The Poetical Works of Matthew Prior. Volume 2

When his carpenter father died, Matthew Prior was taken out of school and apprenticed to his uncle, a tavern-keeper. At the tavern, the Earl of Dorset saw him reading Horace while working, sent the boy to school, and later became his patron. As Prior wrote his poetry, he was deeply interested in the intrigues of the court, in which he was in and out of favor. He rose far above his low birth, but was late in life thrust out of his government position and jailed for two years when he found himself on the wrong end of the political spectrum. While in prison, his friends had all his poems printed in a folio to cheer him up.