House, on June 17th, 1719, leaving by the Countess one daughter, who survived until 1797. His body, after lying in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, was buried by night in Westminster Abbey. A splendid threnody was written by his devoted admirer, Thomas Tickell.

At considerable risk and danger to himself, after quitting the neutral zone of politics to which The Spectator and Addison had committed him, Steele had done his best to ensure the Hanoverian succession (at a time when a pamphlet was a thing of power) in his pamphlet called The Crisis (January, 1714), the danger being the supposed tendency of the Tories to dally with the Pretender. When George I. was settled on his throne, Steele was accordingly made a J.P. and a D.L., a surveyor of the royal stable and a supervisor of the T.R., Drury Lane. From these posts he derived an income little if at all inferior to Addison's pension. He also became an M.P. and was knighted, went on projecting periodicals and writing pamphlets, and produced a somewhat solemn comedy, The Conscious Lovers (1722), which he dedicated to George I. (500 guineas). In spite of the success of this he was still constitutionally incapable of keeping pace with his creditors. Finally he made a composition with them and retired to Carmarthen, where he died on September 1st, 1729, aged fifty-eight. His two sons, Richard and Eugene, died in 1716 and 1723. A natural daughter was at one time contracted to the erratic Richard Savage.1

1 As Parnell's importance derives from the influence his work exercised over Goldsmith, so Savage's is due almost exclusively to the impression his verse and his conversation made upon Dr. Johnson during the most impressionable portion of his London career. According to his own account, which must seemingly have contained elements of truth, Richard Savage was the infant baptised on January 18th, 1697, at St. Andrew's, Holborn, as Richard Smith, being in reality the bastard son of Earl Rivers and the Countess of Macclesfield.

Though he cannot rank with Addison as a great stylist, Steele was a master of that unembarrassed manner which is "the outcome of unembarrassed matter." He writes, as a rule, less from the head than from the heart. With a free and genial humour he combined a deep and genuine love of virtue, which he expressed in lay sermons among the most perfect of their kind. "As the first painter of domesticity the modern novel owes him much, but the women of his own day owe him more. Not only did he pay them collectively a magnificent compliment when he wrote of Lady Elizabeth Hastings that to love her was a liberal education; but in a time when they were treated by the wits with contemptuous flattery or cynical irreverence, he sought to offer them a reasonable service of genuine respect which was immeasurably superior to those fulsome raptures, guilty impressions, senseless deifications, and pretended deaths with which it was the custom of his contemporaries to insult their understandings."

This lady treated him with inveterate cruelty according to his own somewhat perplexed account, apprenticed him to a cobbler and tried to get him punished with the supreme penalty for an unpremeditated homicide in a midnight brawl. Savage procured his release owing to the intervention of several persons of quality. Henceforth he continued brawling and embroidering his strange story for most of the remainde of his stormy life. He lost all his friends save Johnson by his excesses, and produced little to justify his claims to genius. His tragedy, Sir Thomas Overbury (1723), was a failure, and whatever of merit his versification has is to be found in hi two heroic poems, The Bastard (1728) and The Wanderer, in which he moralises more or less poetically upon his own personal misfortunes. A veritable depth of feeling transpires The Bastard and informs the rhythm with a rugged solemnity of which many an echo may be found in The Vanity of Human Wishes. Having outlived or tired out his most generous patrons, such as Lord Tyrconnel, Queen Caroline, Mrs. Oldfield, and Mrs. Pope, Savage died in prison on August 1st, 1743.

CHAPTER X

MAT PRIOR, GAY, AND OTHER PERFORMERS IN THE SCHOOL OF POPE

"Whatever Prior touched in the light style became golden; and the gay good-humour of the experienced, disenchanted man of affairs makes the reader feel how great must have been the charm of his company, which, according to the report of the Duchess of Portland-noble, lovely, little Peggy'-caused him to be beloved by every living thing in the house, master, child, and servant, human creature or animal."-COURTHOPE, A History of English Poetry.

The familiar style of Prior and Gay-Parnell-PomfretGarth-Philips-Akenside-Young.

MATTHEW, or MAT, PRIOR is commonly believed to have been the son of a carpenter at Wimborne, where he was born on July 21st, 1664. His father died when he was yet a child, and he fell to the care of his uncle, Sam Prior, a vintner, who kept the Rhenish wine-house, a fashionable resort as far back as Pepys's time, in Channel Row, Westminster.

Mat's quickness procured his promotion to a seat behind the bar; and when it was discovered by the Earl of Dorset, Sir Fleetwood Shepherd, and other fashionable frequenters that the youth had a happy knack of translating Horace, he was not unnaturally regarded as somewhat of a prodigy. Dorset contributed to his expenses at Westminster, where he became a King's scholar under Busby and made the acquaintance of Charles Montague, afterwards the noted Earl of Halifax. He refused to be separated from his friend and sent to Christ Church, and was, in defiance of tradition, entered at St. John's College, Cambridge (April,

1683), where he was elected a fellow in 1688. In the previous year, in conjunction with Montague, he brought out The City Mouse and Country Mouse, an amusing skit in ridicule of Dryden's Hind and Panther. These achievements were the making of Prior. His fellowship (like Addison's) sustained him when his party was in the cold shade of opposition. His poetic talent, as shown in the satire, procured him almost instant preferment, for although he complained that the other mouse was advanced first, he had not to wait long. It must be said of the nobles who grew up when Charles II. was king, that no other generation has ever shown itself so responsive to literary talent. In 1691 he was sent as secretary of embassy to The Hague Congress, an assembly of princes and nobles to which Europe then had scarcely, perhaps, seen anything equal. Prior's countenance and address so commended themselves to William III. on this occasion that the King made him a gentleman of his bed-chamber.

In 1694 the death of Queen Mary furnished a theme for every one who could write at all. Prior wrote a long ode, which was presented to the King, by whom it was not likely to be ever read. In two years he was once more in diplomatic employment, at Ryswick and then at Paris, as secretary to the embassy. In 1701 he became M.P. for East Grinstead, and henceforth, like Swift later, he veered rapidly over to the Tories, into the inner circle of which he was rapidly admitted, joining the "16 Brothers" Club of Swift, Harley, and Bolingbroke in 1710. In the same year the Tories came in, and Prior was called back to his old task of treaty-making. He and M. Mesnager did most of the real work preliminary to the Treaty of Utrecht, and when it was signed in 1713, Prior, who had hitherto performed the duties, was promoted to the style and title of English Ambassador at Paris. He returned in March, 1715, to find his enemies in power, and was welcomed by

a warrant for his arrest. He was confined for two years, during which period he wrote his tedious poem in three long octosyllabic cantos called Alma, or The Progress of the Mind. When he came out, Harley, Swift, and other friends encouraged him to bring out his collected poems in a subscription folio. This was done, and procured the impecunious poet £4,000, to which Harley added another £4,000 for the purchase of an estate at Down Hall, (celebrated in the ballad) near Hatfield Broad Oak, in Essex. Unhappily his health was already failing; he had a chronic cough, and, like Swift, he suffered from deafness. He died at Harley's seat of Wimpole, where he was on a visit, on September 18th, 1721.

Many of Prior's best poems are short pieces, little more than epigrams, which survive as models of neatness, to be praised perhaps beyond their intrinsic worth, as pioneer work deserves to be, by such masters of the peculiar genre (vers d'occasion) as Cowper, Thackeray, Locker, and Dobson. No less than fifteen of his short familiar poems find their way into the Lyra Elegantiarum.

Though his importance has been a good deal over-rated, Prior remains an interesting figure in English literature, coming as he does between Dryden and Pope. His ideas of finish are by no means up to the Popean standard. As to metre, he tells us that our rhyming heroic measure, as Dryden perfected it, is too confined. He accordingly made a point of running his verses and couplets into one another, and by this means, and a spirited use of the parenthesis and the paragraph, he produced some good and novel effects. Pope almost simultaneously was pulling in exactly the opposite direction. As a matter of fact, however, he often approximates his "Brother" Swift much more nearly than he ever does Pope. He got ideas from Swift, and imitated his octosyllabics as Swift imitated Butler's. Swift is harder, stronger, and more precise;