equal, in point of vigour, richness, and variety, to that of Pope, or Mickle, as it appears in the Iliad and Lusiad, is rarely defective in smoothness and modulation, and sometimes displays a considerable portion of melody and beauty. The miscellaneous poems of Rowe, published in the editions of the British Poets, are, with the exception of "The Despairing Shepherd,' of little value. The pecuniary circumstances of our author, which had been originally independent, were in the latter part of his life augmented to affluence by places under government. In the reign of Queen Anne, he had been appointed by the duke of Queensberry, secretary for public affairs; and upon the death of his grace, it is related that, with a view to preferment, he frequently attended the levees of the earl of Oxford, where at length an incident of rather a ludicrous nature put an end to his assiduities. "Mr Rowe," says the writer of his life in the Biographia Britannica, "going one day to pay his court to the earl, then advanced to be lord-high-treasurer, was courteously received by his lordshp, who asked him if he understood Spanish well? He answered no; but thinking that the earl might intend to send him into Spain on some honourable commission, he presently added, that he did not doubt in a short time both to understand and speak it: and the treasurer approving of what he said, Mr Rowe took his leave, and immediately retired to a private country farm-house; where in a few months having learnt Spanish, he waited again upon the earl, to acquaint him with his diligence; whereupon his lordship asking if he was sure he understood the language thoroughly, and our author answering in the affirmative, that fathomless minister burst out into the following exclamation: How happy are you, Mr Rowe, that you can enjoy the pleasure of reading and understanding Don Quixote in the original !' For the disappointment which he thus suffered he was liberally consoled on the accession of George I. when he was immediately made poet-laureat, and one of the land-surveyors of the customs in the port of London. To these not very congenial employments were shortly afterwards added the clerkship of the council to the prince of Wales, and the secretaryship of the presentations, to which, without any solicitation on his part, he was instantly appointed by the lord-chancellor Parker on his receival of the seals. His enjoyment of these promotions was, however, but of short duration; for he died on the sixth of December, 1718, aged forty-four, and was buried on the nineteenth of the same month in Westminster-abbey. Mr Rowe twice entered into the conjugal state, and had a son by his first, and a daughter by his second, wife. He was a man elegant in his person and manners, of a lively and amiable temper, yet partial to occasional solitude; he therefore frequently retired into the country, where, according to the relation of his friend, Dr Welwood, he usually employed his time in the study of divinity and ecclesiastical history. He was not only well-acquainted with the learned languages, but familiar with French, Italian, and Spanish, the first of which he spoke with fluency.' We are indebted for the above memoir to Dr Drake's elegant sketches of our periodical essayists. Matthew Prior. BORN A. D. 1664.-DIED A. d. 1721. MATTHEW PRIOR was the son of George Prior, citizen of London. and was born in the year 1664. His father dying when he was very young, left him to the care of an uncle, a vintner near Charing-cross, who discharged the trust that was reposed in him with a tenderness truly paternal, as Prior always acknowledged with the highest professions of gratitude. He received part of his education at Westminster school, where he greatly distinguished himself; but was afterwards taken home by his uncle in order to be bred up to his trade. Notwithstanding the mean employment to which Prior seemed now doomed, yet, at his leisure hours, he prosecuted the study of the classics, and especially his favourite Horace, which led to his being taken notice of by the polite company which resorted to his uncle's house. It happened one day that the earl of Dorset being at this tavern with several gentlemen of rank, the discourse turned upon the odes of Horace; and the company being divided in their sentiments about a passage in that poet, one of the gentlemen said, "I find we are not likely to agree in our criticisms; but, if I am not mistaken, there is a young fellow in the house who is able to set us all right;" upon which he named Prior, who was immediately sent for, and desired to give his opinion of Horace's meaning in the ode under consideration. This he did with great modesty, and so much to the satisfaction of the company that the earl of Dorset determined to remove him to some station more suited to his genius; and accordingly sent him, at his own expense, to St John's college, Cambridge, where he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1686, and afterwards became a fellow of the college. During his residence at the university, he contracted an intimate friendship with Charles Montague, Esq. afterwards earl of Halifax; in conjunction with whom he wrote a very humorous piece, entitled, The Hind and the Panther transversed to the story of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse,' printed in 1687, in 4to, in answer to Dryden's Hind and Panther,' published the year before. 6 Upon the Revolution, Mr Prior was brought to court by his great patron, the earl of Dorset, by whose interest he was introduced to public employment; and, in the year 1690, was made secretary to the earl of Berkley, plenipotentiary at the Hague. In this station he acquitted himself so well, that King William, desirous at this time to keep him near his person, made him one of the gentlemen of his bedchamber. He was afterwards appointed secretary to the earls of Pembroke and Jersey, and Sir Joseph Williamson, ambassadors and plenipotentiaries at the treaty of Ryswick, in 1697; the same year he was nominated principal secretary to the embassy to the court of France. He continued in this station during the two embassies of the earls of Portland and Jersey. In 1699 King William sent him from England to hold a private conference with him at his palace at Loo, in Holland; and, upon his re turn, he was made under-secretary of state in the earl of Jersey's office, who was principal secretary of state for the northern provinces. He afterwards went to Paris, where he had a principal share in negotiating the partition-treaty. In 1700 he was created Master of Arts by mandamus, and appointed one of the lords-commissioners of trade and plantations, upon the resignation of Mr Locke. He was also chosen member of parliament for East Grimsted in Sussex. Upon the success of the war with France after the accession of Queen Anne, Prior exerted his poetical talents in honour of his country; first in his letter to Boileau, the celebrated French poet, on the victory at Blenheim in 1704; and again in an ode on the success of her majesty's arms in 1706. In 1710 he was supposed to have had a share in writing The Examiner,' and particularly a criticism in it upon a poem of Dr Garth's to the earl of Godolphin. About this time, when Godolphin was defeated by Oxford, and the tories began again to rally, Prior and Garth espoused opposite interests; Prior wrote for, and Garth against, the court. 6 While Prior was thus early initiated into public affairs, and continued in the hurry of business for many years, it must appear not a little surprising that he should find sufficient opportunities to cultivate his poetical talents as he did. In his preface to his poems, he says, "that poetry was only the product of his leisure hours; that he had commonly business enough upon his hands, and was only a poet by acciBolingbroke, who, notwithstanding the many exceptions to his conduct and sentiments in other instances, must be allowed to be an accomplished judge of fine talents, entertained the highest esteem for Prior's abilities. In a letter dated 10th September, 1712, addressed to Mr Prior, while he was the queen's minister and plenipotentiary at the court of France, his lordship pays him the following compliment: "For God's sake, Matt, hide the nakedness of thy country, and give the best turn thy fertile brain will furnish thee with to the blunders of thy countrymen, who are not much better politicians than the French are poets." His lordship thus concludes his epistle: "It is near three o'clock in the morning. I have been hard at work all day, and am not yet enough recovered to bear much fatigue; excuse, therefore, the confusedness of this scroll, which is only from Harry to Matt, and not from the secretary to the minister. Adieu; my pen is ready to drop out of my hand, it being now three o'clock in the morning. Believe that no man loves you better, or is more faithfully yours, &c." Prior is represented by contemporary writers as a gentleman who united the elegance and politeness of a court with the habits of a scholar and a man of genius. This representation may be just; yet it is generally true that they who rise from low life always retain some traces of their original. There was one particular in which Prior verified this remark. The same woman who could charm the waiter in a tavern, still maintained her dominion over the minister in France. The Chloe of Prior, it seems, was a woman in his own station of life; but he never forsook her in the height of his promotions. One would imagine, however, that this woman— -who is said to have been a butcher's wife,-Spence calls her "a poor mean creature," must either have been very handsome, or have had something about her superior to people of her rank, yet it seems the case was otherwise, and no better reason can be given for his attachment to her but that she was to his taste. Prior was appointed minister-plenipotentiary to the court of France to negotiate the peace of Utrecht; and, after it was concluded, he remained at that court with the character of British ambassador till some months after the accession of George I, when he was succeeded by the earl of Stair. Upon his arrival, he underwent a very strict examination by a committee of the privy-council. His political friend, Bolingbroke, foreseeing a storm, took shelter in France. On the 10th of June, 1715, Robert Walpole moved the house against him, and, on the 17th, Prior was ordered into close custody. In the year 1717, an act of grace was passed in favour of those who had opposed the Hanoverian succession, as well as those who had been in open rebellion; but Prior was exempted from it. At the close of that year, however, he was discharged from his confinement, and retired from all public employment. The severe usage which Prior met with, perhaps, was the occasion of the following lines, addressed to his Chloe: "From public noise, and factious strife, From all the busy ills of life, Take me, my Chloe, to thy breast, To painted roofs, and shining spires, May Heaven around his destin'd head To sum up all the rage of Fate In these two things I dread and hate,- Prior, after a length of years passed in various services of active life, was desirous of spending the remainder of his days in rural tranquillity. He led a very retired life at Downhall in Essex; and found, he declares, a more solid and innocent satisfaction among the woods and meadows, than he had ever enjoyed in the courts of princes. Having finished his Solomon,' a poem on the vanity of the world, -his most admired performance,-he published by subscription, an edition of all his poems, in one volume, folio. Some time after, he formed a design of writing a history of his own time; but he had made very little progress in it when a lingering fever proved fatal to him. He died in the year 1721, at Wimpole, then a seat of the earl of Oxford, at a small distance from Cambridge; his remains were interred in Westminster-abbey, where a monument was erected to his memory, at his own expense, for which purpose he had in his lifetime set apart £500. A suitable inscription was composed for it by Dr Freind, master of Westminster school. After his death, several posthumous poems ascribed to him, were published; and, in 1740, appeared the History of his Own Time,' said to have been printed from his own manuscripts, but it is a performance totally unworthy of him. The best edition of our author's poems is that of 1733, by Samuel Humphreys, Esq. in three vols., to which are prefixed memoirs of his life, the chief authority for the concise account which we have here given of him. Prior has imitated with some success, in his tales and apologues, the graceful ease and naïvetè of the French poets. He is totally destitute, however, of the highest attributes of the poetical genius. Of his personal character, we are constrained to confess, in the language of Spence, that he "was not a right good man." Sir Christopher Wren. BORN A. D. 1632.-DIED A. D. 1723. In CHRISTOPHER WREN, the greatest of British architects, was born at East Knoyle, in Wiltshire, the rectory of his father Dr Christopher Wren, dean of Windsor, on the 20th of October, 1632. His family was of Danish origin. The genius of young Wren early displayed itself. While yet a boy he invented a sort of orrery, and some other mechanical contrivances, which introduced him to the notice of Bishop Wilkins, Dr Willis, and other eminent mathematicians of the day. 1646, he entered as a gentleman-commoner at Wadham college, Oxford; and in 1650 graduated as bachelor of arts. In 1653, he was elected fellow of his college, and soon after went to London. During his residence at Oxford, he directed his attention chiefly to mathematical and astronomical science; and he was one of the first in England who endeavoured to account for the variations in the height of the mercury of the barometer-an instrument just invented by Torricelli— upon the principle of a column of atmospheric air varying in weight. He also paid considerable attention to anatomy, and was employed by Sir Charles Scarborough as a demonstrating assistant. The merit of having been the first to propose and try the physiological experiment of injecting liquids of various kinds into the veins of living animals is claimed, and apparently on good grounds, for Wren. It happened favourably for the young philosopher, that during his residence at Oxford that city became the head-quarters of that association of philosophical inquirers that laid the foundation of the Royal society. Wren, though yet a mere youth, was admitted to their conferences, and doubtless profited greatly by his intercourse with such men as Dr Willis, Dr Wilkins, Sir W. Petty, Robert Boyle, and other eminent philosophers, who belonged to the association. In 1657 Wren was chosen to the professorship of astronomy in Gresham college, London. His inaugural oration on assuming this chair, is published in Ward's Lives of the Gresham Professors.' It was received with great applause, and the course was honoured by the attendance of many of the most distinguished men of science of the day. In 1658, he published a solution of Pascal's celebrated problem which had been given out under the assumed name of Jean de Mountfort; and in the same year he communicated various mathematical papers to Dr Wallis, the Savilian professor at Oxford, which were published by |