SOURCE: "An Autobiographical Ballad by Matthew Prior," in The British Library Journal, Vol. 18, No. 2, Autumn, 1992, pp. 163-70.

In the following essay, Wright and Wright describe and discuss a previously unpublished ballad by Prior.

In the most recent edition of Prior's works, the editors asserted their confidence that, while Prior was a parliamentary prisoner, he composed a poem reflecting some of the circumstances of his confinement and his first acquaintance with Elizabeth Cox, the mistress of his later years.¹ However, the only vestige of such a poem known to the editors was a set of nine untitled stanzas that Joseph Moser had contributed to The European Magazine in 1803.² Since Moser explained that the poem had come to him through its recitation by a relative who had learned it from Prior when she was a child, and since he confessed that he could 'only recollect a few verses …, and those...