It was not known to France that Prior, who was deputed by Queen Anne to adjust the treaty of Utrecht with Louis XIV., was a poet. France has since repaid England in the same coin, for Cardinal Dubois sent our Destouches to London, where he passed as little for a poet as Prior in France. Prior was originally an attendant at a tavern kept by his uncle, when the earl of Dorset, a good poet himself and a lover of the bottle, one day surprised him reading Horace; in the same manner as Lord Ailsa found his gardener reading Newton. Ailsa made his gardener a good geometrician, and Dorset made a very agreeable poet of his vintner.

It was Prior who wrote the history of the soul under the title of “Alma,” and it is the most natural which has hitherto been composed on an existence so much felt, and so little known. The soul, according to “Alma,” resides at first, in the extremities; in the feet and hands of children, and from thence gradually ascends to the centre of the body at the age of puberty. Its next step is to the heart, in which it engenders sentiments of love and heroism; thence it mounts to the head at a mature age, where it reasons as well as it is able; and in old age it is not known what becomes of it; it is the sap of an aged tree which evaporates, and is not renewed again. This work is probably too long, for all pleasantry should be short; and it might even be as well were the serious short also.

Prior made a small poem on the battle of Hochst?dt. It is not equal to his “Alma”; there is, however, one good apostrophe to Boileau, who is called a satirical flatterer for taking so much pains to sing that Louis did not pass the Rhine. Our plenipotentiary finished by paraphrasing, in fifteen hundred verses, the words attributed to Solomon, that “all is vanity.” Fifteen thousand verses might be written on this subject; but woe to him who says all which can be said upon it!

At length Queen Anne dying, the ministry changed, and the peace adjusted by Prior being altogether unpopular, he had nothing to depend upon except an edition of his works; which were subscribed for by his party: after which he died like a philosopher, which is the usual mode of dying of all respectable Englishmen.
Hudibras.

There is an English poem which it is very difficult to make foreigners understand, entitled “Hudibras.” It is a very humorous work, although the subject is the civil war of the time of Cromwell. A struggle which cost so much blood and so many tears, originated a poem which obliges the most serious reader to smile. An example of this contrast is found in our “Satire of Menippus.” Certainly the Romans would not have made a burlesque poem on the wars of Pompey and C?sar, or the proscription of Antony and Octavius. How then is it that the frightful evils of the League in France, and of the wars between the king and parliament in England, have proved sources of pleasantry? because at bottom there is something ridiculous hid beneath these fatal quarrels. The citizens of Paris, at the head of the faction of Sixteen, mingled impertinence with the miseries of faction. The intrigues of women, of the legates and of the monks, presented a comic aspect, notwithstanding the calamities which they produced. The theological disputes and enthusiasm of the Puritans in England, were also very open to raillery; and this fund of the ridiculous, well managed, might pleasantly enough aid in dispersing the tragical horrors which abound on the surface. If the bull Unigenitus caused the shedding of blood, the little poem “Philotanus” was no less suitable to the subject; and it is only to be complained of for not being so gay, so pleasant, and so various as it might have been; and for not fulfilling in the course of the work the promise held out by its commencement.

The poem of “Hudibras” of which I speak, seems to be a composition of the satire of “Menippus” and of “Don Quixote.” It surpasses them in the advantage of verse and also in wit; the former indeed does not come near it; being a very middling production; but notwithstanding his wit, the author of “Hudibras” is much beneath “Don Quixote.” Taste, vivacity, the art of narrating and of introducing adventures, with the faculty of never being tedious, go farther than wit; and moreover, “Don Quixote” is read by all nations, and “Hudibras” by the English alone.

Butler, the author of this extraordinary poem, was contemporary with Milton, and enjoyed infinitely more temporary popularity than the latter, because his work was humorous, and that of Milton m............