SOURCE: "Matthew Prior's Dialogues of the Dead," in Ball State University Forum, Vol. VIII, No. 3, Summer, 1967, pp. 73-8.

In the following essay, first presented as a lecture in 1964, Morton contrasts the approach to the dialogue des morts ("dialogue of (or with) the dead") taken by various seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers with that of Prior in his Dialogues of the Dead. Morton focuses particularly on Prior's use of irony, his subtlety, and effective portrayal of setting.

"I shall be transported into the company of wise and just gods," said Socrates of his approaching death, "and of dead men greater than those left alive. You may be assured that I expect to find myself amongst good men." Dr. John Arbuthnot has his Bishop Burnet "dream that I am dead, and conversing with the ghosts of emperors, popes and kings." From the Augustans to the present century—

For I shall meet...