party, for he voted for the impeachment of those lords who had
persuaded the king to the Partition Treaty, a treaty in which he
himself had been ministerially employed.

A great part of Queen Anne's reign was a time of war, in which there
was little employment for negotiators, and Prior had, therefore,
leisure to make or to polish verses. When the Battle of Blenheim
called forth all the verse-men, Prior, among the rest, took care to
show his delight in the increasing honour of his country by an
epistle to Boileau. He published, soon afterwards, a volume of
poems, with the encomiastic character of his deceased patron, the
Earl of Dorset. It began with the College exercise, and ended with
the "Nutbrown Maid."

The Battle of Ramillies soon afterwards (in 1706) excited him to
another effort of poetry. On this occasion he had fewer or less
formidable rivals, and it would be not easy to name any other
composition produced by that event which is now remembered.

Everything has its day. Through the reigns of William and Anne no
prosperous event passed undignified by poetry. In the last war,
when France was disgraced and overpowered in every quarter of the
globe, when Spain, coming to her assistance, only shared her
calamities, and the name of an Englishman was reverenced through
Europe, no poet was heard amidst the general acclamation; the fame
of our counsellors and heroes was entrusted to the Gazetteer. The
nation in time grew weary of the war, and the queen grew weary of
her ministers. The war was burdensome, and the ministers were
insolent. Harley and his friends began to hope that they might, by
driving the Whigs from court and from power, gratify at once the