St Cloud. Vive Guillaume! You never saw such a strange figure as the old bully is, lean, worn and riv'led."
On his return to England he abandons his friends the Whigs and turns Tory, actually for a short time gaining a seat in the House of Commons, for which act of treachery, on the death of Queen Anne and the return of the opposition, he is held in custody for two years and is, so he fancies, in no small danger of losing his life.
But even so he is still full of resource. He conceives the fortunate idea of issuing a "tall folio" of his poems done on "paper imperial and the largest in England." He manages to interest innumerable people in his project: Jonathan Swift even exerts himself and extracts not less than £200 from what he called the "hedge country" of his residence. The volumes are sold for two guineas each and Matthew Prior is soon rewarded by having four thousand pounds in his fob and this with an equal sum which he owed to the generosity of Lord Oxford and with the money due to him from his fellowship at John's ensures the poet "his bread and butter at the last." And yet when one looks over this famous collection of poems how few of them seem to us at this later date worthy of preservation. How weary one grows of his Cupids and Chloes and how truly gross and artificial so many of his poems appear! Their only redeeming quality lies, it would seem, in a certain airy amorousness which sometimes, but by no means always, carries with it a happy distinctive tone derived, we may perhaps be justified in surmising, from those wanton digressions in his private life which were to be afterwards so deplored by Samuel Johnson. For there can be small doubt that this "ambassador of meane extraction" as Queen Anne used to call him, this "creature" of Dorset's, was extremely addicted to the pursuit of the not altogether intangible delights which come to those who indulge in what the Elizabethans were wont to name as the pastime of "wenching."
Mat Prior was in fact a most incorrigible amorist. He would spend an evening with Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope, and Swift and then go off gay and incontinent to this or that little midnight drab.
"Fair Thames she haunts, and every neighbouring grove
Sacred to soft recess, and gentle love."
"So when I am wearied with wandering all day
