perhaps, he
verges upon indelicacy, but conceals it so well among feathers and rose
leaves, that we may half pardon it. Although always sprightly he is not
often actually humorous, but we may quote the following advice to a
husband from the "English Padlock"

"Be to her virtues very kind,
And to her faults a little blind,
Let all her ways be unconfined,
And clap your padlock on her mind."

"Yes; ev'ry poet is a fool;
By demonstration Ned can show it;
Happy could Ned's inverted rule,
Prove ev'ry fool to be a poet."

"How old may Phyllis be, you ask,
Whose beauty thus all hearts engages?
To answer is no easy task,
For she has really two ages.

"Stiff in brocade and pinched in stays,
Her patches, paint, and jewels on:
All day let envy view her face,
And Phyllis is but twenty-one.

"Paint, patches, jewels, laid aside,
At night astronomers agree,
The evening has the day belied,
And Phyllis is some forty-three."

"Helen was just slipt from bed,
Her eyebrows on the toilet lay,
Away the kitten with them fled,
As fees belonging to her prey."

"For this misfortune, careless Jane,
Assure yourself, was soundly rated:
And Madam getting up again,
With her own hand the mouse-trap baited.

"On little things as sages write,
Depends our human joy or sorrow;
If we don't catch a mouse to-night,
Alas! no eyebrows for to-morrow."

He wrote the following impromptu epitaph on himself--

"Nobles and heralds by your leave,
Here lies what once was Matthew Prior,
The son of Adam and of Eve,
Can Bourbon or Nassau go higher."

But he does not often descend to so much levity as this, his wing is
generally in a higher atmosphere. Sir Walter Scott observes that in the
powers of approaching and touching the finer feelings of the heart, he
has never been excelled, if indeed he has ever been equalled.

Prior wrote a parody called "Erle Robert's Mice," but Pope is more
prolific than any other poet in such productions. His earlier taste
seems to have been for imitation, and he wrote good parodies on Waller
and Cowley, and a bad travesty on Spencer. "January and May" and "The
Wife of Bath" are founded upon Chaucer's Tales. Pope did not generally
indulge in travesty, his object was not to ridicule his original, but
rather to assist himself by borrowing its style. His productions are the
best examples of parodies in this latter and better sense. Thus, he
though