physicians in ordinary to the Queen. John Hughes, whose friendship with Addison does him far more honour than his verses, was Secretary to the Commissions of the Peace, "a situation of great profit;" Rowe, the author of Jane Shore' and the 'Fair Penitent,' held for three years of Anne's reign the post of Under-Secretary, and at the accession of George I. was made one of the Land Surveyors of the Port of London and Clerk to the Council of the Prince of Wales. Nor was this all, for the Lord Chancellor Parker, "as soon as he received the Seals, appointed him, unasked, Secretary of the Presentations." Young, a fulsome flatterer, was in the pay of the Court and Chaplain to George II. At the age of eighty he was appointed Clerk of the Closet to the Princess Dowager; but he never received the high preferment such a man might reasonably have expected. Swift, who possessed the most robust intellect of the age, was the least cared for by Government. During the Administration of Harley and St. John he was probably the most influential man in the country. Those Ministers. treated him as their intimate friend, called him by his Christian name, made abundant use of his marvellous ability, and at last, as a reward for his services, sent him into exile to live on the income of

a poor Irish deanery. But Swift, unfortunately for his prospects of advancement, was a clergyman, and the Queen's repugnance to the author of 'A Tale of a Tub' was too deep to be overcome. Although Swift, in telling Stella of his promotion, says he is less out of humour than she would imagine, he finds it difficult to conceal his disgust. "I confess," he wrote, "I thought the Ministry would not let me go, but perhaps they can't help it." This was no doubt the case. Swift could push the fortunes of other people, but not his own, and it is not to be wondered at that so respectably pious a queen as Anne should have disliked the author of what she must have regarded as a profane book, a book, too, the wit of which she was unable to appreciate. It was thus that Swift missed the preferment attained by almost all his literary contemporaries, whether clergymen or laymen, and no doubt Mr. Henry Morley is right in saying that if the Dean had not written the Tale of a Tub' he would have died a bishop.

Perhaps in all that circle of wits there was no man whose advancement from a low estate to high official honours was more signal than that of Matthew Prior. He was, indeed, apart from his literary gifts, a man of considerable ability, ready

with speech as with pen. His address must have been winning, his skill as a diplomatist considerable, and his general culture entitled him to respect at a time when even statesmen were very partially educated, and when one of the reasons given for making St. John, Secretary of State was, that he was the only person about the Court who understood French. Matthew Prior, or "Matt Prior," as he was familiarly called by his associates, came of so obscure a parentage that his birthplace is open to conjecture. He was born in 1664, and placed by his uncle, a tavern-keeper near Charing Cross, at Westminster School, then under the charge of the renowned Dr. Busby. Samuel Prior's tavern appears to have been frequented by the nobility, and there the young scholar and poet was discovered by the Earl of Dorset, reading Horace. Lord Dorset, himself a small poet and a splendid patron of poets, was afterwards praised by Prior in language which may have been sincere, but which to modern ears sounds ridiculously extravagant. "The manner in which the Earl wrote," he says, "will hardly ever be equalled; every one of his pieces is an ingot of gold, such as, wrought or beaten thinner, would shine through a whole book of any other author." His verses have a lustre like that of the sun in Claude

Lorraine's landscapes; his love poems "convey the wit of Petronius in the softness of Tibullus; his satire" is so severely pointed that in it he appears what his great friend the Earl of Rochester (that other prodigy of the age) says he was,

· The best good man, with the worst natur'd Muse.'

Yet so far was this great author from valuing himself upon his works that he cared not what became of them, though everybody else did. There are many things of his not extant in writing, which, like the verses and sayings of the ancient Druids, retain an universal veneration, though they are preserved only by memory. Moreover Lord Dorset's virtues, according to his panegyrist, were as conspicuous as his genius; he was the model of all that is great and noble; and "for his charity, we can scarce find a parallel in history itself." That Prior, like Dryden, should have absurdly praised the man who had done his best to serve him was in accordance with the taste of the age, and the poet who found a patron was bound to render him such return as a poet best could.

Prior was transferred by his munificent friend from the "Rummer Tavern" to St. John's College, Cambridge, where a far greater poet gained, a

hundred years later, such education as a university could impart to a Wordsworth. One of his first literary efforts at Cambridge was in conjunction with an acquaintance whose advancement in the State was destined to be yet more distinguished than his own. In 1687 John Dryden, who had discovered the truth of the Roman Catholic faith soon after the accession of a Roman Catholic king, published his famous poem 'The Hind and the Panther.' It called forth a number of replies, both serious and burlesque, of which one only, entitled 'The Country Mouse and the City Mouse,' written by Charles Montague and Matthew Prior, can be said to have survived. Montague was the son of a younger son of a nobleman, and, like Prior, was educated under Busby. The two Westminster boys went to Cambridge in the same year, and the good fortune of Montague, like that of his friend, appears to have been due in the first instance to a knack of versemaking. To call him a poet would be as absurd as to call an organ-grinder a musician, but his lines on the death of King Charles started him on the road to fortune. He was born for the House of Commons, and once there, as Macaulay observes, his life during some years was a series of triumphs. "At thirty he would gladly have given all his chances in life