PRIOR, GAY AND POPE.
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seen everywhere except in his own house." Bravo, Mat! Prior rose to be full ambassador at Paris,[1] where he somehow was cheated out of his ambassadorial plate; and in a heroic poem, addressed by him to her late lamented majesty Queen Anne, Mat makes some magnificent allusions to these dishes and spoons, of which Fate had deprived him. All that he wants, he says, is her Majesty's picture; without that he can't be happy.
"Thee, gracious Anne, thee present I adore:
Thee, Queen of Peace, if Time and Fate have power
Higher to raise the glories of thy reign,
In words sublimer and a nobler strain.
May future bards the mighty theme rehearse.
Here, Stator Jove, and Phœbus, king of Verse,
The votive tablet I suspend."
Thee, Queen of Peace, if Time and Fate have power
Higher to raise the glories of thy reign,
In words sublimer and a nobler strain.
May future bards the mighty theme rehearse.
Here, Stator Jove, and Phœbus, king of Verse,
The votive tablet I suspend."
With that word the poem stops abruptly. The votive tablet is suspended for ever like Mahomet's coffin. News came that the Queen was dead. Stator Jove, and Phœbus, king of verse, were left there, hovering to this day, over the votive tablet. The picture was never
- ↑ "He was to have been in the same commission with the Duke of Shrewsbury, but that that nobleman," says Johnson, "refused to be associated with one so meanly born. Prior therefore continued to act without a title till the Duke's return next year to England, and then he assumed the style and dignity of embassador."
He had been thinking of slights of this sort when he wrote his Epitaph:—But, in this case, the old prejudice got the better of the old joke."Nobles and heralds by your leave,
Here lies what once was Matthew Prior,
The son of Adam and of Eve;
Can Bourbon or Nassau claim higher?"
