NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS
A POEM ATTRIBUTED TO PRIOR
An Epistle from the Elector of Bavaria to the French King: After the Baud of Ramillies (Tonson, 1706), has been traditionally ascribed to Prior. A. R. Walter was inclined to accept the attribution. I think it can be disproved on two grounds.
(1) The opening sentences of the Dedicatory Epistle to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal make it clear that the writer was a lawyer. “None of the Profession, over which Your Lordship presides, ought to appear in Verse, without asking Pardon of Your Lordship for the Transgression.”
(2) I have recently examined a volume of folio poems in which a different attribution is given. This volume, which was lately sold along with others of the same provenance, contains the armorial bookplate of a John Plumtre. The arms are those of the well-known Nottingham family; and there can be little doubt that the original owner, who has written his name on a number of the pieces, was that John Plumtre who is mentioned by Nichols as having been member for Nottingham in several parliaments. If so, he was likely to be well informed; and the contents of the volume suggest that he was a judicious person. It contains some five and twenty poetical pamphlets: epicedes on the death of Dryden; poems celebrating the victories of Marlborough; satirical pieces; and a few elegant trifles, including Prior’s To a Young Gentleman in Love and Philips’s ode Ad Henricum St. John. The dated pieces are all between 1700 and 1708, except one which is 1690.
On several of the pieces the original owner has written the author’s name. On this piece he has written “John Plumptre the Gift of ye Author” and “By Stephen Clay Esq.” Stephen Clay (as I learn from Foster’s Alumni and the Calendar of the Inner Temple Records) was a demy of Magdalen, 1690–1702, and was called to the bar November 24, 1700. Sir Charles Frith tells me
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