MATTHEW PRIOR-DIPLOMATIST AND POET

I. Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission on the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Bath preserved at Longleat, Wiltshire. Prior Papers. Vol. III. London: Wyman. 1908. 2. Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission on the Manuscripts of the Duke of Portland at Welbeck. Vol. V.

3. 'Dialogues of the Dead,' and other works in prose and verse. By MATTHEW PRIOR. The Text edited by A. R. WALLER, M.A. Two vols. Cambridge: University Press. 1905, 1907.

4. The Cambridge History of English Literature. Vol. IX. Cambridge University Press. 1912.

IN one many sprechen the charge of being

one of his many suggestive speeches Lord Morley of Black

incapable men of affairs. Matthew Prior is a case in point. He has been long regarded as one of the chief poets of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and, a few years ago, the University of Cambridge issued a final edition of his works, composed, for the most part, of his poems. Immense pains have been taken with this edition, and the archives of Longleat have not been searched in vain for new material, both in verse and in prose. No immortal could have had more efficient editorial labour bestowed on him; corrections and new readings have been noted; and good-natured Mat Prioras his contemporaries called him-is academically canonised. No one would probably have been more amused than he at this care of his verse, for his primary object in life was to become a successful and well-paid official. Place and pay were uppermost-not in any sordid or dishonourable sense-in his thoughts, and he wrote poetry only for a pastime or to help him to rise in the world.

Prior did not hesitate to call himself a professed panegyric ' poet.' To fill this métier was an easy task for one whose expression flowed in couplets, and who had no difficulty in breaking off in the middle of a letter and in concluding it with a spontaneous rhyme. But clever, ingenious, sometimes even brilliant, as Prior was, delightful as was the subdued and kindly gaiety of his temperament, and easy as was the flow of his verse, he was more remarkable as a man of affairs than as a poet. From first to last he was hampered in his

career by his humble birth and by insufficient means, and from first to last one of his chief objects in writing verse was to make good, by the exercise of an agreeable talent, his want of rank and fortune. Prior's muse was always at his service, whether to please monarchs or to conciliate noblemen. During the anxious years which he passed at the Hague, uncertain of his future, as hardly pressed for cash as the Treasury at home, constantly urging his official friends at Whitehall to see that his bills of extraordinaries' received attention, he wrote -in 1695-both the Long Ode on Queen Mary's Death, and the Ballad on the Taking of Namur. The times had ceased to be suitable for such compositions. Prior was consequently the last of the panegyric poets, of whom Cartwright was the most prolific. William III. was too much a man to care for a Carmen Seculare, and Queen Anne was too stupid to appreciate even fulsome compliments in a neatly turned ode. No writer in his senses would have addressed a stanza to any one of the Georges.

Prior's work in this form came to a curiously dramatic conclusion. Staying in Paris in 1714 and hoping that the result of his labours, which had ended in the Peace of Utrecht, would further advance his fortunes, he bethought him that he would write some verses complimentary to the Queen, and, by asking in them for her portrait, please her vanity and improve his position:

The Train of Equipage and Pomp of State,

The shining sideboard, and the burnished Plate,
Let other Ministers, Great Anne, require;
And partial fall thy Gift to their desire.
To the fair Portrait of my Sov'reign Dame,
To that alone, eternal be my claim.

'My bright Defender, and my dread Delight,
If ever I found favour in thy sight;
If all the pains that for thy Britain's sake
My past has took, or future Life may take,
Be grateful to my Queen, permit my Prayer,
And with this Gift reward my total care.'

There were more lines in the same strain; but, even while he wrote, news of the Queen's death arrived, and his verses, like his public career at a later date, came to an abrupt and uncompleted end.

Prior had no need to seek favours from William III. by means of complimentary verses, for his official capabilities were sufficient to gain his Sovereign's approval. The fact of this approval, of his promotion on more than one occasion by a master who demanded efficiency in his subordinates—and not the least the cordial terms on which he always stood with the Earl of Portland-is the best proof of Prior's capacity as a man of affairs. Had the life of William been prolonged, the public career of Prior might have been more fortunate. He fell because he was too efficient a public servant, too zealous in the interests of the Ministers of the day. He lived in an age when what we should now call the permanent civil servant shared, to some extent, in the success or failure of political leaders, and was sufficiently identified with them to be affected by their good or bad fortune. Prior acquitted himself as well in the service of Harley and Bolingbroke over the Treaty of Utrecht at the end of his career, as he did at the Hague, at Ryswyck, and at Paris, in that of William III., at its commencement. Whilst his earlier zeal advanced him in the diplomatic service, his later energy finally landed him in prison, and ended his public career. Throughout these years of responsibility and anxiety, Prior's facility in the agreeable art of verse-making never forsook him. It was part of his nature, and the older he grew the more skilful he became. But he who was a master of expression had little to express; amiable, gay, witty, and intelligent, he was as incapable of deep emotion as of irradiating thought.

If, however, too much attention has been paid to Prior as a poet-and one has only to read Johnson's Introduction to his works to see how little a clear-headed critic could find to say for him in this capacity-the importance and interest of his career as a whole have never been sufficiently appreciated. His influence on the development of the foreign policy of England was considerable, and from his correspondence now rendered available, one is able to perceive the value of his intelligence and tact in diplomatic negotiations. The bases of the two international engagements which are known in history as the Treaty of Ryswyck and the Treaty of Utrecht were completed in private, and, in the settlement of the ' preliminaries' of each, Prior had a large share. 'There begins now,' he wrote to the Earl of Dorset, ' to be some real appearance of a treaty. The

preliminary points are pretty well agreed, and the place will 'soon be named.' Not long after this letter was written Prior visited London obviously for the purpose of giving personal information to the King, whose policy was that stated by Prior at the end of 1696 as his own personal view:

'the success of the whole affair will depend upon the resolutions of our Parliament. France will certainly give more or less in the treaty as the people of England will proportionately give towards carrying on the war in case those offers miscarry; and however great our poverty is we must hide it, if possible, from the enemy.'

This resolution, to proceed with the war and to hide the financial straits of the English Treasury, was adhered to, and the result was a treaty extraordinarily favourable to the parties to the Grand Alliance. The appointment as Chief Secretary to the Lords Justices in Ireland in the summer of 1697 was the King's reward to Prior for his services at the Hague. But the long-drawn negotiations prevented him from taking up the post in person, and in December of the same year the King sent him with Lord Portland to Paris. He thus lost the enjoyment of a post which, being lucrative and easy, was the object of his immediate desire-' we shall get our thousand pound a year in Ireland, and I shall come once or 'twice a year to England, which, my dear Master, are no light 'considerations.'

Though to the end of his life interested in public affairs, Prior was never ambitious, never anxious for power, and always satisfied with subordinate position; for outward show or influence he cared not at all. At the end of 1698, when he had in fact been the representative of Great Britain at Paris, his chief wish was to return to England.

'I have played the minister here in my Lord Jersey's absence, and, now he is returned, we are preparing for his entry, so I am to appear with him as I did with my Lord Portland, in a new gaudy coat and with an expensive equipage. I must own to Your Lordship I am weary of this dancing on the high rope in spangled breeches, and if my Lord Jersey be Secretary of State (as it is thought he may be in some time), I will endeavour to get home and seat myself in a desk in his office, for I had rather be Matt Prior near my dear Lord Dorset than Monsieur l'Envoyé in any Court in Christendom.'

Affluence and congenial society were the objects which Prior chiefly prized, and it was the very irony of fate that his faithfulness in official service, his power of observation, and

his capacity of expression lessened his means for the enjoyment of the form of life which was most suited to his temperament. At the Hague and at Paris Prior was as much bored as amused, and his incapacity for thrift, as well as the shortness of funds in the Treasury, kept him continually in financial difficulties, even during the year 1698 when he was the representative of Great Britain at the French capital with a larger, if irregularly paid, salary.

With his sense of humour, his not unkindly cynicism, and his contempt for show, Prior could not fail to see the worst side of life at the Court of Louis XIV. The Roi Soleil was now in his decline; he was ruled by Madame de Maintenon; he was surrounded by scheming and jealous courtiers; the welfare of the French people was lost sight of in an atmosphere of personal ambition and aggrandisement. And as a foil to the showy glories of the Court of the King of France, there was the shabby royalty of the Stuart circle. 'King James looks 'mighty old and worn, and stoops in his shoulders; the Queen 'looks ill and melancholy; their equipage is mighty ragged, ' and their horses are all as lean as Sancho's.' The position of the exiled rulers-as described by Prior-was unhappy and pitiable. Sovereigns without a kingdom, they were willing but almost afraid to plot against the existing régime. At once impoverished, powerless and ambitious, they were buoyed up by news from their English partisans, and by the personal favours of Louis and his courtiers, who, in reality, only regarded them as pawns in the political game. Things go in relation 'to us as they used to do,' wrote Prior, in the autumn of 1698; they are civil to us, and hate us, and they are civil to King 'James and despise him.' Such were the closing scenes of the Stuart dynasty as depicted for us by Prior. James and his Queen were invited to fêtes at Versailles and to hunts at Compiègne, but they were powerless and poverty-stricken, surrounded by equally poor and equally dissatisfied followers.

The descriptions which Prior sends to his English correspondents of Louis and his entourage are not more complimentary than his accounts of the exiles:

'Madame de Maintenon governs him as absolutely as Roxalana did Solyman. He lives at Marly like an Eastern monarch, making waterworks and planting melons, and leaves his bashas to ruin the land, provided they are constant in bringing in their tribute,'