Born in London in 1664, Matthew Prior was the only surviving child of a London joiner. He had begun his education at Westminster School, but when his father died, leaving the family in financial hardship, he was sent to work at his uncle’s pub, the Rhenish Tavern on Channel Row.

It was there that Charles Sackville, sixth earl of Dorset, discovered the twelve-year-old Prior reading the Roman poet Horace behind the bar. Impressed and amused, the earl commissioned Prior to translate passages from Horace and other of the Latin poets into English verse – which Prior accomplished with such facility that the earl subsequently offered to fund his return to school. Back at Westminster, Prior distinguished himself in the classical languages and was elected a king’s scholar in 1681.

The images above are taken from Prior’s own copy of the 1642 folio edition of Horace’s works (given its size and quality, presumably not the same copy he had read behind the bar as a boy).

Looking back on Prior’s contribution to English poetry more than 150 years later, the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray noted the influence of Horace on his work. ‘Prior's seem to me amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorous of English lyrical poems,’ Thackeray wrote in The English Humorists (1853). ‘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.’

Although the Cambridge curriculum in the late seventeenth century was heavily focused on logic and divinity, Prior continued to develop as a poet while at St John’s, composing more than 40 pieces (in Latin and in English) during his four years as an undergraduate.

His first publication came in July 1687 and was a collaboration (published anonymously) with Charles Montagu, earl of Halifax – one of the school friends whom Prior had followed to St John’s. In a mixture of prose and verse, the work comprised a satirical attack on the Poet Laureate John Dryden’s latest allegorical offering, The Hind and the Panther, which had been published just two months previously.

In Dryden’s poem, an unlikely cast of characters including a hind, a panther, a bear, a wolf, a hare, a fox, an ape and a boar are cast as representatives of the competing religious factions of the day, and engage in a series of lengthy and complex debates concerning matters of church authority and doctrine.

In the preface to their ‘transvers’d’ tale, Prior and Montagu assure the reader that ‘there is nothing Represented here as monstrous and unnatural, which is not equally so in the Original’, pinpointing the perceived absurdity of Dryden’s ‘general design’: ‘Is it not as easie to imagine two Mice bilking Coachmen, and supping at the Devil; as to suppose a Hind entertaining the Panther at a Hermit’s Cell, discussing the greatest Mysteries of Religion, and telling you her son Rodriguez writ very good Spanish?’

Sir James Montagu, brother of Charles and Prior’s lifelong friend, described its composition as follows: ‘The Hind and Panther being at that time in every bodys hands Mr Prior accidently came one morning to make Mr Montagu a visit … and the poem lying upon the table Mr Montagu took it up and read the four first lines … where stopping he took notice how foolish it was … and said the best way of answering that Poem wou’d be to ridicule it by telling Horace’s fable of the City mouse and Country mouse in the same manner’.

Their plan worked: despite having published anonymously, Montagu and Prior were known to be the authors, and the work won them widespread public acclaim, being the vanguard of a volley of pamphlet publications that took issue with Dryden’s theology, if not his verse.

For three of his seven years at The Hague there was no resident English Ambassador, and Prior acted skilfully as chief minister, while only receiving a secretary’s pay. When Edward, Viscount Villiers (later earl of Jersey) – also a St John’s alumnus – assumed the Ambassador’s office at The Hague in 1695, he immediately requested that Prior be kept on and that his salary be doubled.

Much of the poetry Prior wrote in these years focused on public concerns: British war victories, the life of the royal family, and so on. In this poem of 1696, however, Prior offers a rare glimpse of his personal life in The Hague. Where six days out of seven were devoted to the ‘Busyness’ of  composing reports, making and hosting visits, attending tea parties and listening to ‘the long winded cant of a dull refugée’, on Saturday nights and Sundays he was free to pursue his own modest pleasures.

Over the next decade, Prior saw diplomatic service in Paris and London, travelling frequently between the two. As secretary to the ambassador in Paris (1698-99), he had few official duties – his main commission essentially being to spy on those in power in France, and on the Jacobites there, on behalf of his superiors in England. On returning to London, he held the positions of under-secretary of state and commissioner of the Board of Trade and Plantations, while continuing to act as a peripatetic diplomatic agent, managing the secret negotiations with Louis XIV that later formed the basis of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713).

While travelling back from France on a false passport in July 1711, Prior was apprehended by an English customs official and briefly jailed. With his cover blown, the negotiations that should have remained classified quickly became common knowledge. In an attempt to divert public attention, Jonathan Swift (writing under the pseudonym ‘Sieur du Baudrier’) published the following mock account of Prior’s dealings with the French. Unfortunately, Swift’s satire drew rather close to the truth in several places, and may in fact have made matters worse for Prior.

A second satirical account inspired by Prior’s diplomatic adventures appeared the following year. Published anonymously, it is generally assumed to be the work of either Daniel Defoe or the French diplomat Nicolas Mesnager.

During his decade of intermittent residence in London (between 1699 and 1711), Prior participated actively in British politics. Around 1700 he joined the group of committed whigs known as the Kit-Cat Club, among whose members numbered his friend and former collaborator Charles Montagu, his patron the earl of Dorset, the bookseller and publisher Jacob Tonson, and the writers Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and William Congreve.

Prior’s allegiance with the Kit-Cats was unexpectedly short lived, however. In 1701, while serving as the whig MP for East Grinstead, he found himself siding with the tories in a vote to impeach the four leading whigs responsible for an unpopular partition treaty. The ramifications were complex: Charles Montagu was among the four, and Prior – who later explained that his hand in the vote had been forced – found himself estranged from his whig friends and patron. In 1710, having drifted gradually rightwards, Prior became one of the founding editors of the ‘ultra-tory journal’ The Examiner, whose chief contributor was Jonathan Swift.

Above you can see the first ever number of The Examiner, and below is a later number in which the ‘Articles of a Whig-Creed’ are satirically set down. To compete with the tories’ offering, Kit-Catter Joseph Addison quickly launched his own rival paper, The Whig Examiner – though this ran to only five issues.

Prior’s diplomatic achievements cost him dearly. By 1714, having effectively served as ambassador to Paris without the requisite allowance, he had incurred substantial financial debt. On his return to England, with the whigs now in power, he was held under house arrest for over a year, under the auspices of a secret committee set up to investigate corruption in the tory party (with a particular focus on the preceding negotiations for the Treaty of Utrecht). Unable to receive guests without permission, and forbidden from writing or receiving letters, Prior somehow managed to compose several new poems during this period.

On his release in 1716, with his political career decidedly over and no immediate source of income, Prior faced a difficult future. To assist him, a group of his friends and admirers – including fellow poet Alexander Pope and the publisher Jacob Tonson – came up with the idea of producing a high-quality subscription edition of Prior’s poems. This was to combine all the poems from his 1709 volume Poems on Several Occasions with a number of new poems, including the long poem ‘Alma, or, The Progress of the Mind’, which he had written while under arrest.

Eventually published in 1719 (though bearing the publication date 1718), this large-format folio edition ran to more than 500 pages, and features a beautifully engraved frontispiece illustration and portrait of the author.

With an astonishing 1445 subscribers (each named at the back of the volume over the course of a 20-page list), the publication reputedly earned Prior the huge sum of 4000 guineas: more than £450,000 in today’s money.

Prior’s reputation as one of the leading public figures, as well as poets, of his day, was sustained by a steady flow of publications in the decades and even centuries following his death. New and supplemented editions of his poetry appeared sporadically throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, published in Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Berwick and Manchester as well as London. In 1740, Prior’s literary executor and former amanuensis Adrian Drift oversaw the publication of an authorised memoir, compiled from Prior’s original manuscripts.

The quotation featured on the title page reveals Prior’s attitude to the relative importance of his two careers: ‘I had rather be thought a good ENGLISHMAN than the best POET or greatest SCHOLAR that ever Wrote.’ In the dedication at the front of the volume, Drift is keen to reiterate the image of Prior as an outstanding public servant whose reputation was unfairly damaged as a consequence of complex and localised political machinations beyond his control. The ‘peruser’ of his papers, Drift asserts, ‘will discover the Violence, and at the same Time the Impotence of Party Malice, against a Gentleman whose only Crime was acting up to his Commission, and executing faithfully his Sovereign’s Warrants’.

As a companion volume to The History of His Own Time, in the same year Drift brought out a volume of Prior’s miscellaneous poetical and literary works. The frontispiece engraving to this volume depicts the large marble monument to Prior that stands behind Shakespeare’s memorial in Westminster Abbey. The bust at the centre of the monument had been presented to Prior during his lifetime by the King of France. Standing on either side are the life-size figures of Poetry and History.

Spin-off publications by other editors keen to capitalise on Prior’s popularity as a poet also abounded. This 1741 volume offers a selection of Prior’s lyrics ‘set to music by several eminent masters’.

As ‘The Divided Heart’ (pictured below) demonstrates, the category of poems Prior termed ‘amorous odes’ lend themselves especially well to the song form.