than she tells.  She laughs at the tricks she shews us, and blushes, or would be thought to do so, at what she keeps concealed.  Prior has translated several of Fontaine’s Tales from the French; and they have lost nothing in the translation, either of their wit or malice.  I need not name them:  but the one I like the most, is that of Cupid in search of Venus’s doves.  No one could insinuate a knavish plot, a tender point, a loose moral, with such unconscious archness, and careless raillery, as if he gained new self-possession and adroitness from the perplexity and confusion into which he throws scrupulous imaginations, and knew how to seize on all the ticklish parts of his subject, from their involuntarily shrinking under his grasp.  Some of his imitations of Boileau’s servile addresses to Louis XIV. which he has applied with a happy mixture of wit and patriotic enthusiasm to King William, or as he familiarly calls him, to

      “Little Will, the scourge of France,
      No Godhead, but the first of men,”

are excellent, and shew the same talent for double-entendre and the same gallantry of spirit, whether in the softer lyric, or the more lively heroic.  Some of Prior’s bon mots are the best that are recorded.—­His serious poetry, as his Solomon, is as heavy as his familiar style was light and agreeable.  His moral Muse is a Magdalen, and should not have obtruded herself on public view.  Henry and Emma is a paraphrase of the old ballad of the Nut-brown Maid, and not so good as the original.  In short, as we often see in other cases, where men thwart their own genius, Prior’s sentimental and romantic productions are mere affectation, the result not of powerful impulse or real feeling, but of a consciousness of his deficiencies, and a wish to supply their place by labour and art.

Gay was sometimes grosser than Prior, not systematically, but inadvertently—­from not being so well aware of what he was about; nor was there the same necessity for caution, for his grossness is by no means so seductive or inviting.

Gay’s Fables are certainly a work of great merit, both as to the quantity of invention implied, and as to the elegance and facility of the execution.  They are, however, spun out too long; the descriptions and narrative are too diffuse and desultory; and the moral is sometimes without point.  They are more like Tales than Fables.  The best are, perhaps, the Hare with Many Friends, the Monkeys, and the Fox at the Point of Death.  His Pastorals are pleasing and poetical.  But his capital work is his Beggar’s Opera.  It is indeed a masterpiece of wit and genius, not to say of morality.  In composing it, he chose a very unpromising ground to work upon, and he has prided himself in adorning it with all the graces, the precision, and brilliancy of style.  It is a vulgar error to call this a vulgar play.  So far from it, that I do not scruple to say that it appears to me one of the most refined productions