taken of his mind, and from the pleasure which he must have felt in
for ever silencing all attempts to lessen his poetical fame. . . . I
remember once to have heard Johnson say, 'Sir, a thousand years may
elapse before there shall appear another man with a power of
versification equal to that of Pope.'"

Pope's laurel, since Johnson's days, has flourished, without showing
a dead bough, for all the frosts of hostile criticism.

H. M.



PRIOR



Matthew Prior is one of those that have burst out from an obscure
original to great eminence. He was born July 21, 1664, according to
some, at Wimborne, in Dorsetshire, of I know not what parents;
others say that he was the son of a joiner of London: he was
perhaps willing enough to leave his birth unsettled, in hope, like
Don Quixote, that the historian of his actions might find him some
illustrious alliance. He is supposed to have fallen, by his
father's death, into the hands of his uncle, a vintner near Charing
Cross, who sent him for some time to Dr. Busby, at Westminster; but,
not intending to give him any education beyond that of the school,
took him, when he was well advanced in literature, to his own house,
where the Earl of Dorset, celebrated for patronage of genius, found
him by chance, as Burnet relates, reading Horace, and was so well