has a national calling; and Englishmen, as such, have a claim to the good offices of the English Church. It is the tendency of modern Anglicanism to ignore this, and to take up the lower, denominational standpoint. A word of counsel and sympathy, spoken in public and with authority, might have done much-it may be to recall reluctant exiles, in any case to revive faith then dying and since then in many instances dead. It was not spoken; what the latest historian of the English Church characterises as 'the more than Gamaliel-like caution' * of the bishops blocked the way. Tide must be taken at the flood, if it is to lead on to fortune.' The opportunity passed, and will not return.

In Tyrrell's case, it may be permitted to an English Churchman who knew him intimately to think that 'antiquam exquirite matrem' would have been the best and happiest solution, and that his natural home was in the English Church. One cannot go on with a withered heart and a bitter taste in one's mouth for ever,' he wrote. 'Why should I hold on to a body which hates me, and whose exclusive claims I no longer admit?' (ii, 369). Her historical background appealed to his temperament; her freedom and large horizons to his understanding The Church of England, while holding to the principle of Catholicism, has always opened her windows towards the rising sun.' And, had he devoted to an examination of the position of the Reformed Churches half the ingenuity which he displayed in the construction of a purely abstract Roman Catholicism to which nothing in the world of fact corresponded or could ever correspond, he would probably have got nearer solving the problems which perplexed him. That those Churches lost something -much, if we will-by the Reformation is true. But neither the greatness of the deliverance nor that of the gain must be forgotten. And the history of the Roman Church since the Reformation shows, if it shows anything, that the gain could not have been secured without the loss. Nor has the loss been final. The values have been revised, and have come back to us; time has restored what time had taken away.

* F. Warre-Cornish, History of the English Church in the Nineteenth Century,' ii, 117.

If it is asked what is Tyrrell's precise place in the modern theological movement, the answer is that it is that of a constructive and conservative critic. He was not deterred by fear of consequences; he followed where the thought led. But he was constructive in aim, and conservative in method; like Burke, he viewed history and human nature as wholes. He distrusted

'runaway solutions and spurious simplifications, that would force a premature synthesis by leaving out all the intractable difficulties of the problem; that prefer a cheap logicality to the clash and confusion through which the immanent reason of the world works order out of the warring elements of a rich and fruitful chaos. The new must be made out of the old, must retain and transcend all its values.' (Mediævalism,' 186.) His particular application of this principle is not ours; and we may doubt whether it would have satisfied him permanently. But the principle itself—¿x tov diaḍepóvτæv καλλίστην ἁρμονίαν καὶ πάντα κατ ̓ ἔριν γίγνεσθαι - lies at the heart both of thought and of things. The process of gestation is long and painful; but it is by way of assimilation, not of exclusion, that delivery comes.

The negative peace of difficulties evaded and not conquered .... spells spiritual stagnation and decay. Doubtless we must not make this a reason for remaining in a society whose badness is irremediable, or so excessive as to overwhelm and carry us along in its current. But it may be a reason why a society of saints might not be the best school of sanctity; and why the better and the best men in a community must always expect to be at war with the inert and backward majority, and must strain every muscle to tow the passive, unwieldy barge up stream.' (Scylla and Charybdis, p. 186.)

It is not perhaps only to the Church of Rome, or even to the Churches, that these words apply.

ALFRED FAWKES.

Art. 5.-NEW FACTS ABOUT MATTHEW PRIOR.

1. Selected Poems of Matthew Prior. Edited by Austin Dobson. London: Kegan Paul, 1889.

2. The Writings of Matthew Prior. Edited by A. R. Waller. Two vols. Cambridge: University Press, 1905, 1907. 3. Life of Prior. By Austin Dobson. (Dictionary of National Biography.'") London: Smith, Elder, 1896. 4. Matthew Prior. By G. A. Aitken. (Contemporary Review,' May 1890.) London: Isbister.

5. Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission on the MSS at Longleat (vol. III). London: Wyman, 1908. And other works.

'POETRY is gone with him. The rest of the pretenders to it are but scribblers.' Thus, on the death of Matthew Prior, wrote Dr William Stratford, canon of Christ Church, Oxford, and a schoolfellow of the poet. This was friendship's hyperbole, and was doubtless meant for no more; for Swift and Gay were still alive, and Pope was at the height of his fame. Yet in a sense, though a sense certainly unknown to Stratford, there was truth in the first clause of this threnody. If poetry was not gone, something was gone from poetry; and that something was just the quality upon which we look nowadays as poetry's very spirit. The note of pure lyric, which is at its freshest in Shakespeare, descends legitimately, through Fletcher, Herrick, Waller and Dryden, to Matthew Prior. But it grows ever less spontaneous and more polite, and in Prior's Chloes and Strephons it gracefully expires. When Prior died, lyric was laid to rest until its splendid rebirth in Burns and Blake. It is this authentic note of poetry-not 'Solomon,' nor 'Henry and Emma,' nor even 'Alma'-which keeps Prior among the poets who are still to be read with more than antiquarian delight. His songs charm us less by their delicate artificiality than by a certain natural gaiety which lurks beneath it. The quality which gives him an historic interest as the final voice in a great epoch of song gives him an æsthetic value for a generation which rates the lyric higher than the didactic or the polite.

If Prior were notable only for his lyric poetry, there would be little call to probe into the details of his life;

the song would suffice. Prior, however, was a man of many activities and as many accomplishments. His Dialogues of the Dead,' first published a few years ago, display him as a brilliant predecessor of Landor in the art of prose dialogue. He was an excellent letter-writer, numbering all his most interesting contemporaries among his correspondents. As a diplomatist, he won the approval and the confidence of those able and critical politicians, the Whig leaders under William III and the Tory leaders of Anne's reign. Against the praises of William and Portland, Oxford and Bolingbroke, Pope's narrow verdict of nothing out of verse' may be lightly valued. The Treaty of Utrecht, which marked the end of the power of Louis XIV, was known as 'Matt's Peace.' Sir William Trumbull, writing to him in 1696, said, Though I am unwilling to deny you anything you ask, yet I cannot allow you to be a better secretary than a poet, but must make you amends in saying you have found the secret of joining two things generally thought incompatible, poetry and business, and both in perfection.' It is curious that a man so versatile, at once so individual and so typical of his age, should still lack a biographer. Johnson's ill-informed and unsympathetic 'Life' deserves much of the contempt with which Horace Walpole and George Selwyn † greeted its appearance. The account which Prior himself is said to have drawn up for Jacob's Lives of the Poets' is both jejune and inaccurate; and what there is of the personal in the posthumous and largely spurious History of my own Time' is not much worthier of trust. Though Prior's name was on the titlepage of this work, he had little hand in its preparation. The bost modern accounts of the poet are those by Mr Austin Dobson and Mr G. A. Aitken mentioned at the head of this article. These are invaluable; but neither Mr Dobson nor Mr Aitken, though each brings his handful of new Taots, protonds to have exhausted the evidence. Nor can the following pages claim to contain anything more than a further handful from the heap which awaits the biographerd

* Next, Apex Comm. Longloat ass, iii, 79,

↑ Mist apex Comm. Carlisle mess, 306,

The souves chiefly drawn on for these notes are the rich collections of ispers i private hands made accessible by the Historical Manuscripts

*

A shadow of doubt has always hung round the poet's birth. Walpole's unsupported insinuation that he was possibly the son of his patron, the Earl of Dorset, has rightly been dismissed as the sort of story which Horace liked to believe and to circulate. Even among his contemporaries there was no question of Prior's humble origin. Lord Strafford-' as proud as Hell,' said Swift-objected to being associated with him on that account; and Queen Anne, until over-persuaded by the Earl of Oxford, considered his 'meane extraction' a bar to his appointment to the position of ambassador.† It was the degree of lowliness which was in doubt. The strong tradition which made him the son of George Prior, a carpenter of Wimborne in Dorset, has been generally accepted, although the poet seems to have represented himself as the son of a London citizen. In the registers of St John's College, Cambridge, he is once described as of Dorset, once as of Middlesex, while in a third case 'Dorcestr.' has been altered to Middlesexiensis.' Mr Dobson summons three witnesses who had known persons acquainted with Matthew or members of his family at Wimborne. The evidence in two of these cases is late and obviously confused, but in the third, from Hutchins's 'History of Dorset,' it is of more value. About 1727, one Prior of Godmanston, a labouring man, and living 1755, declared to a company of gentlemen where Mr Hutchins was present, that he was Mr Prior's cousin, and remembered his going to Wimborne to visit him, and afterwards heard he became a great man.' The matter is put beyond question by the evidence of the same labourer as given, with greater circumstance, to Conyers Place, master of the Dorchester grammar school, and by him reported to Conyers Middleton, the distinguished controversial divine, in the following letter dated at Dorchester December 7, 1730.

Commission. Foremost of these is the third volume of the report on the Mss at Longleat, belonging to the Marquess of Bath, which is almost entirely filled with Prior's correspondence. But other collections have yielded information, the most fruitful being the Harley papers belonging to the Duke of Portland at Welbeck Abbey. The letters quoted in this article are now published for the first time, except in so far as they are given in the Hist. MSS Comm. Reports. The quotations from these Reports are given with the permission of H.M. Stationery Office. + Longleat Mss, i, 217. iii, 253.

* Letters (ed. Toynbee), ii, 381.