Edward (more generally known as Ned) Ward was the landlord of public-houses alternately in Moorfields, Clerkenwell, Fulwood’s Rents, and Long Acre. He was born in 1667, and died 1731. He was a High Tory, and fond of the society of poets and authors.[516] Attacked in the _Dunciad_, he turned _Don Quixote_ into Hudibrastic verse, and wrote endless songs, lampoons, coarse clever satires, and _Dialogues on Matrimony_ (1710). The father of Pepys’s long-suffering wife lived in Long Acre; and the bustling official describes, with a stultifying exactitude, his horror at a visit which he found himself forced to pay to a house surrounded by taverns. Dr. Arbuthnot, in a letter to Mr. Watkins, gives Bessy Cox--a woman in Long Acre whom Prior would have married when her husband died--a detestable character. The infatuated poet left his estate between his old servant Jonathan Drift, and this woman, who boasted that she was the poet’s Emma,--another virago, Flanders Jane, being his Chloe.[517] It is said of this careless, pleasant poet, that after spending an intellectual evening with Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope, and Swift, in order to unbend, he would smoke a pipe and drink a bottle of ale with a common soldier and his wife in Long Acre. Cibber calls the man a butcher;[518] other writers make him a cobbler or a tavern-keeper, which is more likely. The shameless husband is said to have been proud of the poet’s preference for his wife. Pope, who was remorseless at the failings of friends, calls the woman a wretch, and said to Spence, “Prior was not a right good man; he used to bury himself for whole days and nights together with this poor mean creature, and often drank hard.” This person, who perhaps is misrepresented--and where there is a doubt the prisoner at the bar should always have the benefit of it--was the Venus of the poet’s verse. To her Prior wrote, after Walpole tried to impeach him:-- “From public noise and faction’s strife, From all the busy ills of life, Take me, my Chloe, to thy breast, And lull my wearied soul to rest. “For ever in this humble cell [ale-house] Let thee and I [me], my fair one, dwell; None enter else but Love, and he Shall bar the door and keep the key.” Prior was the son of a joiner,[519] and was brought up, as before mentioned, by his uncle, a tavern-keeper at Charing Cross, where the clever waiter’s knowledge of Horace led to his being sent to college by the Earl of Dorset. Abandoning literature, he finally became our ambassador to France. He died in retirement in 1721.