joyful to Live, not unwilling to Die.
Swift was but one of the friends of Prior's earlier days who
were devoted to him. His old fellow-diplomatists in Paris,
Torcy and abbé Gaultier, assure him of their regard : the duke
of Buckingham compliments his Solomon ; Bathurst is reluctant
to return Alma, with whom he owns himself in love; Chester-
field testifies to admiration for Prior's Nut-browon Maid; the


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Prior's Last Years
153
conversation of Smalridge is a great comfort to him and a com-
pensation for the loss of Atterbury's, with whom he had a sharp
quarrel. Harley's grand-daughter 'little Peggy' or 'mistress
Margaretta' was a great favourite with Prior, and to her he
first addressed his dainty and charming little Letter, afterwards
expanded, 29 March 17201. The 'little pretty lady' seems to
have reciprocated his fondness, for she said that Prior made
himself loved by every living thing in the house-master, child,
servant, creature or animal. Prior was not insensible to the
charms of Down hall, a typical Essex lath and plaster manor-
farm. With the aid of Harley's factotum and land surveyor,
honest John Morley of Harlow, he burlesqued the pride of
Louis XIV in the improvements at Marly and Versailles. Yet
some letters represent him toping in London taverns, a dis-
appointed man, and Voltaire describes him dying in poverty as
an English philosopher must learn to die. In his will, however,
of which Harley and Adrian Drift were executors, he devoted
£500 to that last of human vanities, a costly monument, to be
surmounted by Coysevox's bust of himself—a gift of the Grand
Monarque, with a long inscription from Freind. His death
took place, on 18 September 1721, during a visit to Wimpole,
where he had contracted a lingering fever. He was duly buried
in Westminster abbey. The best of his books, including Mezeray
(but without the inscription), went to St John's college.
Prior's versatility as a writer is greater than is always re-
cognised. In addition to the lyrical verse of various kinds
contained in the successive editions of his poems, or left behind
him in manuscript, he wrote three longer poems which, though
none of them commends itself to modern taste, call for separate
mention.
Henry and Emma, a Poem, Upon the Model of The
Nut-brown Maid is dedicated To Cloe in some lines of the
ordinary humorous type, and concludes with a sort of envoi by
Venus, in approved rococo style. The pagan deities and their
associates, indeed, disport themselves through the dialogue
between the lovers which forms the substance of the poem, and
which, as has been well said>, is 'a futile attempt to apply the
external classical style to what is in its essence romantic. ' With
>
1 Waller, vol. 11, p. 131.
? It is now printed, together with Essays and Dialogues of the Dead, from Prior's
literary papers preserved at Longleat, in vol. 11 of Waller's edition.
3 Courthope, History of English Poetry, vol. v, p. 117.


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the style of the beautiful early sixteenth century ballad The Nut-
brown Maid its charm disappears; but, though not professing
oneself, with Cowper, ‘bewitched' by `this enchanting piece,' one
may allow that it paraphrases its original with an extraordinary
profusion of elegant expressions? . Of course, a point in the
argument is reached where elegance itself can no longer hold
out; but, artificial as the treatment is, a vein of pathos, of the
Griselda sort, runs through it to the last—so powerful is the
effect of the main motive of the old ballad.
Alma, or The Progress of the Mind, treats in the form of a
dialogue, extending over three cantos, the practically inexhaustible
subject of the vanity of the world and of what it contains, the folly
of the human thoughts which busy themselves with its changing
phenomena. Apart from the management of the metre (of which
immediately), there is little in this poem to enchain the interest
of the reader. In its theme as well as in its form, it approaches
Hudibras ; but its superior urbanity cannot conceal its positive,
as well as relative, lack of force. So much pleasure, however,
did Prior take in the subject, which had the fluidity harmonising
with his own mind when in a mood of relaxation, that he returned
to it, in more methodical fashion, and in the heroic couplet, in
Solomon on the Vanity of the World, a Poem in Three Books.
These take the form of a long soliloquy by 'the Hero and the
Author,'
Whose serions Muse inspires him to explain
That all we Act, and all we think is Vain.
In the first, he treats of knowledge (indulging in a brief
digression on the prospects of Britannia, the great glorious
Pow'r,' which, though it cannot escape the universal doom, shall
die last); in the second, of pleasure and the love of women; in
the last, of power. All, alike, are vanity ; but, in the final book,
an angel comforts the pessimist philosopher with the promise of
the Redeemer who, after 'a Series of perpetual Woe,' shall come
forth from the royal race. Prior certainly took pains with the
poem, and was rather proud of it; but, after being applauded by
Cowper, Wesley, Crabbe and Scott, it has gone the way of Alma,
or had, perhaps, preceded it into oblivion.
It was inevitable that a poet who rejoiced when he could turn
1 The usually misquoted line
Fine by Degrees and beautifully less
occurs in this poem, as a compliment paid by Henry to Emma's figure !


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Prior's Light Satirical Verse 155
to verse-writing from his political work at home and abroad
should have transferred much of its spirit into his poetry, and
contributed his share to the pindaric odes and other panegyrical
writing of his age. But, though Carmen Seculare may, from the
point of view of length, be singled out among his pieces in praise
of William or of Anne, no part of it can claim enduring remem-
brance for its own sake: it varies from the outrageous to the
insipid? . His genius for persiflage suggested to him the notion,
when the tide of success had turned, of turning with it upon
Boileau, who had sung the earlier success of the French arms,
and made him repeat the experiment after Blenheim? .
Of satires in verse, properly so called, no complete examples
are to be found among his poems, though he seems in his early
days to have thought of attempting this form of composition and
left one or two fragmentary pieces of the kind behind him. On
the other hand, he was fertile in a wide variety of light satirical
narrative in verse, from the familiar fabliau to the humorous
ballad or character-sketch, and to epigrammatic sallies and vers
de société of all sorts“. In many of these pieces, his lightness of
touch, combined with a singular gift of saying, in language as
clear and simple as prose, and yet rarely devoid of wit, and
still more rarely without grace, exactly what he wanted to say,
brought him much nearer to classical examples, above all to
that of his favourite Horace, than the more elaborate didactic
or semi-didactic efforts mentioned above. The best instances
of Prior's success in the fabliau are An English Padlock and
Hans Carvel, both of which are seasoned with the grossel
characteristic of the species ; but they do not stand alone. To
the humorous character-sketch, there are some admirable ap-
proaches in Down-Hall, a Ballad, where the figure of the
landlady at the Bull in Hendon, bent on business, first, and the
sorrows of memory, afterwards, stands forth for all time', and the
still more famous Secretary, an autobiographical reminiscence.
But by far the best example of this class, a masterpiece in its
way, is the poem which A. R. Waller was fortunate enough to
>
1 Among the former may be reckoned the lines Seeing the Duke of Ormond's Picture;
among the latter, some of the Harley series.
. An English Ballad on the Taking of Namur (1695). A Letter to Monsieur Boileau
Despréaut, Occasion'd by the Victory at Blenheim (1704).
3 Advice to the Painter; A Session of the Poets ; Epistle to Lord - The last-
named, which is printed by Waller (vol. 11, pp. 305—8), is conceived on an exceptionally
large soale.
• Waller, vol. 11, p. 360.
5 See note 1 on next page.


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discover among the Longleat MSS, and to which, in his edition,
he has given the name Jinny the Just. The insight into character
here displayed is equalled by the nicety of nuance with which it
is expressed ; and the twinkle of humour which animates the life-
like portrait is absolutely irresistible. Almost equally good is the
earlier epitaph on 'Saunt’ring Jack and Idle Joan'—which, indeed,
reaches a higher plane in its scorn of the mental or moral apathy
it depicts :
Without Love, Hatred, Joy, or Fear,
They led-a kind of-as it were;
Nor wish'd, nor lov'd, nor Cough'd, nor Coy'd;
But so They livd; and so They dy'd.
Among Prior’s vers de société proper, in which the wit is always
playful and the flattery kept within the bounds of actual life, a
high place has always been assigned to his verses to children, or
concerned with them. The cult, it must be allowed, is not one
that makes for sincerity, though Prior was a genuine child-lover?
His songs are rarely of high excellence; but in an intermediate
kind of lyric, half song, half poesy, he remains unsurpassed, with
an inimitable-albeit, at times, a kind of wax flower-prettiness.
Cloe Hunting, To Cloe Weeping and many another example of
this style might be cited; but its acme is reached in A Better
Answer to Cloe Jealous, which ends with the most exquisite
grammatical faux-pas :
Then finish, Dear Cloe, this Pastoral War;
Now let us like Horace and Lydia agree;
For Thou art a Girl as much brighter than Her,
As He was a Poet Sublimer than Me.
Prior's epigrams are not uniformly good and, occasionally,
wanting in restraint ; perhaps, his genius as a writer lacked the
concentration necessary for the epigram proper ; his happiest
effort in this direction, the celebrated lines Written in the Be-
ginning of Mezeray's History of France, part cited above, is,
after all, less an epigram than a train of thought suggested by
the subject. As a whole, Prior's shorter poems, of which the
entire series seems at last to be in our hands, mark him as the
earliest, as he was one of the most consummate, masters of English
familiar verse. In his own age, he had no rival in this kind of
1 Cf. with this the short Journey to Copt-hall, one of the Longleat MSS.
? See A Letter to the Honourable Lady Miss Margaret-Cavendish-Holles-Harley
(* My noble, lovely, little Peggy'), already mentioned, and to a Child of Quality, five
years old, the Author Forty.


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Prior's Versification
157
composition but Swift ; that his success in it was more rapid and
more widespread than Swift's, may be attributed to his greater
sympathy with the ordinary moods of the human mind, though
it was primarily due to his more diversified skill in the manage-
ment of metre and to his originality in the use of it.
In his History of English Prosody', Saintsbury has entered
very fully into this aspect of Prior's poetic genius, which, though
it had of course not escaped the attention of critics, had hardly
before received full consideration. He has directed attention to
the fact that, though Prior wrote, not only his Henry and Emma
and not a little of his other amorous poetry, but, also, his Solomon,
which he esteemed his masterpiece, in the heroic couplet, he
was far from entertaining a preference for the metre to which
Dryden had assured its prerogative position. In the Preface to
Solomon, he goes out of his way to dwell on its shortcomings.
He explains how the 'Heroic with continued Rhime,' as used by
Donne and his contemporaries 'carrying the Sense of one Verse
most commonly into another, was found too dissolute and wild,
and came very often too near Prose. On the other hand, the
'
same couplet 'as Davenant and Waller corrected, and Dryden
perfected it,' appears to him 'too confined' for the freedom, and
'too broken and weak' for the grandeur, of epic, as well as tedious
in a poem of any considerable length. These objections he en-
deavoured, in his own practice, to meet in various ways. Like
most of the poets of his own age and of that immediately pre-
ceding it, he sought refuge in the wide haven of pindarics, not
without a certain amount of success, but without leaving his mark
upon this measure, of which the day was on the wane in English
poetry. In the conviction that he who ‘writes in Rhimes, dances
in Fetters,' he also essayed blank verse; but his efforts in this
metre cannot be called successful; they comprise. his translations
of The First and Second Hymns of Calliomachus, as well as the
Prelude to a Tale from Boccace and another fragment from The
Georgics. The characteristic mark of his blank verse in the
longer pieces is an excessive use of double-endings, which arrest,
rather than promote, its flow. Of more significance is his
endeavour to employ, and to improve, the Spenserian stanza, for
which, in the preface to his Ode to the Queen, he expresses high
i Vol. 11, pp. 423—5.
2 See above as to Prior's feeling towards Dryden, which it would be absurd to
describe as jealousy, but which was certainly, in a measure, antipathetic.
8 Waller, vol. II, pp. 339 and 537.


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admiration, however imperfect may be the parallel which he draws
between the genius of Spenser and that of Horace. The change
introduced by him into the scheme of rimes cannot be said to
contribute to sustain the rise of the stanza towards its close; but
the comparative failure of the attempt was mainly owing to Prior's
inability to rise, even with the help of an occasional archaism, to
the grand manner of Spenser
It was neither in the heroic couplet nor in these substituted
that Prior achieved eminence, or, as Saintsbury puts it, the com-
bination of that ease, variety and fluency for which his soul longed. '
In a delightful passage of An Essay upon Learning, after observing
that those bred at Westminster school (like himself) grew 'used
very young to what Dr Sprat calls the Genius of the place which
is to Verses made Extempore, and Declamations composed in a
very few hours,' he goes on to say that
“As to Poetry, I mean the writing of Verses. . . . I would advise no Man to
attempt it except he cannot help it, and if he cannot it is in Vain to diswade
him from it. . . . Cowley felt it at Ten Years old, and Waller could not get rid
of it at Sixty. . . . As to my own part I found This impulse very soon, and shal
continue to feel it as long as I can think, I can remember nothing further in
my life than that I made Verses. But, he continues, 'I had Two Accidents
in Youth which hindered me from ing 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. . . . 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. . . '
Here, in a nutshell, we have the history both of his poetry and,
more especially, that of his versification. The metres which he
chose, because they were congenial to him and to his easy,
familiar style of poetic composition, were the octosyllabic couplet
and various forms of couplet or stanza in which a large use was
made of the anapaest. As to the former, both Swift and Prior, of
course, originally modelled their verse on that of Hudibras ;
but they avoided (Prior perhaps not quite at the outset) what
Saintsbury calls “the roughness, the curvets, the extravagances'
intentionally introduced by Butler, and aimed at ease and natural-
ness-a verse as near prose as good verse can be rather than at
sudden and surprising effects. The frequent use of the anapaest
in light measures and familiar verse was, apparently, an innovation
1 Over his attempt to imitate Chaucer, it is better to draw a veil. It may be worth
noting that his Translation of an Epitaph upon Glanville, Bishop of Rochester (ibid.
vol. II, p. 356) is an amusing effort in English hexameters.


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Prior's Prose
159
of Prior's own designing ; certainly, he domesticated it in English
verse, and thus definitely enriched English poetry by providing its
metrical instrument with a new variety of effect. Prior's use of
this variety was virtually confined to occasions
When a man's in a humour too merry for prose,
but not in an exaltation of spirit very far above it.
English
poetry, however, dealt freely with the gift, and the use of the
apapaestic measure, which he had admirably fitted to his de-
scription of the secretary's délassements, the tribulations of Cloe
and the golden mediocrity of Jinny the just, was employed for
strains of a very different intensity by the poets of the romantic
school. But, though it might be diverted from the use to which
he had put it, the best examples of light and inspiriting versifica-
tion which he produced with its aid must continue to be acknow-
ledged as masterpieces of their kind,
As a prose writer, Prior might have attained to a high rank,
had he cared to cultivate a form of composition which he reserved
for the service of the state and for familiar correspondence with
his friends. Apart from his share in The Hind and Panther
Transvers’d, of which mention has been made above, he is now
known to have been the author of prose compositions which,
though few in number, are of high merit. They include, besides
An Essay upon Learning already cited—which contains some
sensible remarks on misapplied and superfluous learning, and
some apt remarks on the art of quotation and on conversational
wit—a more striking companion Essay upon Opinion. The tone
of this essay, half gay, half cynical, is very characteristic of its
author : most men, he argues, have no opinion of their own, but,
as childless fathers did in ancient Rome, adopt that of the first
man they like; others use the simple criterion of success or failure,
as in the case (which might be illustrated from Prior's own verse)
of Orange and Monmouth. Together with these essays are pre-
served Four Dialogues of the Dead, which deserve to be reckoned
among the brightest examples of a device which maintained its
popularity from Lucian down to Lyttelton, and from Lyttelton
up to Landor. The first, between Charles the Emperor and
Clenard the Grammarian, is a novel treatment of the old theme
that greatness—and happiness with it—is relative only; the second,
between Mr John Lock and Seigneur de Montaigne, is an amusing
and extremely voluble reproduction of Montaigne's concrete
though discursive way of thinking, but can hardly have been


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intended as a serious criticism! In the third Dialogue, between
the Vicar of Bray and Sir Thomas Moor, Prior, as he had done
in the first, displays considerable historical knowledge; but the
talk of More, though it displays the main features of his noble
character, lacks playfulness of touch. The fourth, between Oliver
Cromwell and his Porter, which turns on the prophet-porter's
contention that the master was ten times madder than the man,
is hardly equal to its predecessors.
6
The spoiled child of the queen Anne fraternity of poets was
the pliant fabulist John Gay. The younger son of William Gay,
John was baptised at Barnstaple old church on 16 September
1685. The family was impoverished, and, when his mother and
father died, respectively, in 1694 and 1695, the boy was left to the
care of his uncle Thomas Gay of Barnstaple, by whom, after being
educated at the free grammar school of the town, the lad was
apprenticed to a silk mercer in London. In London, after leaving
the shop and spending some months in lounging unprofitably in
his old home, Gay found an abettor in his old school-mate Aaron
Hill, and another in a Westminster hall bookseller, who, in May
1708, brought out his first experiment in verse, an indifferent
poem, in blank verse, with the title Wine, suggested by the Cyder
of John Philips. This was followed by A Tragical Comical Farce,
said (rather doubtfully) to have been acted in 1712 near the watch
house in Covent garden, and detecting the dudes' or 'nuts' of the
time in those dread aversions of Swift's, the Mohocks. In May 1712,
Gay contributed a translation of the story of Arachne in Ovid's
Metamorphoses to The Rape of the Lock volume of Lintot's Miscel-
laneous Poems and Translations; and, five months later, he be-
came secretary or domestic steward in the house of the highminded
widow of the duke of Monmouth beheaded in 1685. In January 1713,
he inscribed to Pope, as the first of contemporary poets, his trim
georgic called Rural Sports. It is a smooth reflection of Pope's
own pastoral, saturated with the false sentiment and poetic diction,
so-called, of the period, and replete with 'feather'd choirs' and 'finny
broods' (it contains, indeed, a minute and rather grotesque descrip-
tion of fly-fishing). Swift laughed at the modern Theocritus, who
knew more about kine than Pope did, but yet could not distinguish
rye from barley. In poetic taste, Pope was accepted by Gay as an
1 The first Lord Lyttelton, as to whose History of the Life of Henry the Second see
vol. x, chap. XII, post, published the first series of Dialogues of the Dead in 1760, and
the second in 1765.


## p. 161 (#185) ############################################

161
>
John Gay
unfailing mentor, and it was by Pope's express encouragement
that, in December, he went on to supply the world with another
heroic poem in three books on that 'agreeable machine' The Fan.
After a poor and unsuccessful comedy, The Wife of Bath, Gay's
next work of any importance was his pleasing poem The Shepherd's
Week (15 April 1714), in six pastorals, with a prologue addressed
to Bolingbroke, containing familiar flattering allusions to some
of the greatest ladies of the day who might be tempted into
becoming his patronesses. These pastorals of actual, as opposed
to fashionable, rusticity, were written originally to cast ridicule
upon those of Ambrose (“Namby-Pamby ’) Philips; for Gay was a
born parodist. But they were so full of comic humour and droll
portraiture of country life that they were soon popular on their
own merits as rural poems. The grotesque passages (like those of
Greene's pastorals-) helped to conceal the flimsiness of the texture,
and the scheme thus serves as a link between the Calender of
Spenser and The Gentle Shepherd of Allan Ramsay, while the
historical method adopted specially approved itself to Crabbe.
Gay was an occasional contributor to Steele's Guardian; but his
versatility in letters did not make up to the duchess of Monmouth
for his deficiencies as domestic steward : in the summer of 1714
his position in her household came to an end, and he would have
been in a bad case but for the kindness of literary friends. Swift
procured him a secretaryship to Lord Clarendon, envoy extra-
ordinary at Hanover; and there is a curious rhymed petition to
Lord Oxford, in which Gay solicits funds to enable him to set out on
his journey. When, a few months later, queen Anne died, the em-
bassage was at an end, and Gay was called to find a brief anchorage
with Pope at Binfield. While there, he wrote, with a hint or two
from Pope and Arbuthnot, a satirical tragi-comi-pastoral farce
The What D’ye Call it, which gives us a distinct foretaste of his
clever light librettist vein, and of his happy knack for a ballad
(Black-eyed Susan and 'Twas when the Seas were roaring were
both his). It ridiculed, after the manner of The Rehearsal, a
number of plays in vogue; and, in one of the offended dramatists,
Steele, Gay lost a friend. His profits amounted to £100. In the
following year, he composed, what is probably his best remembered
poem, Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London, in
three books, an elaborate imitation and expansion of Swift's Tatler
poems The City Shower and the photographic Morning. The
1 Cf. ante, vol. II, pp. 356–7; as to the general characteristics of Elizabethan
pastoral, cf. ante, vol. iv, pp. 121–2.
11
E. L. IX.
CH. VI.


## p. 162 (#186) ############################################

162
Lesser Verse Writers
idea is good, the versification neat, and the mock heroic style
admirable, while nearly every couplet is of historic interest to the
antiquary and the student of eighteenth century street humours.
This was published by Lintot 26 January 1716, during part of
which year Gay found a temporary home with Lord Burlington in
Devonshire. A year later, Pulteney took him in his train to Aix,
and, in 1718, he was at Nuneham with Lord Harcourt. The
number of his patrons justified his collecting and publishing his
poems in 1720 in two large quarto subscription volumes, brought
out jointly by Lintot and Tonson. He realized £1000 by the
venture, which he invested in South Sea stock. For the moment,
he was the nominal holder of £20,000 worth ; but it vanished in
the crash, while he was deliberating what to do with it. Soon
afterwards, his hopes of advancement in the new reign were
dashed, while his dignity was offended by his nomination as gentle-
man usher to the princess Louisa, a child under three. In the
meantime, he had brought out his Fables (1727) in octosyllabic
verse, wherein he surveys mankind for the benefit of the
youthful duke of Cumberland. Gay had now become a more
or less regular inmate in the household of the duchess of
Queensberry, Bolingbroke's 'Sa Singularité' and Prior’s Kitty,
younger sister of Lady Jane Hyde, the “ blooming Hyde with
Eyes so Rare” of his own prologue to The Shepherd's Week. Gay
had spent a great deal of time in polishing his Fables, elaborate
trifles, the publication of which by Tonson had been still further
delayed by costly expenditure on plates after Kent and Wootton.
Ambling, colloquial and, occasionally, slipshod, like the bard
himself, it cannot be said Gay's Fables maintain an inordinately
high standard ; yet their novelty and glossy ease won them an
assured success which lasted for a hundred years before it began
to wane. Apart from one or two later fables by Cowper and by
Northcote, they are still, probably, the best that have been written
in English verse : nor would it be easy for any fabulist to better
the narrative of
The hare who in a civil way
Complied with everything like Gay,
a charming fabliau with a touch of personal application—disil-
lusion, for the most part-quite in the manner of the early masters.
Gay’s Fables suffer, it is true, from juxtaposition with the
terse masterpieces of La Fontaine. Compared with the immortal
bonhomme, Gay took but little trouble with his work. The fables


## p. 163 (#187) ############################################

The Beggar's Opera
163
were applauded; but the draftsman of the illustrations, it is said,
had the lion's share of the profit. A second set, adding sixteen to
the original fifty, appeared in 1738.
Whenever he was off duty with the Queensberrys, Gay-
always 'inoffensive'-sought the society of Congreve, Prior,
Arbuthnot and, above all, of Swift. To Swift's visit to England in
1736 was, in part, due Gay's next venture The Beggar's Opera,
which-unless an exception be made in favour of Lillo's London
Merchant (1731)-may be described as the first popular success of
the modern English stage? It ran for the unprecedented, though
not uninterrupted, space of sixty-two days, beginning 29 January
1728, and continued a triumphant career in Bath, Bristol and
other towns in the country, and even in the colonies. Like not a
few jeux d'esprit of the day, it sprang from a saying of Swift, who
observed to Gay that a Newgate pastoral might make an odd
pretty sort of thing'; and Gay wrote most of it at Twickenham
when in the same house with Pope and Swift, whose opinion was
that it was either very bad or very good. As often in comic opera,
it was one of the numbers,
O ponder well! be not severe
that turned the scale and made the play an irresistible success, out
of which Gay gleaned about £800.
Polly became the town darling, her songs were painted on fans
and the actress who performed the part captured a duke for life.
The factions of the day recognised Walpole (who led the applause
on the first night) and Townshend in Peachum and Lockit.
The Beggar's Opera, it was said, made Gay rich, and Rich (the
manager) gay. Its literary value is very small, except historically
as a link between the masque and the vaudeville. For the time,
it superseded French and Italian opera, and made a new opening
for English lyric on the stage. A sequel was prohibited by the
lord chamberlain, and was promptly printed, the fortunate author
making £1200 by Polly (as it was called), to which the duchess of
Marlborough contributed £100 for a single copy.
Gay's later years were uneventfully spent in the house of his
faithful patrons the duke and duchess of Queensberry, at Amesbury
and at Burlington gardens. The duchess and Gay wrote some
amusing joint letters to Swift, who entered into the correspondence
with zest, beginning his reply low on the page as a mark of respect
-receiving her grace, as it were, at the bottom of the stairs. Yet
1 For a retrospective account of the progress of the drama in England, and the
place occupied in it by The Beggar's Opera, see vol, xi, post.
11--2


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164
Lesser Verse Writers
Swift's fondness for Gay himself was genuine, as may be discerned
in more than one touching letter. The duchess looked after the
gentle parasite's little comforts, and kept his money under lock
and key, while the duke invested his savings for him, so that when
he died, intestate, about £6000, or thereabouts, was left to be
divided between his sisters. After an idle life which, on the
whole, notwithstanding his unmanly repining, was one in which
good fortune preponderated, Gay died suddenly, of inflammatory
fever, on 4 December 1732. He was interred with much pomp
in Westminster abbey, where an imposing monument, erected by
the unwearying duke and duchess, bears, together with Pope's,
the light-minded poet's own characteristic epitaph
Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, and now I know it.
His easy-going, affectionate disposition made Gay a general
favourite, even though, as Johnson observed, the wits regarded
him rather as a playfellow than a partner. He was utterly devoid
of energy ; and though, in complaining of his treatment by the
court, he laments ‘My hard fate! I must get nothing, write for or
against,' it is very far from clear what duties he would have been
fit to discharge, had they been imposed upon him. He was, in
truth, predestined on every account, in Pope's phrase, to 'die
unpension’d with a hundred friends. '
Gay's longer poems, with the exception of The Shepherd's
Week and Trivia, are dead. Of the shorter, some of the eclogues,
such as The Birth of the Squire, The Toilette, The Tea-Table and
The Funeral, contain many witty passages; and the epistles are
all interesting, especially Mr Pope's Welcome from Greece, the
ottava rima of which has a spontaneous flash and felicity. Written
on the completion of Pope's translation of The Iliad, it represents
all the poet's friends as gathering to meet him on his return to
town, each being characterised in one or two apt lines, or by a brief
pert epithet, in the happiest possible manner. Among the mis-
cellaneous pieces which deserve to escape neglect is the sprightly
Ladies' Petition to the Honourable the House of Commons, in
which the maids of Exeter protest against their loss of the chance
of marriage through the interloping competition of widows? .
6
&
1 G. F. Underhill calls this poem 'the least doubtful piece' in the collection known
as Gay’s Chair, a little volume published in 1820, with a life of Gay, by his nephew,
Joseph Baller. There seems good reason to doubt the authenticity of some of the
pieces there attributed to Gay; though the chair, in whose secret drawer they were
found, has & well-authenticated history.


## p. 165 (#189) ############################################

6
Ambrose Philips
165
Gay's parodies of Ambrose Philips in The Shepherd's Week
(which pleased by the very quality they were intended to ridicule)
were suborned by Pope, and the quarrel was accentuated by the
fact that Ambrose not only belonged to the rival or whig faction
(he was secretary of the Hanover club in 1714) but was also a friend
and adherent of Addison. A native of the midlands, Ambrose
Philips (born in 1675) was educated at Shrewsbury and St John's
college, Cambridge (1693–6), of which he was fellow from 1699 to
1708. At Cambridge, he began writing English verse. In 1709,
he abridged Hacket's wellknown Life of Archbishop Williams.
On 9 March of the same year, he addressed, from Copenhagen, his
Epistle to the Earl of Dorset, Prior's early patron. It was published
by Steele in The Tatler and praised as a great 'winter-piece. '
His Pastorals appeared in the following autumn in Tonson's
Miscellany, his being the first, and Pope's the last, in this same
volume. In The Guardian", Ambrose was thoughtlessly praised by
Thomas Tickell as the only worthy successor of Spenser, Pope being
completely ignored. Philips had also been cordially applauded in
The Spectator for his artless type of eclogue. Pretending to criticise
the rival pastorals and compare them, Pope, in an anonymous con-
tribution to The Guardian”, gave the preference to Philips, but
quoted all his worst passages as his best, and placed by the side of
them his own finest lines, which, he says, want rusticity, and often
deviate into downright poetry. The satire stung, as was intended,
and Philips bought a rod and hung it up at a popular coffeehouse
(Button's) in order to carry out his threatened chastisement of
Pope in public. The encounter was averted by Pope's prudence.
To keep up the reciprocation of malevolence, Pope scoffed at
Philips in The Dunciad and elsewhere as one of Curll's authors,
'a Pindaric writer in red stockings. ' Philips played his cards
sufficiently well to extract some very fair Irish sinecures from the
dominant whig party, but he did not live to enjoy them. The
poems of Philips which please best, says Johnson, are those
which from Pope or Pope's adherents procured him the name of
Namby-Pamby, the poems of short lines by which he paid his
court to all ages and characters, from Walpole, the steerer of the
realm, to Miss Pulteney in the nursery. ' Henry Carey, the
author of Sally in our Ally, mocked Philips under this name, and
Swift called his pretty waxworks 'little flams. ' But the machina-
tions of Pope managed to raise a perfect storm of ridicule, which,
6
· Nos. 22, 23, 30, and 32.
2 No. 40.


## p. 166 (#190) ############################################

166
Lesser Verse Writers
in numberless parodies and broadsides, broke over the new
versification, as it was called. The line generally consists of three
trochees, followed by an extra-stressed monosyllabic foot. Many
critics have pronounced these sweetmeats delightful, though
cloying; and, it must be granted, in spite of ridicule, that Philips
had a genuine sensibility and a kindness for the elder music in
English poetry which is to his credit and which his age, for the
most part, ignored. In 1723, he brought out A Collection of old
Ballads, including Robin Hood, Johnny Armstrong and the famous
Children in the Wood, much belauded by Addison. The ballads
are, in the main, bad versions derived from current broadsides ;
but the collection, such as it was, was one of the earliest of its kind.
His only play of any note, The Distressed Mother, was derived
immediately from Racine's Andromaque. He died in Hanson
street, London, on 18 June 1749. His poems, with a dedication
to the duke of Newcastle, had been published in the year before
his death.
Thomas Parnell is, probably, now less remembered for his verse
than because of the fact that his life was written by Goldsmith
and Johnson, and that from his younger brother was descended
Charles Stewart Parnell. The son of a commonwealth's man, who,
at the restoration, left Congleton in Cheshire, where the family
had been long established and, settling in Ireland, purchased an
estate which, together with his land in Cheshire, was afterwards
owned by the poet, Thomas Parnell was born at Dublin in 1679.
In 1693, he was admitted at Trinity college, Dublin, where in 1700
he proceeded M. A. , and was ordained deacon under an episcopal
dispensation on the score of age. Swift's friend Ashe, bishop of
Clogher, named him archdeacon of that see in 1706, an appointment
followed by his marriage to Anne, daughter of Thomas Minchin of
Tipperary. Her death in 1711 seems to have unsteadied the young
archdeacon's mind. Swift and Stella conceived a friendliness for
the bereaved poet, who was taken to sup with Bolingbroke and was
introduced to the lord treasurer (Oxford). By this time, he had
changed his political vesture, and, in April 1713, he wrote a Poem
on Queen Anne's Peace. About this time, he became an intimate
of the Scriblerus club and of Pope, who designed him to be one
of 'the children of Homer. ' Swift whipped up his Irish friends
to procure Parnell a prebend. In May 1716, archbishop King
presented the poet with the vicarage of Finglass, worth over
£100 a year. Meanwhile, he had become inseparable from Pope


## p. 167 (#191) ############################################

Thomas. Parnell
167
at Binfield and the Bath, and he retained his position in the
Scriblerus circle to the last. He died suddenly at Chester (his
end being hastened by habitual intemperance)' on his way to
Ireland in October 1718. His publications during his lifetime
had been in periodicals; but he left many unprinted compositions,
of which those which Pope thought best were selected by him
and dedicated to the earl of Oxford, who wrote appreciatively
of the Noctes he had spent in the company of Pope, Swift,
Parnell and the doctor. Johnson, in conversation, deplored that
Goldsmith's Life of the poet was so thin; but he made his own
sketch an opportunity for a most splendid eulogy of Goldsmith's
ease and versatility. Goldsmith wrote a fair epitaph, which was
eclipsed by Johnson’s? .
Goldsmith, Collins and Blair show signs of having studied
Parnell, whose own work, apart from the manifest impress of Pope
and Swift, was influenced, it is thought, to some extent, by Milton.
Apart from his contribution to Pope's Homer, which took the
form of a learned essay in the taste of the time on 'The Life,
Writings and Learnings of Homer,' and a few imitative poems,
Parnell did not write anything of importance. Pope was glad of
his aid at the time, but, after Parnell's death, expressed a hope
that his essay might be made 'less defective. ' His poems, gene-
rally in heroic measure, run smoothly. The Flies, an Eclogue,
has merit as a picture. An Elegy to an old Beauty enjoys an
adventitious fame. After ridiculing the lady's strenuous efforts at
resisting the ravages of time, Parnell goes on to explain how the
daughter Fanny has acquired her mother's old artifices, with
interest:
And all that's madly wild, or oddly gay
We call it only pretty Fanny's way.
A Nightpiece on Death is an early example of a convention which
reached its acme with Gray's Elegy: A Hymn to Contentment
is another fashionable exercise on the theme of Plantin, Desportes,
Wotton and Pomfret, written in easy flowing octosyllabics. All
these copies of verse—the last and most meritorious of which as
a model, and greatly admired during the age of Johnson, is The
Hermit-were published posthumously in Poems on Several
1 Hearne says he was undoubtedly killed by the immoderate drinking of 'mild
ale. '
? Qui sacerdos pariter et poeta, utrasque partes ita implevit, ut neque sacerdoti
suavitas poetae, nec poetae sacerdotis sanctitas, deesset.
3 Prompted by contrariness of his own or by Johnson's dislike of Gray, Goldsmith
used to say that he preferred Parnell's Nightpiece greatly to the Elegy.


## p. 168 (#192) ############################################

168
Lesser Verse Writers
! !
1
Occasions, issued by the poet's friend, corrector and patron
Pope, in December 1721. The only separate volume issued
previously by Parnell was his Homer's Battle of the Frogs and
Mice with the Remarks of Zoilus (May 1717), satirising two
objects of Pope's aversion, Theobald and Dennis. His scholar-
ship had been of material service to Pope as translator, apart
from his Introductory Essay on Homer (1715), which Pope, as
usual, exalted in public and deplored in private.
a
Anne, daughter of Sir William Kingsmill of Sidmonton, was born
in April 1661, became maid of honour to queen Mary of Modena
and was a friend of Anne Killigrew, who had kindred tastes; but,
in 1684, she abandoned her court position and married colonel
Heneage Finch, afterwards earl of Winchilsea. In 1690, Ardelia
(her name as authoress) settled at beautiful Eastwell and began
to write verses for circulation among her friends, the Thynnes,
Tuftons, Twysdens and other Kentish people of distinction. She
died in Cleveland row and was buried at Eastwell in August
1720. She had adopted the practice of writing,
Betray'd by solitude to try
Amusements which the prosperous fly,
and soon showed that she had an eye for observing country scenes
and that she loved them for their own sake. She began by trans-
lations from French and Italian, and went on with blank verse
dramas after the model of the virtuous and matchless Orinda;
she wrote songs after Prior, pindarics after Cowley and fables
after La Fontaine. In 1713, she was persuaded to publish a
selection of her poems. She left a large number of further
poems in two manuscript volumes, one folio, the other octavo;
these were edited by Myra Reynolds in 1903 and cannot fairly
be said to have enhanced Lady Winchilsea's reputation. It had
hitherto mainly depended on the discovery by Wordsworth that
there were affinities with his own predominant mood in a few of
her poems of 1713, especially the sentimental and meditative
soliloquy entitled A Nocturnal Reverie, an enunciation of rural
charms in which almost every other line begins with the word
'when, while the last fifty verses conclude with the following
two couplets :
In such a Night let Me abroad remain,
Till Morning breaks, and All's confus'd again;
Our Cares, our Toils, our Clamours are renew'd,
Or Pleasures, seldom reach'd, again pursu'd.


## p. 169 (#193) ############################################

Lady Winchilsea
169
a
in
A few other poems, such as an ode To the Nightingale, sustain
the same kind of impression, which gained indefinitely from the
twilight of Eastwell as well as from the rarity of Ardelia's slim
volume. Wordsworth's discovery was taken up with enthusiasm by
Matthew Arnold, Edmund Gosse and others, and Lady Winchilsea
was cited as a rara avis, a woodlark among those town sparrows,
the best accredited poets of the days of queen Anne. To Pope, Gray
and Prior, she had just seemed a female wit, with a stray predilection,
and some genuine taste, for riming. The appearance of her poems
in bulk certainly strengthens the idea that her forte was gay and
complimentary verse of the occasional order, and that she ought to
rank not as a rival of Dyer and Collins, but as an imitator of Prior
and a precursor of Gay, Cowper and Northcote. Her light verse,
upon which she bestowed much pains, was based upon the miscel-
lany poems of Dorset, Sedley and their queen Anne successors.
Her verses To Mr F now Earl of w, written in 1689, in an
886886 stanza, are among the best of their kind at that date. Her
Fanscombe Barn, with its jolly beggars, is a tolerable parody of
the Miltonic (written a few years after The Splendid Shilling);
but her 'Pindaricks, including The Spleen, issued separately
in a miscellany of 1701, as well as in the volume of 1713, are
unbearable. The Spleen contains the lines
Now the jonquille o’ercomes the feeble brain,
We faint beneath the Aromatick Pain.
The adjective was borrowed from Dryden's Annus Mirabilis ; the
phrase was appropriated by Pope in his Essay on Man, and the
association of the odour of the jonquil with delicious pain by
Shelley (Epipsychidion). Two of Lady Winchilsea's poems, The
Sigh and To Mr Jervas (the famous portrait painter and translator
of Don Quixote), were printed in Steele’s Miscellany (1714), her
Lines to Prior in Prior's Miscellaneous Works; To Mr Pope in
the early collected editions of Pope.
A writer similar in calibre to Lady Winchilsea and, like her,
destined to be raised too high by disproportioned praise, is John
Pomfret, son of a vicar of Luton, whose studies were carried on at
Bedford and at Queens' college, Cambridge (where he graduated
M. A. in 1688). His elegy upon the death of queen Mary was the
prelude to his taking orders and was soon rewarded by two con-
siderable Bedfordshire rectories. He was a good early example of
the cultivated, poetizing, archaeologizing, chess-playing divines of
the eighteenth century. In 1699, he gave to the world his Poems


## p. 170 (#194) ############################################

170
Lesser Verse Writers
on Several Occasions, the sale of which was stimulated next year
when he issued anonymously The Choice: A Poem written by a
Person of Quality. The poem obtained adventitious fame. At first,
it was held to have been composed by a personage of distinction.
Then, it was said to have been modelled upon a study of Sir William
Temple's philosophic retirement among his peaches at Sheen. And
the public was still more interested when it learned that the poet's
frankly expressed aspiration to have no wife' had displeased the
bishop of London (Compton), to whom he had been recommended for
preferment. As a matter of fact, he married and had a son, shortly
before his death, at thirty-five, in 1702. The Choice was no more and
no less than a familiar exercise, adapted to the taste of the time, of
the old Bonheur de ce Monde theme, sung to death by the French
poets, and best known to us in the poems of Wotton and Samuel
Rogers (‘Mine be a cot'). The versification will strike no one today as
being (that which the theme demands) exceptionally neat; and the
best modern anthologists ignore the poem. But, when the scheme for
the Lives of the Poets was submitted by the booksellers to Johnson,
the name of Pomfret (together with three others) was added by his
advice, chiefly, it seems, on the ground of Pomfret's ineradicable
popularity (half a century later, Robert Southey is found solemnly
asking 'Why is Pomfret's “ Choice” the most popular poem in the
language? ').