Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/322

266 cause of a series of chances, remained for several years as England's chief representative "at this central cogwheel of the cumbrous engine" of the Coalition.

From a pecuniary point of view the berth was not as satisfactory as it might have been, and Prior's letters from now on are filled with fretful references to the inadequacy of the Government's payment of twenty shillings a day with an allowance for "reasonable extraordinaries." He was never tired of deploring the fact that his creditors, as he put it, "were brisker in business than the Treasury." "Who has ever heard," he exclaimed, "of a professed panegyric poet that was able to advance two guineas to the public?" In vain he pointed out to the preoccupied authorities at home "that a little house, this winter, would be convenient in so cold a country as Holland." His agitated pleas were greeted with evasions and procrastinations and the poet-diplomatist was left "to scramble at ordinaries with Switzers or French Protestants." One of his own poems suggests, however, that his time was not entirely occupied with his ambassadorial duties. He too had, we may assume, as well as another, his margins, his moments, his golden week-ends when it mattered not a rush to him whether or no the "disaffected" reached the shores of England.

As the years passed his financial straits were considerably relieved by a sinecure secretaryship in Dublin, from which he drew for several years, though never setting foot in the Island, remuneration to the tune of nearly £1000 a year.

From the Hague he was eventually transferred to Paris. His letters from that capital are full of entertaining gossipy information. He was shown over the royal palace and as he viewed Le Brun's gorgeous pictures representing the victories of Louis XIV was asked whether Hampton Court could be said to rival such a display. "The monuments of my master's actions" he replied appositely enough, "are to be seen everywhere but in his own house." He visited the court of the exiled King of England and though the account he gives of that fallen monarch was not exactly in the best of taste it has its own interest: "I faced old James the other day at