our steps, or
knocking at our door! Of course not. We are living in the nineteenth
century, and poor Dick Steele stumbled and got up again, and got into jail
and out again, and sinned and repented; and loved and suffered; and lived
and died scores of years ago. Peace be with him! Let us think gently of
one who was so gentle: let us speak kindly of one whose own breast
exuberated with human kindness.

Lecture The Fourth. Prior, Gay, And Pope

Matthew Prior was one of those famous and lucky wits of the auspicious
reign of Queen Anne, whose name it behoves us not to pass over. Mat was a
world-philosopher of no small genius, good nature, and acumen.(108) He
loved, he drank, he sang. He describes himself, in one of his lyrics, "in
a little Dutch chaise on a Saturday night; on his left hand his Horace,
and a friend on his right," going out of town from the Hague to pass that
evening and the ensuing Sunday, boozing at a _Spielhaus_ with his
companions, perhaps bobbing for perch in a Dutch canal, and noting down,
in a strain and with a grace not unworthy of his Epicurean master, the
charms of his idleness, his retreat, and his Batavian Chloe. A vintner's
son in Whitehall, and a distinguished pupil of Busby of the Rod, Prior
attracted some notice by writing verses at St. John's College, Cambridge,
and, coming up to town, aided Montague(109) in an attack on the noble old
English lion John Dryden, in ridicule of whose work, _The Hind and the
Panther_, he brought out that remarkable and famous burlesque, _The Town
and Country Mouse_. Aren't you all acquainted with it? Have you not all
got it by heart? What! have you never heard of it? See what fame is made
of! The wonderful part of the satire was, that, as a natural consequence
of _The Town and Country Mouse_, Matthew Prior was made Secretary of
Embassy at the Hague! I believe it is dancing, rather than singing, which
distinguishes the young English diplomatists of the present day; and have
seen them in various parts perform that part of their duty very finely. In
Prior's time it appears a different accomplishment led to preferment.
Could you write a copy of Alcaics? that was the question. Could you turn
out a neat epigram or two? Could you compose _The Town and Country Mouse_?
It is manifest that, by the possession of this faculty, the most difficult
treaties, the laws of foreign nations, and the interests of our own, are
easily understood. Prior rose in the diplomatic se