Works

MISCELLANEOUS

W O R K S

Of His late EXCELLENCY

MATTHEW PRIOR Efq

Consisting of

P O E M S

ON

SEVERAL OCCASIONS

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The SECOND EDITION

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L O N D O N

Adrian Drift (Executor)

MDCCXL

DESCRIPTION

(ii) + viii + contents + 380pp + xcv + (ii)

Book measures 200mm x 130mm approximately.

Bound in full contemporary brown calf. Spine with five gilt-ruled raised bands and maroon title label.

CONDITION

Binding is in fair condition with boards attached although both a little loose and cracked along all of front hinge and top of rear hinge. Calf maintains a rich appearance although there is some wear and scuffs, small losses and crackling to calf, also with some bumping to corners. Internally the pages are in good clean condition throughout although with some uniform dustiness and some margin shadowing and the odd blemish towards latter and foremost pages and to end-papers and paste-downs.

INTERESTING

Matthew Prior (1664 to 1721) was an English poet and diplomat. One of Prior's schoolfellows and friends was Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax and to avoid being separated from Montagu and his brother James Prior accepted a scholarship recently founded at St John's College, Cambridge. Prior later became secretary to the embassy at the Hague. After four years of this, he was appointed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber at court. Apparently he acted as one of the King's secretaries, and in 1697 he was secretary to the plenipotentiaries who concluded the Peace of Ryswick.

Prior's poems show considerable variety, a pleasant scholarship and great executive skill. The most ambitious, Solomon, and the paraphrase of The Nut-Brown Maid, are the least successful. But Alma, an admitted imitation of Samuel Butler, is a delightful piece of wayward easy humour, full of witty turns and well-remembered allusions, and Prior's mastery of the octo-syllabic couplet is greater than that of Jonathan Swift or Pope. His tales in rhyme, though often objectionable in their themes, are excellent specimens of narrative skill; and as an epigrammatist he is unrivalled in English. The majority of his love songs are frigid and academic, mere wax-flowers of Parnassus; but in familiar or playful efforts, of which the type are the admirable lines To a Child of Quality, he has still no rival. "Prior's"—says Thackeray, himself no mean proficient in this kind—"seem to me amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorous 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."