Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 46.djvu/407

 are, among other things, four ‘Dialogues of the Dead’ (Hist. MSS. Comm. 3rd Rep. App. p. 194), which, having been greatly praised by Pope, Beattie, Nichols, and others who have seen them; and it is from his original papers that is said to be compiled the dubious ‘History of his Own Time,’ which, with a second volume of ‘Miscellaneous Works,’ including several pieces of verse now reckoned among his accepted efforts, was editorially put forth by one J. Bancks in 1740 [1739]. Both volumes purport to be derived from transcripts by Prior's executor, Adrian Drift, who died in 1738. But a letter from Heneage Legge to the Earl of Dartmouth on 6 Nov. 1739 (ib. 11th Rep. App. pt. v. p. 329) throws considerable doubt on these collections, and it is not easy to decide how far they were ‘a trick of a bookseller's.’ It is possible, however, to distrust too much, as they admittedly contain a very great deal that is authentic, and they are certainly not without interest.

Of his poems Prior speaks, either affectedly or with sincerity, as ‘the product of his leisure hours, who had commonly business enough upon his hands, and was only a poet by accident;’ and it seems clear that the collection of his fugitive pieces into a volume was precipitated by Curll's unauthorised issue in 1707 of the ‘Poems on Several Occasions,’ just as the larger collection of 1718 was prompted by Prior's necessitous circumstances. As it is, some of his now best known pieces, ‘The Secretary,’ ‘The Female Phaeton,’ ‘To a Child of Quality,’ were not included among his works until after his death. What he considered to be his most successful efforts are at present, as it often happens, the least valued. His three books of ‘Solomon on the Vanity of the World,’ of which he himself ruefully admitted in ‘The Conversation,’

although they once found admirers in John Wesley and Cowper, find few readers today; and his paraphrase of the fine old ballad of ‘The Nut-Brown Maid’ as ‘Henry and Emma’ shares their fate. His ‘Alma,’ which he regarded as a ‘loose and hasty scribble,’ is, on the contrary, still a favourite with the admirers of Butler, whose ‘Hudibras’ is its avowed model—a model which it perhaps excels in facility of rhyme and ease of versification. In Prior's imitations of the ‘Conte’ of La Fontaine this metrical skill is maintained, and he also shows consummate art in the telling of a story in verse. Unhappily, in spite of Johnson's extraordinary dictum that ‘Prior is a lady's book’ (, ed. Hill, 1887, iii. 192), his themes are not equally commendable. But he is one of the neatest of English epigrammatists, and in occasional pieces and familiar verse has no rival in English. ‘Prior's,’ says Thackeray, in an oft-quoted passage (English Humourists, 1864, p. 175) ‘seem to me amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humourous of English lyrical poems. Horace is always in his mind, and his song, and his philosophy, his good sense, his happy easy turns and melody, his loves, and his Epicureanism, bear a great resemblance to that most delightful and accomplished master.’



PRIOR, THOMAS (1682?–1751), founder of the Dublin Society and philanthropist, born about 1682 was a native of Rathdowny, Queen's County, He entered the public school at Kilkenny in January 1696-7, and continued there till April 1699. Among his school-fellows was [q. v.], subsequently bishop of Cloyne, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship. Prior entered Trinity College, Dublin, obtained a scholarship in 1701, and graduated B.A. in 1703. He subsequently devoted himself to the promotion of material and industrial works among the protestant population in Ireland.