lated by a woman who had been his servant. Of this propensity to sordid converse I have seen an account so seriously ridiculous, that it seems to deserve insertion*. "I have been assured that Prior, after having spent the evening with Ox"ford, Bolingbroke, Pope, and Swift, would go and smoke a pipe, and "drink a bottle of ale, with a common soldier and his wife, in Long-Acre, "before he went to bed; not from any remains of the lowness of his original, "as one said, but, I suppose, that his faculties, "Strain'd to the height, "In that celestial colloquy sublime, "Dazzled and spent, sunk down, and sought repair.' Poor Prior, why was he so strained, and in such want of repair, after a conversation with men, not, in the opinion of the world, much wiser than himself? But such are the conceits of speculatists, who strain their faculties to find in a mine what lies upon the surface. His opinions, so far as the means of judging are left us, seem to have been right; but his life was, it seems, irregular, negligent, and sensual. PRIOR has written with great variety, and his variety has made him popular. He has tried all styles from the grotesque to the solemn, and has not so failed in any as to incur derision or disgrace. His works may be distinctly considered as comprising Tales, Love-verses, Occasional Poems, Alma, and Solomon. His Tales have obtained general approbation, being written with great familiarity and great spriteliness; the language is easy, but seldom gross, and the numbers smooth, without appearance of care. Of these tales there are only four. The Ladle, which is introduced by a Preface, neither necessary nor pleasing, neither grave nor merry. Paulo Purganti; which has likewise a Preface, but of more value than the Tale. Hans Carvel, not over decent; and Protogenes and Apelles, an old story, mingled, by an affectation not disagreeable, with modern images. The Young Gentleman in Love has hardly a just claim to the title of a Tale. I know not whether he be the original author of any Tale which he has given us." The adventure of Hans Carvel has passed through many successions of merry wits; for it is to be found in Aricsto's Satires, and is perhaps yet older. But the merit of such stories is the art of telling them.. In his Amorous Effusions he is less happy; for they are not dictated by nature or by passion, and have neither gallantry nor tenderness. They have the coldness of Cowley, without his wit, the dull exercises of a skilful versifier, resolved at all adventures to write something about Chloe, and trying to Richardfoniana. to be amorous by dint of study. His fictions therefore are mythological. Venus, after the example of the Greek Epigram, asks when she was seen naked and bathing. Then Cupid is mistaken; then Cupid is disarmed; then he loses his darts to Ganymede; then Jupiter sends him a summons by Mercury. Then Chloe goes a-hunting, with an ivory quiver graceful at her side; Diana mistakes her for one of her nymphs, and Cupid laughs at the blunder. All this is surely despicable; and even when he tries to act the lover, without the help of gods and goddesses, his thoughts are unaffecting or remote. He talks not like a man of this world." The greatest of all his amorous essays is Henry and Emma; a dull and tedious dialogue, which excites neither esteem for the man, nor tenderness for the woman. The example of Emma, who resolves to follow an outlawed murderer wherever fear and guilt shall drive him, deserves no imitation; and the experiment by which Henry tries the lady's constancy is such as must end either in infamy to her, or in disappointment to himself. His occasional poems necessarily lost part of their value, as their occasions, being less remembered, raised less emotion. Some of them, however, are preserved by their inherent excellence. The burlesque of Boileau's Ode on Namur has, in some parts, such airiness and levity, as will always procure it readers, even among those who cannot compare it with the original. The Epistle to Boileau is not so happy. The Poems to the King are now perused only by young students, who read merely that they may learn to write; and of the Carmen Seculare, I cannot but suspect that I might praise or censure it by caprice, without danger of detection; for who can be supposed to have laboured through ic? Yet the time has been when this neglected work was so popular, that it was translated into Latin by no common master. His poem on the battle of Ramillies is necessarily tedious by the form of the stanza: an uniform mass of ten lines, thirty-five times repeated, inconsequential and slightly connected, must weary both the ear and the understanding. His imitation of Spencer, which consists principally in Iween and I weet, without exclusion of later modes of speech, makes his poem neither ancient nor modern. His mention of Mars and Bellona, and his comparison of Marlborough to the Eagle that bears the thunder of Jupiter, are all puerile and unaffecting; and yet more despicable is the long tale told by Lewis, in his despair, of Brute and Treynovant, and the teeth of Cadmus, with his similies of the raven and cagle, and wolf and lion. By the help of such easy fictions, and vulgar topicks, without acquaintance with life, and without knowledge of art or nature, a poem of any length, cold and lifeless like this, may be easily written on any subject. In his epilogues to Phedra and to Lucius, he is very happily facetious; but in the Prologue before the Queen, the pedant has found his way, with Minerva, Perseus, and Andromeda. Vol. I. Y Y His His epigrams and lighter pieces are, like those of others, sometimes elegant, sometimes trifling, and sometimes dull; among the best are the Camelion and the epitaph on John and Joan. Scarcely any one of our poets has written so much and translated so little the version of Callimachus is sufficiently licentious; the paraphrase on St. Paul's Exhortation to Charity is eminently beautiful. Alma is written in professed imitation of Hudibras, and has at least one ac cidental resemblance: Hudibras wants a plan, because it is left imperfect; Alma is imperfect, because it seems never to have had a plan. Prior appears not to have proposed to himself any drift or design, but to have written the casual dictates of the present moment. What Horace said when he imitated Lucilius might be said of Butler by Prior, his numbers were not smooth or neát: Prior excelled him in versification; but he was, like Horace, inventore minor; he had not Butler's exuberance of matter and variety of illustration. The spangles of wit which he could afford, he knew how to polish; but he wanted the bullion of his master. Butler pours out a negligent profusion, certain of the weight, but careless of the stamp. Prior has comparatively little, but with that little he makes a fine shew. Alma has many admirers, and was the only piece among Prior's works of which Pope said he should wish to be the author. Solomon is the work to which he entrusted the protection of his name, and which he expected succeeding ages to regard with veneration. His affection was natural; it had undoubtedly been written with great labour; and who is willing to think that he has been labouring in vain? He had infused into it much knowledge and much thought; had often polished it to ele gance, often dignified it with splendour, and sometimes heightened it to sublimity he perceived in it many excellences, and did not discover that it wanted that without which all others are of small avail, the power of engaging attention and alluring curiosity. Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults; negligences or errors are single and local, but tediousness pervades the whole; other faults are censured and forgotten, but the power of tediousness propagates itself. He that is weary the first hour is more weary the second; as bodies forced into motion, contrary to their tendency, pass more and more slowly through every successive interval of space. Unhappily this pernicious failure is that which an author is least able to discover. We are seldom tiresome to ourselves ; and the act of composition fills and delights the mind with change of languaget and succession of imagest every couplet when produced is new, and novelty is: the great source ef pleasure. Perhaps no man ever thought a line superfluous when he first wrote it, or contracted his work till his ebullitions of invention had subsided. And even if he should controui his desire of immediate renown, and keeep his work work nine years unpublished, he will be still the author, and still in danger. of deceiving himself: and if he consults his friends, he will probably find men who have more kindness than judgement, or more fear to offend than desire to instruct. The tediousness of this poem proceeds net from the uniformity of the subject, for it is sufficiently diversified, but from the continued tenour of the narration; in which Solomon relates the successive vicissitudes of his own mind, without the intervention of any other speaker, or the mention of any other agent, unless it be Abra; the reader is only to learn what he thought, and to be told that he thought wrong. The event of every experiment is foreseen, and therefore the process is not much regarded. Yet the work is far from deserving to be neglected. He that shall peruse it will be able to mark many passages, to which he may recur for instruction or delight: many from which the poet may learn to write, and the philosopher to reason. If Prior's poetry be generally considered, his praise will be that of correctness and industry, rather than of compass of comprehension, or activity of fancy. He never made any effort of invention: his greater pieces are only tissues of common thoughts; and his smaller, which consist of light images or single conceits, are not always his own. I have traced him amongst the French epigrammatists, and have been informed that he poached for prey among obscure authors. The Thief and Cordelier is, I suppose, generally considered as an original production; with how much justice this Epigram may tell, which was written by Georgius Sabinus, a poet now little known or read, though once the friend of Luther and Melancthon... De Sacerdote Furem consolante. Quidam sacrificus furen comitatus euntem What he has valuable he owes to his diligence and his judgment. His diligence has justly placed him amongst the most correct of the English poets; and he was one of the first that resolutely endeavoured at correctness. He never sacrifices accuracy to haste, nor indulges himself in contemptuous negligence, or impatient idleness; he has no careless lines, or entangled sentiments; his words are nicely selected, and his thoughts fully expanded. If this part of his character suffers any, abatement, it must be from the disproportion Y y 2 portion of his rhymes, which have not always sufficient consonance, and from the admission of broken lines into his Solomon; but perhaps he thought, like Cowley, that hemistichs ought to be admitted into heroic poetry. He had apparently such rectitude of judgement as secured him from every thing that approached to the ridiculous or absurd; but as laws operate in civil agency not to the excitement of virtue, but the expresssion of wickedness, so judgement in the operations of intellect can hinder faults, but not produce excellence. Prior is never low, nor very often sublime. It is said by Longinus of Euripides, that he forces himself sometimes into grandeur by violence of effort, as the lion kindles his fury by the lashes of his own tail. What ever Prior obtains above mediocrity seems the effort of struggle and of toil. He has many vigorous but few happy lines; he has every thing by purchase and nothing by gift; he had no nightly visitations of the Muse, no infusions of sentiment or felicities of fancy. His diction, however, is more his own than that of any among the suc cessors of Dryden; he borrows no lucky turns, or commodious modes of language from his predecessors. His phrases are original, but they are sometimes hersh; as he inherited no elegances, none has he bequeathed. His expression has every mark of laborious study: the line seldom seems to have been formed at once; the words did not come till they were called, and were then put by constraint into their places, where they do duty, but do it sullenly. In his greater compositions there may be found more rigid stateli ness than graceful dignity. Of versification he was not negligent: what he received from Dryden he did not lose; neither did he increase the difficulty of writing by unnecessary severity, but uses Triplets and Alexandrines without scruple. In his preface to Solomon he proposes some improvements, by extending the sense from one couplet to another, with a variety of pauses. This he has attempted; but without success; his interrupted lines are unpleasing, and his sense as less distinct is less striking. He has altered the stanza of Spenser, as a house is altered by building another in its place of a different form. With how little resemblance he has formed his new stanza to that of his master, these speciments will shew. SPENSER, She flying fast from heaven's hated face, From living eyes her open shame to hide, Did in that castle afterwards abide, To rest themselves, and weary powers repair, Where store they found of all, that dainty was and rare. |