never get rid of me. My spirit would become your shadow. Ah! But why all this fuss about it? It is all in a nutshell. I will not be separated from you. I only maintain my right to be always with you. Mamma has made mischief between us. She will go; and we shall again be alone together. We have one table, one bed, one interest, one pocket. Night and day we shall be always together. You always have by your side a young, healthy and faithful wife. Now! Would you dare throw me over even for a time?..."

And before her husband could reply, she walked quickly up to him, pressed her lips to his and left the room, flinging at her mother-in-law the following words—

Good-night, dear mamma; I advise you to give up all plans for separating us."

Mother and son looked sorrowfully at one another. Tears were slowly rolling down the old lady's cheeks.

"Well, dear mamma, you understand my life? You know now why I never wrote to you? What could I write ?"

"But how can you manage to exist thus?"

66

'Well, as you see, I exist a cypher, a mere nothing. I tried to resist." Here Alexander made a gesture with his hand. "It is no use. Caresses, threats, entreaties-nothing takes with her. And how should it? She has no heart, no feeling, selfishness only. And she is irreproachable with it all. One has no hold upon her. You have yourself seen the housekeeping.' Exemplary! And her bearing in society is faultless. For myself, I am sure she loves me, but then in her own fashion. Do you know there have been moments when... when I thought, 'a bullet through my heart and there will be an end of everything.' But I did not do it. It was not that I regretted to lose my life. No! But why should I have done it? To leave her the aureole of widowhood, to please her by having my poor body hacked about by the doctors prior to a verdict of Temporary Insanity,' to enable one and all-thanks to her beauty-to demand and obtain for her an additional allowance-to enable her, after my death, to find another to torment? Never! Better take to drink, and beat her to break her in. The Taming of the Shrew!' Yes, that might work. But I could not do it. No. Only one thing is left for me. Work! Work and live as I am living. That is what I am doing."

"But why not leave her? she would think better of it. you have a will of your own...

Were it only for a time, perhaps
Were you to show for once that

"Ah! mamma! mamma! You do not understand. You are a I know her too well. She cannot hide one

different woman. thought from me. I know full well that she is faithful to me out of sheer egoïsm, so as not to lose her position. And then! Every time she comes near me, she embraces me! And I am again her slave. I know not with what philtre she bewitches me; but there are times when she can do with me as she likes... There now! I know I shall go to her. I can see her. She is lying in wait for me. She is on her bed. And as soon as I go in the room, she will bewitch me! And to-day, this very minute, I shall be kissing her hands, and asking her forgiveness-vowing never more to thwart her wishes. I shall tell her a pack of lies, vow never to leave her! Good-night, mamma!” And he kissed his mother and left the room. "Good-night, Alexander!"

*

Two days afterwards the young couple were again driving to the station. This time, they were accompanying their visitor on her way back. The sun was shining. It was spring-like. Sophie was as merry as a lark, and when taking leave of her mother-in-law she invited her to visit them again—at Pavlovsk !

2 M

VOL. CVIII.

Matthew Prior.

ONE day in the year 1680 the Earl of Dorset and other gentlemen being at the Rummer Tavern, Charing Cross-then a fashionable rendezvous-a dispute arose about the meaning of a particular passage in Horace, which, not being settled to the satisfaction of those present, one of them said he was mistaken if there was not a young fellow in the house-the nephew of mine host-who was able to set them all right, and proposed sending for him. On this recommendation all the company desired he might be called in, when, the difficulty being proposed to him, he explained it with so much modesty that the Earl of Dorset-the Mæcenas of his age-immediately resolved to take him under his protection, and soon after he was sent to St. John's College, Cambridge. The young scholar who thus came to the rescue was Matthew Prior-Matt Prior, as his friends affectionately called him-well named our English Horace. "Who now reads Prior?" we might say, as Pope said of Cowley. Yet he is the wittiest and most graceful of all our English poets, whether he is writing lines to "Young Lord Buckhurst playing with a cat," or to "The Countess of Exeter playing on a flute, a ballad on the Thief and the Grave Cordelier," or stanzas to

"Miss Kitty, beautiful and young,

But wild as colt untamed."

Prior soon vindicated his patron's discrimination. While he was at Cambridge Dryden published his grotesque but powerful satire, "The Hind and the Panther "-the first fruit of his apostasy to Rome-in which wolves, bears, and foxes gravely debate the deepest points of theology and vent their spite against "the milk-white hind, immortal and unchanged," type of the true Church. The fable lent itself to parody, and Prior and his friend Charles Montague came out with a clever burlesque called “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse." Montague was an earl's

grandson, and soon got preferment. Prior had to wait, and he plaintively laments

"That one mouse thrives while t'other's starved."

The Earl of Dorset did not, however, forget his protégé. He introduced him to the King, adding facetiously, "I have brought a mouse to have the honour of kissing your Highness's hand." The joke was explained to William, and he at once replied, smiling, "You will do me a favour if you will put me in the way of making a man of him." And he was as good as his word. Prior was soon made Secretary of the English Embassy to the Congress at the Hague. His quick parts, his industry, his politeness, and his perfect knowledge of the French language marked him out for diplomatic employment. He was a man of the world with the Horatian bonhommie and the Horatian capacity for enjoyment. At the Hague, as throughout life, he took care, he tells us―

"With labour assiduous due pleasure to mix,

And in one day atone for the business of six;
In a little Dutch chaise on a Saturday night,

On my left hand my Horace, a nymph on my right."

A very characteristic picture of the poet. He was frankly epi

curean:

"'Tis the mistress, the friend, and the bottle, old boy,
Which create all the pleasure poor mortals enjoy

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-but his epicureanism, like that of the Roman poet, is so genial and so graceful that it never jars upon us.

Prior's gaiety and wit were just suited to the French character, and made him highly popular at the French Court, where he went as English plenipotentiary, and where he lived in considerable splendour. Louis writes: "I am impatiently expecting Mr. Prior, who is very agreeable to me." One bon mot of his is worth recording. He was being shown the celebrated pictures in which Le Brun has ostentatiously represented on the ceiling of the gallery of Versailles the exploits of Louis, and was asked whether Kensington Palace could boast such decorations. "No, sir," he replied; "the memorials of my master's actions are to be seen everywhere but in his own palace."

There is another anecdote-told by Macaulay-which illustrates his diplomatic address. His chief in the embassy to the Hague was Portland, who thought wits and poets a profane and licentious set. Prior set himself to remove this unfavourable impression. He talked on serious subjects seriously, quoted the

New Testament appositely, vindicated Hammond from the charge of popery, and by way of a decisive blow, gave the definition of a true Church from the nineteenth article. Portland stared at him. "I am glad, Mr. Prior, to find you so good a Christian. I was afraid you were an atheist." "An atheist! My good Lord," cried Prior, "what could lead your lordship to entertain such a suspicion ? "Why," said Portland, "I knew that you were a poet, and I took it for granted you did not believe in God." "My lord," said the wit, "you do us poets the greatest injustice. Of all people we are the farthest from atheism, for the atheists do not even worship the true God whom the rest of mankind acknowledge, and we are always invoking and hymning false gods whom everybody else has renounced." This last was true enough. Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Cupid—the whole mythological machinery of Olympus is in full play in Prior's poetry, as it is in that of his contemporaries. It was the fashion of that pseudoclassical age; but with Prior the gods and goddesses are brought on the stage only by way of burlesque, not of pretty pagan conceits, as they are by the poetasters of his time. One of the most stinging of his satires is the simile in which he compares these same poetasters to a squirrel jumping in its revolving cage:— "Still dancing in an airy round,

Well pleased with their own verse's sound."

Prior himself never soars to the empyrean, nor does he seek to. He rises in his "Solomon " to a lofty didactic strain, but mostly he pipes on "the lower slopes." It is the wit and the savoir faire of the man of the world which charms us in him, not any poetic rhapsodies-a wit not misanthropic, like that of Swift, or malignant, like that of Pope, but good-humoured, sparkling, and always sane. He threw off epigrams, tales, songs, satires, epitaphs and odes just as the inspiration seized him or the subject arose. Surely he must have had a prophetic glimpse of Mr. Gladstone when he penned the lines:

"For you may speak in Tully's tongue,
And all the while be in the wrong;

and of the Board School when he wrote:

"And if you would improve your thought,
You must be fed as well as taught."

Here is his own epitaph by himself:-
"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?"