Battle of the Boyne. After a while, suddenly reverting to the epistolary style, he exclaims :-- Stop! stop, brave Prince! On which his correspondent is supposed to exclaim :— "What! does your Muse, sir, faint? Proceed, pursue his conquests." "Faith! I can't," says the poet, and breaking off his fragment, prefers to conclude his Epistle with lines of satiric reflection on the poetical flatterers of Louis XIV., which are certainly vigorous and pointed :--- Oh! if in France this hero had been born, There triumphs are o'er kings and kingdoms sold, If courage could, like courts, be kept in pay, What sums would Louis give that France might say Would pass between Versailles and Nostre Dame ! Boyne would for ages be the painter's theme, The Gobelin's labour, and the poet's dream. The wounded arm would furnish all their rooms, And bleed, for ever scarlet, in their looms. Matthew Prior's is a name with which Montague's is inseparably associated." They were schoolfellows; they were members of the same University; they were partners in the first literary venture in which both alike hoped to lay the foundations of a political fortune. Yet their careers and their capacities furnish a singular contrast. Montague was a born orator and statesman; he arrived at eminence with a bound, when once he had passed the threshold of the House of Commons. Prior, on the other hand, was a born poet; though he filled important political posts, he died a comparatively needy man; and perhaps the very qualities which give him a unique place in English poetry prevented him from winning the highest prizes of English political life. These prizes were Prior's aim. In a complimentary Epistle, asking Fleetwood Sheppard to get him "some little place," he says: There's one thing more I had almost slipt, But that may do as well in postscript; That one mouse eats while t'other's starved. I reserve a fuller account of Prior's life till I come to that province of poetry to which belongs his genuine fame. Meantime we may note that, while Montague's panegyrical Epistle affects the "loose familiar strains" of which Prior was so much greater a master, Prior labours his praises of "Nassau" in the Pindaric Ode, modelled on the example of Cowley. There is, indeed, little of the vigour and abundance, which elevate the best passages of Cowley, either in Prior's Imitation of Horace, Odes, iii. II, or in his Carmen Seculare. Cowley seldom copies the mere mythology of Pindar; Prior, who had Horace in all his thoughts, not only compares his hero or his heroine to Jove, Mars, or Juno, but actually addresses Janus as if he were a kind of Whig Historiographer-Royal, and could sympathise with the satisfaction of the British nation in the Revolution of 1688, and with their grief at the loss of Queen Mary.1 1 Carmen Seculare, st. viii. Janus, mighty deity, Be kind; and as thy searching eye Finding some of Stuart's race Unhappy, pass their annals by ; No harsh reflection let. remembrance raise : Lest Britain's grief should waken at the sound, 1 Yet, underneath the artificiality of form in these compositions, so foreign to the native talent of Prior, it is interesting to observe how the spirit of the age instinctively turns contemporary panegyrical verse, in the hands of a man of genius, into channels suitable to the master tendencies of life and thought. If Prior does not reach Cowley's excellencies, he avoids his faults. The structure of his Odes is simple and regular; an intelligible thought is expressed in each stanza, and is worked up to a set climax; there is no straining after far-fetched conceits, and very little trace of the hyperbolical flattery which, in the previous generation, had caused such an offensive disproportion between the subject matter and the form of panegyrical poetry. In all directions lyrical fancy gives place to epigrammatic point; at the same time a certain manliness and public spirit preserve the poet from sinking into mere bombast. The entire Ode, Presented to the King, on the death of Queen Mary is devoted to consoling the bereaved husband by reminding him of his duties to the nation, and the closing stanzas may be cited as exemplifying the new style : Yet ought his sorrow to be checkt; She was instructed to command, Great King, by long obeying thee; But oh! 'twas little that her life O'er earth and water bears thy fame: Beyond where matter moves, or place From Mary's glory angels trace The beauty of her partner's soul. Wise fate, which does its heaven decree Is deified before thy death. Alone to thy renown 'tis given Unbounded through all worlds to go : Prior found more truly congenial employment for his own talents in burlesquing the classical hyperboles by which Boileau had attempted to exalt the glory of Louis XIV. after the capture of Namur by the French in 1692. In 1695 William retook the town and fortress, and Prior reprinted Boileau's Ode, with a paraphrase of his own parallel to each stanza. The art with which he at once ridicules the mythological allusions of the French poet, and converts them into compliments to the English Sovereign, makes this poem a masterpiece of wit, a specimen of which may be given in the stanzas contrasting the physical difficulties overcome by Louis when he took the town in June 1692 with Villeroy's failure to relieve it in August 1695: |