the door,
Let in the drunkard, and let out----.
But, as to villains it has often chanc'd,
Was for his wit and wickedness advanc'd.
Let no man think his new behaviour strange,
No metamorphosis can nature change;
Effects are chain'd to causes; generally,
The rascal born will like a rascal die.
His Prince's favours follow'd him in vain;
They chang'd the circumstance, but not the man.
While out of pocket, and his spirits low,
He'd beg, write panegyrics, cringe, and bow;
But when good pensions had his labours crown'd,
His panegyrics into satires turn'd;
O what assiduous pains does Prior take
To let great Dorset see he could mistake!
Dissembling nature false description gave,
Show'd him the poet, but conceal'd the knave.

To us the poet Prior is better known than the placeman Prior; yet in
his own day the reverse often occurred. Prior was a State Proteus;
Sunderland, the most ambiguous of politicians, was the _Erle Robert_
to whom he addressed his _Mice_; and Prior was now Secretary to the
Embassy at Ryswick and Paris; independent even of the English
ambassador--now a Lord of Trade, and, at length, a Minister
Plenipotentiary to Louis XIV.

Our business is with his poetical feelings.

Prior declares he was chiefly "a poet by accident;" and hints, in
collecting his works, that "some of them, as they came singly from the
first impression, have lain long and quietly in Mr. Tonson's shop."
When his party had their downfall, and he was confined two years in
prison, he composed his "Alma," to while away prison hours; and when,
at length, he obtained his freedom, he had nothing remaining but that
fellowship which, in his exaltation, he had been censured for
retaining, but which he then said he might have to live upon at last.
Prior had great sagacity, and too right a notion of human affairs in
politics, to expect his party would last his time, or in poetry, that
he could ever derive a revenue from rhymes!

I will now show that that rare personage, a sensible poet, in
reviewing his life in that hour of solitude when no passion is
retained but truth, while we are casting up the amount of our past
days scrupulously to ourselves, felicitated himself that the natural
bent of his mind, which inclined to poetry, had been checked, and not
indulged, throughout his whole life. Prior congratulated himself that
he had been only "a poet by accident," not by occupation.

In a manuscript by Prior, con