LIVES OF THE ENGLISH POETS COWLEY. THE Life of COWLEY, notwithstanding the pen-time, that his teachers never could bring it to reury of English biography, has been written by tain the ordinary rules of grammar." Dr. Sprat, an author whose pregnancy of imagin- This is an instance of the natural desire of man ation and elegance of language have deservedly to propagate a wonder. It is surely very difficult set him high in the ranks of literature; but his to tell any thing as it was heard, when Sprat zeal of friendship, or ambition of eloquence, has could not refrain from amplifying a commodious produced a funeral oration rather than a history: incident, though the book to which he prefixhe has given the character, not the life, of Cow-ed his narrative contained his confutation. A ley; for he writes with so little detail, that scarcely memory admitting some things, and rejecting any thing is distinctly known, but all is shown confused and enlarged through the mist of panegyric. ABRAHAM COWLEY was born in the year one thousand six hundred and eighteen. His father was a grocer, whose condition Dr. Sprat conceals under the general appellation of a citizen; and, what would probably not have been less carefully suppressed, the omission of his name in the register of St. Dunstan's parish gives reason to suspect that his father was a sectary. Whoever he was, he died before the birth of his son, and conse quently left him to the care of his mother; whom Wood represents as struggling earnestly to procure him a literary education, and who, as she lived to the age of eighty, had her solicitude rewarded by seeing her son eminent, and, I hope, by seeing him fortunate, and partaking his prosperity. We know, at least, from Sprat's account, that he always acknowledged her care, and justly paid the dues of filial gratitude. others, an intellectual digestion that concocted the pulp of learning, but refused the husks, had the appearance of an instinctive elegance, of a particular provision made by Nature for literary politeness. But in the author's own honest relation, the marvel vanishes: he was, he says, such "an enemy to all constraint, that his master never could prevail on him to learn the rules without book." He does not tell that he could not learn the rules; but that, being able to perform his exercises without them, and being an "enemy to constraint," he spared himself the labour. Among the English poets, Cowley, Milton, and Pope, might be said "to lisp in numbers," and have given such early proofs, not only of powers of language, but of comprehension of things, as to more tardy minds seem scarcely credible. But of the learned puerilities of Cowley there is no doubt, since a volume of his poems was not only written, but printed in his thirteenth year ;* containing, with other poetical compositions, "The tragical History of Pyramus and Thisbe," written when he was ten years old; and "Constantia and Philetus," written two years after. In the window of his mother's apartment lay Spenser's Fairy Queen; in which he very early took delight to read, till, by feeling the charms of verse, he became, as he relates, irrecoverably a poet. Such are the accidents which, sometimes While he was yet at school he produced a coremembered, and perhaps sometimes forgotten, medy called "Love's Riddle," though it was not produce that particular designation of mind, and published till he had been some time at Campropensity for some certain science or employ-bridge. This comedy is of the pastoral kind, ment, which is commonly called genius. The which requires no acquaintance with the living true genius is a mind of large general powers, world, and therefore the time at which it was accidentally determined to some particular direc- composed adds little to the wonders of Cowley's tion. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great painter of minority. the present age, had the first fondness for his art excited by the perusal of Richardson's treatise. By his mother's solicitation he was admitted into Westminster School, where he was soon distinguished. He was wont, says Sprat, to relate, "That he had is defect in his memory at that * This volume was not published before 1633, when Cowley was fifteen years old. Dr. Johnson, as well as portrait of Cowley being by mistake marked with the former biographers, seems to have been misled by the age of thirteen years.-R. In 1636, he was removed to Cambridge, where | homage to his Laura, refined the manners of the he continued his studies with great intenseness: lettered world, and filled Europe with love and for he is said to have written, while he was yet a poetry. But the basis of all excellence is truth; young student, the greater part of his "Davideis;" "he that professes love ought to feel its power. a work, of which the materials could not have Petrarch was a real lover, and Laura doubtless been collected without the study of many years, deserved his tenderness. Of Cowley, we are but by a mind of the greatest vigour and activity. told by Barnes, who had means enough of inTwo years after his settlement at Cambridge formation, that, whatever he may talk of his own he published "Love's Riddle," with a poetical inflammability, and the variety of characters by dedication to Sir Kenelm Digby; of whose ac- which his heart was divided, he in reality was quaintance all nis contemporaries seem to have in love but once, and then never had resolution been ambitious; and "Naufragium Joculare," to tell his passion. a comedy written in Latin, but without due attention to the ancient models; for it was not loose verse, but mere prose. It was printed, with a dedication in verse to Dr. Comber, master of the college; but, having neither the facility of a popular nor the accuracy of a learned work, it seems to be now universally neglected. At the beginning of the civil war, as the Prince passed through Cambridge in his way to York, he was entertained with a representation of the "Guardian," a comedy which Cowley says was neither written nor acted, but rough-drawn by him, and repeated by the scholars. That this comedy was printed during his absence from his country, he appears to have considered as injurious to his reputation; though during the suppression of the theatres, it was sometimes privately acted with sufficient approbation. This consideration cannot but abate, in some measure, the reader's esteem for the work and the author. To love excellence, is natural; it is natural likewise for the lover to solicit reciprocal regard by an elaborate display of his own qualifications. The desire of pleasing has in different men produced actions of heroism, and effusions of wit; but it seems as reasonable to appear the champion as the poet of an "airy nothing," and to quarrel as to write for what Cowley might have learned from his master Pindar to call “the dream of a shadow." The It is surely not difficult in the solitude of a college, or in the bustle of the world, to find useful studies and serious employment. No man needs to be so burdened with life as to squander it in voluntary dreams of fictitious occurrences. man that sits down to suppose himself charged In 1643, being now master of arts, he was, by with treason or peculation, and heats his mind to the prevalence of the parliament, ejected from an elaborate purgation of his character from Cambridge, and sheltered himself at St. John's crimes which he was never within the possibility College, in Oxford; where, as is said by Wood, of committing, differs only by the infrequency of he published a satire, called "The Puritan and his folly from him who praises beauty which he Papist," which was only inserted in the last col-never saw; complains of jealousy which he never lection of his Works; and so distinguished himself by the warmth of his loyalty and the elegance of his conversation, that he gained the kindness and confidence of those who attended the king, and amongst others of Lord Falkland, whose notice cast a lustre on all to whom it was extended. About the time when Oxford was surrendered to the parliament, he followed the queen to Paris, where he became secretary to the Lord Jermyn, afterwards Earl of St. Alban's, and was employed in such correspondence as the royal cause required, and particularly in cyphering and decyphering the letters that passed between the king and queen; an employment of the highest confidence and honour. So wide was his province of intelligence, that, for several years, it filled all his days and two or three nights in the week. felt; supposes himself sometimes invited, and sometimes forsaken; fatigues his fancy, and ransacks his memory, for images which may exhibit the gayety of hope, or the gloominess of despair; and dresses his imaginary Chloris or Phyllis, sometimes in flowers fading as her beauty, and sometimes in gems lasting as her virtues. At Paris, as secretary to Lord Jerinyn, he was engaged in transacting things of real inipoitance with real men and real women, and at that time did not much employ his thoughts upon phantoms of gallantry. Some of his letters to Mr. Bennett, afterwards Earl of Arlington, from April to December, in 1650, are preserved in "Miscellanea Aulica," a collection of papers published by Brown. These letters, being written like those of other men whose minds are more on things than words, contribute no otherwise to his reputation than as they show him to have In the year 1647, his "Mistress" was publish- been above the affectation of unscasonable eleed; for he imagined, as he declared in his pre-gance, and to have known that the business of a face to a subsequent edition, that "poets are statesman can be little forwarded by flowers of scarcely thought freemen of their company with- rhetoric. out paying some duties, or obliging themselves to be true to Love." One passage, however, seems not unworthy of some notice. Speaking of the Scotch treaty then in agitation: "The Scotch treaty," says he, "is the only thing now in which we are vitally concerned: 1 am one of the last hopers, and yet cannot now abstain from believing, that an agreement will be made; all people upon the place incline to that of union. The Scotch will moderate something of the rigour of their demands; the mutual ne Barnesii Anacreontem.-Dr. J. cessity of an accord is visible, the King is per- the security of a thousand pounds given by Dr. sualed of it. And to tell you the truth (which I | Scarborough. take to be an argument above all the rest,) Virgil has told the same thing to that purpose." This expression from a secretary of the present time would be considered as merely ludicrous, or at most as an ostentatious display of scholarship; but the manners of that time were so tinged with superstition, that I cannot but suspect Cowley of having consulted on this great occasion the Virgilian Lots, and to have given some credit to the answer of his oracle. Some years afterwards, "business," says Sprat, "passed of course into other hands; and Cowley, being no longer useful at Paris, was in 1656, sent back into England, that under pre- | tence of privacy and retirement, he might take occasion of giving notice of the posture of things in this nation." Soon after his return to London, he was seized by some messengers of the usurping powers who were sent out in quest of another man; and, being examined, was put into confine- | ment, from which he was not dismissed without This year he published his poems with a preface, in which he seems to have inserted soice thing suppressed in subsequent editions, when was interpreted to denote some relaxation of ne loyalty. In this preface he declares, that " desire had been for some days past, and did sit very vehemently continue, to retire himself some of the American plantations, and to forsa this world for ever." From the obloquy which the appearance of submission to the usurpers brought upon him, a biographer has been very diligent to clear him, and indeed it does not seem to have lessened his reputation. His wish for retirement we can easy believe to be undissembled; a man harassed in one kingdom, and persecuted in another, who, after a course of business that employed all is days and half his nights, in cyphering and decyphering, comes to his own country, and steps into a prison, will be willing enough to retire to some place of quiet and of safety. Yet let neitt cr our reverence for a genius, nor our pity for a sufferer, dispose us to forget that, if his activity was virtue, his retreat was cowardice. * Consulting the Virgilian Lots, Sones Virgiliane, is a method of divination by the opening of Virgil, and applying to the circumstances of the peruser the first pas He then took upon himself the character of a sage in either of the two pages that he accidentally fixes physician, still, according to Sprat, with intention his eye on. It is said that King Charles I. and Lord Falk-to dissemble the main design of his coming land being in the Bodleian Library, made this experiment of their future fortunes, and met with passages equally ominous to each. That of the king was the following: At bello audacis populi vexatus et armis, Yet let a race untamed, and haughty foes, Lord Falkland's : over;" and, as Mr. Wood relates, "complying with the men then in power, (which was much taken notice of by the royal party,) he obtained an order to be created doctor of physic; which being done to his mind, (whereby he gained the ill-will of some of his friends,) he went into France again, having made a copy of verses on Oliver's death. This is no favourable representation, yet even in this not much wrong can be discovered. How far he complied with the inen in power, is to be inquired before he can be blamed. It is not said that he told them any secrets, or assisted them by intelligence or any other act. If he only promised to be quiet, that they in whose hands he was, might free him from confinement, he did what no law of society prohibits. The man whose miscarriage in a just cause has put him in the power of his enemy, may, without any violation of his integrity, regain his liberty, or preserve his life, by a promise of neutrality : fer, Dryden. the stipulation gives the enemy nothing which he had not before; the neutrality of a captive may be always secured by his imprisonment or death. He that is at the disposal of another may not promise to aid him in any injurious act, because no power can compel active obedience. He may engage to do nothing, but not to do ill. Non haec, O Palla, dederas promisaa parenti, Haud ignarus eram, quantum nova gloria in armis, There is reason to think that Cowley promised Eneid xi. 152. | little. It does not appear that his compliarce gained him confidence enough to be trusted with out security, for the bond of his bail was never cancelled: nor that it made him think himself secure; for at that dissolution of government wh..ch followed the death of Oliver, he returned into France, where he resumed his former station, and staid till the restoration. O Pallas, thou hast fail'd thy plighted word, Vain vows to Heaven, and unavailing care! Dryden. Hoffman, in his Lexicon, gives a very satisfactory account of this practice of seeking fates in books; and says, that it was used by the Pagans, the Jewish Rabbins, and even the early Christians; the latter taking the New Testament for their oracle.-H. "He continued," says his biographer, "under these bonds till the general deliverance;" it is therefore to be supposed, that he did not go to France, and act again for the king, without the consent of his bondsman; that he did not snow his loyalty at the hazard of his friend, but by rus friend's permission. Of the verses on Oliver's death, in which | It was treated on the stage with great severity, Wood's narrative seems to imply something en- and was afterward censured as a satire on the comiastic, there has been no appearance. There King's party. is a discourse concerning his government, indeed, with verses intermixed, but such as certainly gained its author no friends among the abettors of usurpation. A doctor of physic, however, he was made at Cxford, in December, 1657; and in the commencement of the Royal Society, of which an account has been given by Dr. Birch, he appears busy among the experimental philosophers with the title of Dr. Cowley. There is no reason for supposing that he ever attempted practice; but his preparatory studies have contributed something to the honour of his country. Considering botany as necessary to a physician, he retired into Kent to gather plants; and as the predominance of a favourite study affects all subordinate operations of the intellect, botany in the mind of Cowley turned into poetry. He composed in Latin several books on plants, of which the first and second display the qualities of herbs, in elegiac verse; the third and fourth, the beauties of flowers in various measures; and the fifth and sixth, the uses of trees, in heroic numbers. At the same time were produced, from the game university, the two great poets, Cowley and Milton, of dissimilar genius, of opposite prinriples; but concurring in the cultivation of Latin poetry, in which the English, till their works and May's poem appeared, seemed unable to contest the palm with any other of the lettered nations. If the Latin performances of Cowley and Milton be compared, (for May I hold to be superior to both,) the advantage seems to lie on the side of Cowley. Milton is generally content to express the thoughts of the ancients in their language; Cowley, without much loss of purity or elegance, accommodates the diction of Rome to his own conceptions. At the Restoration, after all the diligence of his long service, and with consciousness not only of the merit of fidelity, but of the dignity of great abilities, he naturally expected ample preferments; and, that he might not be forgotten by his own fault, wrote a Song of Triumph. But this was a time of such general hope, that great numbers were inevitably disappointed; and Cowley found his reward very tediously delayed. He had been promised by both Charles the First and Second, the mastership of the Savoy; "but he lost it," says Wood, "by certain persons, enemies to the muses." The neglect of the court was not his only mortification; having, by such alteration as he thought proper, fitted his old comedy of "The Guardian," for the stage, he produced itt under the title of "The Cutter of Coleman-street." By May's poem we are here to understand a continuation of Lucan's Pharsalia to the death of Julius Cæsar, by Thomas May, an eminent poet and historian, who flourished in the reigns of James and Charles I. and of whom a life is given in the Biographia Britannica.- H. +1663. Here is an error in the designation of this Comedy, which our author copied from the title-page of the later editions of Cowley's Works the title of the play itself is without the article, “Cutter of Coleman street," al hough a merry sharking fellow about the town, named Cuter, is a prizeipal character in it.-H. Mr. Dryden, who went with Mr. Sprat to the first exhibition, related to Mr. Dennis, "That, when they told Cowley how little favour had been shown him, he received the news of his ill success, not with so much firmness as might have been expected from so great a man." What firmness they expected, or what weakness Cowley discovered, cannot be known. He that misses his end will never be as much pleased as he that attains it, even when he can impute no part of his failure to himself; and, when the end is to please the multitude, no man, perhaps, has a right, in things admitting of gra dation and comparison, to throw the whole blame upon his judges, and totally to exclude diffidence and shame by a haughty consciousness of his own excellence. For the rejection of this play it is difficult now to find the reason; it certainly has, in a very great degree, the power of fixing attention and exciting merriment. From the charge of disaffection he exculpates himself in his preface, by observing how unlikely it is that, having fol lowed the royal family through all their distresses, "he should choose the time of their restoration to begin a quarrel with them." It appears, however, from the Theatrical Register of Downes, the prompter, to have been popularly considered as a satire on the royalists. That he might shorten this tedious suspense, he published his pretensions and his discontent, in an ode called "The Complaint;" in which he styles himself the melancholy Cowley. This met with the usual fortune of complaints, and seems to have excited more contempt than pity. These unlucky incidents are brought, maliciously enough, together, in some stanzas, written about that time, on the choice of a laureat; a mode of satire, by which, since it was first in troduced by Suckling, perhaps every generation of poets has been teased. "Savoy-missing Cowley came into the court, That Apollo gave heed to all he could say: His vehement desire of retirement now came again upon him. "Not finding," says the morose Wood," that preferment conferred upon him carried away most places, he retired discontented which he expected, while others for their money into Surry." "He was now," says the courtly Sprat, "weary of the vexations and formalities of an active condition. He had been perplexed with a long compliance to foreign manners. He was satiated with the arts of a court; which sort of life, though his virtue made it innocent to him, yet nothing could make it quiet. Those were the reasons that made him to follow the violent inclination of his own mind, which, in the greatest throng of his former business, had still called upon him, and represented to him the true delights of solitary studies, of temperate pleasures, and a moderate revenue, below the malice ani flatteries of for tune." over many transactions in general expressions, and to leave curiosity often unsatisfied. Wnat he did not tell, cannot however now be known; I must therefore recommend the perusal of his work, to which my narration can be considered only as a slender supplement. So differendy are things seen! and so different- | party were easily irritated, was obliged to pass ly are they shown! but actions are visible, though motives are secret. Cowley certainly retired; first to Barn-elms, and afterwards to Chertsey, in Surry. He seems, however, to have lost part of his dread of the hum of men.* He thought himself now safe enough from intrusion, without the defence of mountains and oceans; and, instead of seeking shelter in America, wisely went only so far from the bustle of life as that he might easily find his way back, when solitude should grow tedious. His retreat was at first but slenderly accommodated; yet he soon obtained, by the interest of the Earl of St. Alban's and the Duke of Buckingham, such a lease of the Queen's lands as afforded him an ample income. By the lovers of virtue and of wit, it will be solicitously asked, if he now was happy. Let them peruse one of his letters accidentally preserved by Peck, which I recommend to the consideration of all that may hereafter pant for solitude. "To DR. THOMAS SPRAT. 66 " Chertsey, May 21, 1665. "The first night that I came hither, I caught so great a cold with a defluxion of rheum, as made me keep my chamber ten days. And, two after, had such a bruise on my ribs with a fall, that I am yet unable to move or turn myself in my bed. This is my personal fortune here to begin with. And, besides, I can get no | money from my tenants, and have my meadows eaten up every night by cattle put in by my neighbours. What this signifies, or may come to in time, God knows; if it be ominous, it can end in nothing else than hanging. Another misfortune has been, and stranger than all the rest, that you have broke your word with me, and failed to come, even though you told Mr. Bois that you would. This is what they call monstri simile. I do hope to recover my late hurt so far within five or six days, (though it be uncertain yet whether I shall ever recover it,) as to walk about again. And then, me thinks, you and I and the Dean might be very merry upon St. Ann's Hill. You might very conveniently come hither the way of Hampton Town, lying there one night. I write this in pain, and can say no more: Verbum Sapienti." He did not long enjoy the pleasure, or suffer the uneasiness of solitude; for he died at the Porch-houset in Chertsey, 1667, in the 49th year of his age. He was buried with great pomp near Chaucer, and Spencer, and King Charles pronounced, "That Mr. Cowley had not left behind him a better man in England." He is represented by Dr. Sprat as the most amiable of mankind; and this posthumous praise may safely be credited, as it has never been contradicted by envy or by Cowley, like other poets who have written with narrow views, and instead of tracing intellectual pleasures in the minds of men, paid their court to temporary prejudices, has been at one time too much praised, and too much neglected at another. Wit, like all other things subject by their na ture to the choice of man, has its changes and fashions, and at different times takes different forms. About the beginning of the seventeenth century, appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets: of whom, in a criticism on the works of Cowley, it is not improper to give some account. The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole en deavour: but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables. If the father of criticism has rightly denomi nated poetry réxvn piμntikǹ, an imitative art, these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets; for they cannot be said to have imitated any thing: they neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect. Those however who deny them to be poets, allow them to be wits. Dryden confesses of himself and his contemporaries, that they fall below Donne in wit; but maintains, that they surpass him in poetry. If wit be well described by Pope, as being "that which has been often thought, but was never before so well expressed," they certainly never attained, nor ever sought it; for they endeavoured to be singular in their thoughts, and were careless of their diction. But Pope's ac count of wit is undoubtedly erroneous: "he de presses it below its natural dignity, and reduces it from strength of thought to happiness of language. If by a more noble and more adequate con ception, that be considered as wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first production, acknow ledged to be just; if it be that which he that never found it wonders how he missed; to wit of this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen. Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found. But wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, they have more than |