south-west of the church of Hatfield Broad Oak. It is now in the possession of the Selwyn family, who still preserve Prior's favourite chair; but at the poet's death it reverted, by arrangement, to Lord Harley. In a ballad of ‘Down Hall,’ afterwards published separately, Prior describes charmingly his first visit to his new retreat, in company with Harley's agent, John Morley [q. v.], the notorious land-jobber, of Halstead, and his own Swedish servant, Newman or Oeman. Unhappily his health was already failing, and, like his friend Swift, he suffered from deafness. At Down Hall, however, he continued, for the most part, to reside, amusing himself in the manner of Pope by nursing his ailments and improving his property until his death, which took place on 18 Sept. 1721, at Lord Harley's seat of Wimpole, where he was on a visit. He was in his fifty-eighth year, a circumstance which did not prevent an admirer (Mr. Robert Ingram) from writing:
Horace and He were call'd in haste
From this vile Earth to Heaven;
The cruel year not fully pass'd
Ætatis, fifty-seven.
He was buried, as he desired, ‘at the feet of Spenser,’ on 25 Sept., and left five hundred pounds for a monument. This was duly erected, close to Shadwell's, in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, surmounted with the bust by Antoine Coysevox (misnamed Coriveaux in the poet's will), which had been given to him by Louis XIV. His epitaph was written by the copious Dr. Robert Freind [q. v.] To ‘the College of St. John the Evangelist, in Cambridge,’ he left by will two hundred pounds' worth of books. These, which were to be preserved in the library with some earlier gifts, included the poems of 1718 ‘in the greatest paper’ (there are said to have been three issues of this emphatically ‘tall’ volume). He also left to the college Hyacinthe Rigaud's portrait of his patron, Edward, earl of Jersey, and his own portrait by Alexis-Simon Belle, familiar in Vertue's engraving. There is another well-known likeness of him by Jonathan Richardson in the National Portrait Gallery, which again is a duplicate of one belonging to the Duke of Portland, and this too was engraved by Vertue in 1719 for Lord Harley (Letter to Swift, 4 May 1720). Prior was also painted by Kneller (Stationers' Hall), Michael Dahl, and others, including an unknown artist, whose work is in the Dyce collection at South Kensington. The Dahl portrait, once the poet's own property, and afterwards Lord Oxford's, now belongs to Mr. Lewis Harcourt, of Nuneham Park, and was etched in 1889 by G. W. Rhead for the ‘Parchment Library.’ Besides the Coysevox bust above mentioned, there is one attributed to Roubiliac, which was purchased for one hundred and thirty guineas by Sir Robert Peel at the Stowe sale of 1848 (Illustrated London News, 26 Aug.); in the Portland collection, dispersed in 1786, was an enamel by Boit (Academy, 4 Aug. 1883).
The character of Prior has suffered somewhat from Johnson's unlucky application to it of the line in Horace about the cask which retains the scent of its first wine. ‘In his private relaxation,’ says the doctor, ‘he revived the tavern,’ i.e. the Rhenish Wine House of his youth; and certainly some of the stories which have been repeated from Spence, Arbuthnot, and others, of the very humble social status of his Chloes and ‘nut-brown maids’ lend a qualified support to Johnson's epigram (cf. Spence, Anecdotes, 1858, pp. 2, 37; Richardsoniana, 1776, p. 275). But the evidence of his better qualities rests upon a surer foundation. Those who knew him well—and, both by rank and intellect, they were some of the noblest in the land—concur in praising him; and even Johnson rather inconsistently admits that in a scandal-mongering age little ill is heard of him. But, by his, own admission (cf. verses For my own Monument), his standard can hardly have been a very elevated one; and in his official life, although he performed his duties creditably, he was probably an opportunist rather than an enthusiast. In private there can be no doubt that he was a kind friend, and, as far as is possible to a valetudinarian, a pleasant and an equable companion. Swift's picture of him (Journal to Stella, 21 Feb. 1711) as one who ‘has generally a cough, which he only calls a cold,’ and who walks in the park ‘to make himself fat,’ coupled with Davis's ‘thin, hollow-looked man,’ and Bolingbroke's ‘visage de bois,’ may stand in place of longer descriptions. As to his amiability, there is no better testimony than that of Lord Harley's daughter, afterwards the Duchess of Portland, to whom as a child Prior addressed the lines beginning ‘My noble, lovely little Peggy.’ Her recollection of him was that he made ‘himself beloved by every living thing in the house—master, child, and servant, human creature, or animal’ (Lady M. Wortley Montagu, Works, ed. Wharncliffe, 1837, i. 63).
Apart from the somewhat full-wigged dedication prefixed to his poems of 1709 and 1718, and his contributions in 1710 to the tory ‘Examiner,’ Prior's known prose works are of slight importance. At Longleat there
