ranslated half-way out of one language into the other, which raised the
Doctor's reputation, and confounded all ranks in literature.

In the short period above alluded to, authors professed to write as
other men spoke; every body now affects to speak as authors write; and
any one who retains the use of his mother tongue, either in writing or
conversation, is looked upon as a very illiterate character.

Prior and Gay belong, in the characteristic excellences of their
style, to the same class of writers with Suckling, Rochester, and
Sedley: the former imbibed most of the licentious levity of the age of
Charles II. and carried it on beyond the Revolution under King William.
Prior has left no single work equal to Gay's Fables, or the Beggar's
Opera. But in his lyrical and fugitive pieces he has shown even more
genius, more playfulness, more mischievous gaiety. No one has exceeded
him in the laughing grace with which he glances at a subject that will
not bear examining, with which he gently hints at what cannot be
directly insisted on, with which he half conceals, and half draws aside
the veil from some of the Muses' nicest mysteries. His Muse is, in fact,
a giddy wanton flirt, who spends her time in playing at snap-dragon and
blind-man's buff, who tells what she should not, and knows more than she
tells. She laughs at the tricks she shews us, and blushes, or would be
thought to do so, at what she keeps concealed. Prior has translated
several of Fontaine's Tales from the French; and they have lost nothing
in the translation, either of their wit or malice. I need not name them:
but the one I like the most, is that of Cupid in search of Venus's
doves. No one could insinuate a knavish plot, a tender point, a loose
moral, with such unconscious archness, and careless raillery, as if he
gained new self-possession and adroitness from the perplexity and
confusion into which he throws scrupulous imaginations, and knew how to
seize on all the ticklish parts of his subject, from their involuntarily
shrinking under his grasp. Some of his imitations of Boileau's servile
addresses to Louis XIV. which he has applied with a happy mixture of wit
and patriotic enthusiasm to King William, or as he familiarly calls him,
to

"Little Will, the scourge of France,
No Godhead, but the first of men,"

are excellent, and shew the same talent for _double-entendre_ and the
same gallantry of spirit, whether in the softer lyric, or