Born, in London, 1618. King’s Scholar at Westminster School, 1628 [?]–1636. First poems published, 1633. Scholar of Trinity Coll., Cambridge, 14 June 1637; B.A., 1639; Minor Fellow, 30 Oct. 1640; M.A., 1642; Major Fellow, 1642. Latin Comedy, “Naufragium Joculare” performed before University, 2 Feb. 1638. “The Guardian” performed, 12 March 1641; rewritten and produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields as “The Cutter of Coleman Street,” 16 Dec. 1661. Ejected from Cambridge as a Royalist, and removed to St. John’s Coll., Oxford, 1664. Afterwards in household of Earl of St. Alban’s, and in Court of exiled Queen in France. Engaged on diplomatic services. Returned to England, 1656. Studied Medicine. M.D., Oxford, 2 Dec. 1657. Removed to Chertsey, April 1665. Died there, 28 July 1667. Buried in Westminster Abbey. Works: “Poetical Blossoms” (anon.), 1633; “Love’s Riddle,” 1638; “Naufragium Joculare,” 1638; “A Satyre: the Puritan and the Papist,” 1643 [?]; “Ad Populum” (anon.), 1644; “The Mistress,” 1647; “The Foure Ages of England” (anon.), 1648; “The Guardian,” 1650 (second version, entitled: “The Cutter of Coleman Street,” 1663); “Poems,” 1656; “Ode upon the Blessed Restoration,” 1660; “Vision concerning … Cromwell the Wicked,” 1661; “A Proposal for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy,” 1661; “A. Couleii Plantarum libri duo,” 1662; “Verses upon several Occasions,” 1663; “Verses lately written,” 1663. Posthumous: “A Poem on the late Civil War,” 1679; “Love’s Chronicle” (anon.), [1730?]. He translated: “Anacreon” (anon., with Willis, Wood and Oldham), 1683. Collected Works: ed., with life, by T. Sprat, 1668 (subsequent edns., some enlarged, 1689–1721); ed., with life by Grosart, 1880–81.

Personal

  Even when I was a very young boy at school, instead of running about on holydays and playing with my fellows, I was wont to steal from them, and walk into the fields, either alone with a book, or with some one companion, if I could find any of the same temper. I was then, too, so much an enemy to all constraint, that my masters could never prevail on me, by any persuasions or encouragements, to learn without book the common rules of grammar; in which they dispensed with me alone, because they found I made a shift to do the usual exercise out of my own reading and observation. That I was then of the same mind as I am now (which, I confess, I wonder at, myself) may appear by the latter end of an ode, which I made when I was but thirteen years old, and which was then printed, with many other verses. The beginning of it is boyish: but of this part, which I here set down (if a very little were corrected), I should hardly now be much ashamed.

  Went to Mr. Cowley’s funerall, whose corps lay at Wallingford House, and was thence convey’d to Westminster Abbey, in a hearse with six horses, and all funeral decency; neeare an hundred coaches of noblemen and persons of qualitie following; among these all the witts of the towne, divers bishops and cleargymen.

  In the thirteenth Year of his Age there came forth a little Book under his Name, in which there were many things that might well become the Vigour and Force of a manly Wit. The first beginning of his studies, was a Familiarity with the most solid and unaffected Authors of Antiquary, which he fully digested not only in his Memory, but his Judgment. By this Advantage he learn’d nothing while a Boy, that he needed to forget or forsake, when he came to be a Man. His Mind was rightly season’d at first, and he had nothing to do, but still to proceed on the same Foundation on which he began. He was wont to relate, that he had this Defect in his Memory at that time, that his Teachers could never bring it to retain the ordinary Rules of Grammar. However he supply’d that want, by conversing with the Books themselves, from whence those Rules had been drawn.

  He lies interred at Westminster Abbey, next to Sir Jeffrey Chaucer, N., where the duke of Bucks has putt a neate monument of white marble, viz. a faire pedestall, wheron the inscription:—

	ABRAHAMUS COULEIUS,
	ANGLORUM PINDARUS, FLACCUS, MARO,
	DELICIAE, DECUS, DESIDERIUM AEVI SUI,
	HIC JUXTA SITUS EST.
	AUREA DUM VOLITANT LATÈ TUA SCRIPTA PER ORBEM,
	ET FAMÂ AETERNÙM VIVIS, DIVINE POETA,
	HIC PLACIDÂ JACEAS REQUIE; CUSTODIAT URNAM
	CANA FIDES, VIGILENTQUE PERENNI LAMPADE MUSAE;
	SIT SACER ISTE LOCUS. NEC QUIS TEMERARIUS AUSIT
	SACRILEGÂ TURBARE MANU VENERABILE BUSTUM.
	INTACTI MANEANT, MANEANT PER SECULA, DULCIS
	COULEI CINERES SERVENTQUE IMMOBILE SAXUM.
	SIC VOVET,

  VOTUMQUE SUUM APUD POSTEROS SACRATUM ESSE VOLUIT, QUI VIRO INCOMPARABILI POSUIT SEPULCRALE MARMOR, GEORGIUS DUX BUCKINGHAMIAE.
  ABRAHAM COWLEY EXCESSIT E VITÂ ANNO AETATIS SUAE 49; ET, HONORIFICÂ POMPÂ ELATUS EX AEDIBUS BUCKINGHAMIANIS, VIRIS ILLUSTRIBUS OMNIUM ORDINUM EXEQUIAS CELEBRANTIBUS, SEPULTUS EST DIE 3 MENSIS AUGUSTI ANNU DOMINI 1667.
Above that a very faire urne, with a kind of ghirland of ivy about it. The inscription was made by Dr. (Thomas) Spratt, his grace’s chapellane: the Latin verses were made, or mended, by Dr. (Thomas) Gale. On his very noble gravestone, his scutcheon, and Abrahamus Couleius H. S. E. 1667.

  He was not so much respected by the cavaliers as he ought to have been, upon the restauration, which much troubled him, and made him fly off something, as appears partly from the preface to his poems. He was however a good natured man, of great candor and humanity, and no party ever spoke ill against him upon that score.

  Cowley’s allowance was, at last, not above three hundred a year. He died at Chertsey; and his death was occasioned by a mean accident, whilst his great friend, Dean Sprat, was with him on a visit there. They had been together to see a neighbour at Cowley’s; who (according to the fashion of those times) made them too welcome. They did not set out for their walk home till it was too late; and had drank so deep, that they lay out in the fields all night. This gave Cowley the fever that carried him off. The parish still talk of the drunken Dean.

  When Cowley grew sick of the court, he took a house first at Battersea, then at Barnes; and then at Chertsey: always farther and farther from town. In the latter part of his life, he showed a sort of aversion for women; and would leave the room when they came in: ’twas probably from a disappointment in love. He was much in love with his Leonora; who is mentioned at the end of that good ballad of his, on his different mistresses. She was married to Dean Sprat’s brother; and Cowley never was in love with anybody after.

  Of Cowley, we are told by Barnes, who had means enough of information, that, whatever he may talk of his own inflammability, and the variety of characters by which his heart was divided, he in reality was in love but once, and then never had resolution to tell his passion.

  We suspect, from the portraits of Cowley, that his blood was not very healthy by nature…. Cowley and Thomson were alike in their persons, their dispositions, and their fortunes. They were both fat men, not handsome; very amiable and sociable; no enemies to a bottle; taking interest both in politics and retirement; passionately fond of external nature, of fields, woods, gardens, &c.; bachelors,—in love, and disappointed; faulty in style, yet true poets in themselves, if not always the best in their writings, that is to say, seeing everything in its poetical light; childlike in their ways; and, finally, they were both made easy in their circumstances by the party whom they served; both went to live at a little distance from London, and on the banks of the Thames; and both died of a cold and fever, originating in a careless exposure to the weather, not without more than a suspicion of previous “jollification” with “the Dean,” on Cowley’s part, and great probability of a like vivacity on that of Thomson, who had been visiting his friends in London. Thomson could push the bottle like a regular bon vivant: and Cowley’s death is attributed to his having forgotten his proper bed, and slept in a field all night, in company with his reverend and jovial friend Sprat.

  Cowley House … in which Cowley spent his last days, is on the west side of Guildford Street near the railway station…. It was a little house, with ample gardens and pleasant meadows attached. Not of brick indeed, but half timber, with a fine old oak staircase and balusters, and one or two wainscoted chambers, which yet remain much as when Cowley dwelt there, as do also the poet’s study, a small closet with a view meadow-ward to St. Anne’s Hill, and the room, overlooking the road, in which he died. He lived here little more than two years in all.

Juvenile Poems

  We are even more pleased with some of the earliest of his juvenile poems, than with many of his later performances; as there is not every where in them that redundancy of wit; and where there is, we are more inclined to admire, than be offended at in the productions of a boy. His passion for studious retirement, which was still increasing with his years, discovered itself at thirteen, in an ode which a good judge thinks equal to that of Pope on a similar subject, and which was written about the same era of his life. The tenderness of some of his juvenile verses shews, that he was no stranger to another passion; and it is not improbable but Margarita, or one of her successors, might at fifteen, have had a full possession of his heart.

  Let any reader of “Pyramus and Thisbe” consider how naïve, artless, and infantine are the writings of the very cleverest child of ten that he has ever known when compared with this first work of Cowley’s. After more than two hundred years it remains still readable—much more readable, in fact, than many of its author’s more elaborate poems of maturity…. “Pyramus and Thisbe” is a work which few of the adult poets of that day would have been ashamed of writing. It contains mistakes of rhyme, and grammar that might be so easily corrected that they form an interesting proof that the poem was not touched up for the press by older hands, but in other respects it is smooth and singularly mature. The heroic verse in which it is written is nerveless, but correct, and the story is told in a straightforward way, and with a regular progress, that are extraordinary in so young a child.

The Cutter of Coleman Street, 1641–63

  We are therefore wonderful wise men, and have a fine business of it; we, who spend our time in poetry. I do sometimes laugh, and am often angry with myself, when I think on it; and if I had a son inclined by nature to the same folly, I believe I should bind him from it by the strictest conjurations of a paternal blessing. For what can be more ridiculous than to labour to give men delight, whilst they labour, on their part, most earnestly to take offence?

  The comedy, as acted in 1661, seems to have subjected Cowley to censure as having been intended for abuse and satire of the Royalists, besides being guilty of profaneness. In his Preface, which is well worth reading, he accordingly defends himself with effective indignation against both charges—and this he could upon the whole well afford to do. What enraged these injudicious assailants, proves to us the moral courage of the poet. As a tried friend of the monarchy he rendered a real service to its cause, and to that of social order at large, by thus boldly and bravely satirising the scum of the loyal party at the very time when its ignobler elements were actively striving to remain at the top; and for the sake of the spirit of manliness which pervades this comedy we may readily pardon its occasional coarseness and the farcical improbabilities of its plot.

The Mistress, 1647

  Considered as the verses of a lover, no man that has ever loved will much commend them. They are neither courtly nor pathetic, have neither gallantry nor fondness. His praises are too far sought, and too hyperbolical, either to express love, or to excite it; every stanza is crowded with darts and flames, with wounds and death, with mingled souls, and with broken hearts.

  In the next year, 1647, Cowley’s “Mistress” appeared; the most celebrated performance of the miscalled metaphysical poets. It is a series of short amatory poems, in the Italian style of the age, full of analogies that have no semblance of truth, except from the double sense of words and thoughts that unite the coldness of subtility with the hyperbolical extravagance of counterfeited passion.

  It is as though in the course of a hundred years the worst fancies which Wyatt had borrowed from Petrarch had become fossilized, and were yet brought out by Cowley to do duty for living thoughts. What is love? he seems to ask: it is an interchange of hearts, a flame, a worship, a river to be frozen by disdain—he has a hundred such physical and psychological images of it; and the poetry consists in taking the images one by one and developing them in merciless disregard of taste and truth of feeling.

Davideis

  His “Davideis” was wholly written in so young an Age; that if we shall reflect on the vastness of the Argument, and his manner of handling it, he may seem like one of the Miracles, that he there adorns, like a Boy attempting Goliah.

  The “Davideis” is much more disfigured by far-fetched conceits than even his Odes; and they offend still more against good Taste, when we find them mixed up with the sobriety of narration, than when they mingle in his Pindaric ecstacies. The narrative itself is also heavy and uninteresting; there are no strongly drawn or predominating characters; and the Allegorical personages, who are the chief actors, do not, of course, excite any strong interest, or greatly arrest the attention. Still there are many scattered beauties throughout the Poem; many original ideas, and much brilliant versification.

  His epic attempt, “Davideis,” was not successful.

  The “Davideis” is a school exercise, no more.

Essays

  In all our comparisons of taste, I do not know whether I have ever heard your opinion of a poet, very dear to me,—the now-out-of-fashion Cowley. Favour me with your judgment of him, and tell me if his prose essays, in particular, as well as no inconsiderable part of his verse, be not delicious. I prefer the graceful rambling of his essays, even to the courtly elegance and ease of Addison; abstracting from this the latter’s exquisite humour.

  Spent the two hours that remained before dinner, in skimming the “Prose Essays” of Cowley, which I had often heard very highly commended for the style; in this respect I was so much gratified, by the genuine vein of English idiom, as well as by what appeared to my ear, in many passages, a sweet and flowing melody of composition, that I have resolved to read the volume over again three or four times, till I fix some of those beauties in my memory, and accustom my ear to the tune.

  They are eminently distinguished for the grace, the finish, and the clearness which his verse too often wants. That there is one cry which pervades them—vanity of vanities! all is vanity!—that there is an almost ostentatious longing for obscurity and retirement, may be accounted for by the fact that at an early age Cowley was thrown among the cavaliers of the civil wars, sharing the exile and the return of the Stuarts, and doubtless disgusted, as so pure a writer was pretty sure to be, by a dissolute Court, with whom he would find it easier to sympathize in its misery than in its triumph.

  His prose is as easy and sensible as his poetry is contorted and unreasonable. A polished man, writing for polished men, pretty much as he would speak to them in a drawing-room,—this I take to be the idea which they had of a good author in the seventeenth century. It is the idea which Cowley’s “Essays” leave of his character; it is the kind of talent which the writers of the coming age take for their model; and he is the first of that grave and amiable group which, continued in Temple, reaches so far as to include Addison.

  Cowley holds perhaps a higher rank among prose writers than among poets. His “Essays,” written for the most part after the Restoration, mark an advance in the art of prose composition. The construction of the sentences is often stumbling and awkward, but the diction shows an increasing command over the language. No previous writer, not even Fuller, is so felicitous as Cowley in the combination of words. His prose has none of the extravagance of his poetry.

  Cowley’s prose essays, it must be acknowledged, have held their ground in our literature, but as a poet he is a dead name, or living only in depreciation and ridicule. We hope to show that, however great his faults, this depreciation is unjust and this ridicule absurd, and in doing so it will be necessary to solve two questions—why Cowley ever attained so immense a poetic reputation, and why, having once gained it, he has so completely lost it.

  The familiar ease, never descending into what would misbecome either the man of breeding or the man of letters, is the true cause of the pleasure which cultivated readers have never ceased to derive from these “Essays;” and to enjoy this pleasure to the full, we should pace with their author the whole length of his modest garden walks; for his estate was not on the scale of his friend John Evelyn’s.

  This test of re-reading is, of course, only an approximate one. So great an authority as Hume said it was sufficient to read Cowley over, but that Parnell after the fiftieth reading was as fresh as at the first. Now, for my part, I have to go to the encyclopedia to find out who Parnell was, but of Cowley even desultory readers like myself know something. His essays one can not only read, but re-read. They make one of the unpretentious minor books that one can put in his pocket and take with him on a walk to the woods, and nibble at under a tree or by a waterfall. Solitude seems to bring out its quality, as it does that of some people.

Love’s Chronicle

  “The Chronicle” was written two hundred years ago. Ladies, dear ladies, if one could be sure that no man would open this book, if we were altogether in (female) parliament assembled, without a single male creature within hearing, might we not acknowledge that the sex, especially that part of it formerly called coquette, and now known by the name of flirt, is very little altered since the days of the Merry Monarch? and that a similar list compiled by some gay bachelor of Belgravia might, allowing for differences of custom and of costume, serve very well as a companion to Master Cowley’s catalogue? I would not have a man read this admission for the world.

General

	To him no author was unknown,
	Yet what he wrote was all his own;
	He melted not the ancient gold,
	Nor with Ben Jonson, did make bold
	To plunder all the Roman stores
	Of poets and of orators.
	Horace’s wit and Virgil’s state,
	He did not steal, but emulate;
	And when he would like them appear,
	Their garb, but not their clothes, did wear.
	He not from Rome alone, but Greece,
	Like Jason, brought the golden fleece.

  These times have produced many excellent poets, among whom, for strength of wit, Dr. Abraham Cowley justly bears the bell.

  The darling of my youth.

	Great Cowley then, a mighty genius, wrote,
	O’er run with wit, and lavish of his thought:
	His turns too closely on the reader press:
	He more had pleased us, had he pleased us less.
	One glittering thought no sooner strikes our eyes
	With silent wonder, but new wonders rise;
	As in the milky-way a shining white
	O’erflows the heavens with one continued light,
	That not a single star can show his rays,
	Whilst jointly all promote the common blaze.
	Pardon, great poet, that I dare to name
	The unnumber’d beauties of thy verse with blame;
	Thy fault is only wit in its excess.

  One of our late great poets is sunk in his reputation, because he could never forgive any conceit which came in his way; but swept, like a drag-net, great and small. There was plenty enough—but the dishes were ill sorted; whole pyramids of sweetmeats for boys and women, but little of solid meat for men. All this proceeded not from any want of knowledge, but of judgment. Neither did he want that in discerning the beauties and faults of other poets, but only indulged himself in the luxury of writing; and perhaps knew it was a fault, and hoped to find it. For this reason, though he must always be thought a great poet, he is no longer esteemed a good writer; and for ten impressions which his works have had in so many successive years, yet at present a hundred books are scarcely purchased once a twelvemonth; for, as my last Lord Rochester said, though somewhat profanely, “Not being of God, he could not stand.”

  Never any poet left a greater reputation behind him than Mr. Cowley, while Milton remained obscure, and known but to few.

	Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet,
	His moral pleases, not his pointed wit:
	Forgot his Epic, nay Pindaric art
	But still I love the language of his heart.

  Cowley is a fine poet, in spite of all his faults.—He, as well as Davenant, borrowed his metaphysical style from Donne.

  The time seems to be at hand when justice will be done to Mr. Cowley’s prose, as well as poetical writings; and though his friend Doctor Sprat, bishop of Rochester, in his diction falls far short of the abilities for which he has been celebrated; yet there is some times a happy flow in his periods, something that looks like eloquence.

  Cowley is an author extremely corrupted by the bad taste of his age; but had he lived even in the purest times of Greece or Rome, he must always have been a very indifferent poet. He had no ear for harmony; and his verses are only known to be such by the rhyme which terminates them. In his rugged untunable numbers are conveyed sentiments the most strained and distorted, long-spun allegories, distant allusions, and forced conceits. Great ingenuity, however, and vigour of thought, sometimes break out midst those unnatural conceptions; a few anacreontics surprise us by their ease and gaiety: his prose writings please, by the honesty and goodness which they express, and even by their spleen and melancholy. This author was much more praised and admired during his lifetime, and celebrated after his death, than the great Milton.

  Botany in the mind of Cowley turned into poetry…. The power of Cowley is not so much to move the affections, as to exercise the understanding…. A mind capacious by nature, and replenished by study. In the general review of Cowley’s poetry it will be found that he wrote with abundant fertility, but negligent or unskilful selection; with much thought but with little imagery; that he is never pathetic, and rarely sublime; but always either ingenious or learned, either acute or profound…. His manner he had in common with others; but his sentiments were his own. Upon every subject he thought for himself; and such was his copiousness of knowledge that something at once remote and applicable rushed into his mind; yet it is not likely that he always rejected a commodious idea merely because another had used it; his known wealth was so great, that he might have borrowed without loss of credit…. He makes no selection of words, nor seeks any neatness of phrase: he has no elegance, either lucky or elaborate, as his endeavours were rather to impress sentences upon the understanding than images on the fancy, he has few epithets, and those scattered without peculiar propriety of nice adaptation.

  Cowley, at all times harsh, is doubly so in his Pindaric compositions. In his Anacreontic odes, he is much happier. They are smooth and elegant; and indeed the most agreeable and the most perfect in their kind, of all Mr. Cowley’s Poems.

	Ingenious Cowley! and though now, reclaim’d
	By modern lights from an erroneous taste,
	I cannot but lament thy splendid wit
	Entangled in the cobwebs of the schools;
	I still revere thee, courtly though retired;
	Though stretch’d at ease in Chertsey’s silent bowers,
	Not unemploy’d, and finding rich amends
	For a lost world in solitude and verse.

  Cowley, I think, would have had grace (for his mind was graceful) if he had had any ear, or if his taste had not been vitiated by the pursuit of wit; which, when it does not offer itself naturally, degenerates into tinsel or pertness.

  To speak of this neglected writer, as a poet. He had a quick and ready conception; the true enthusiasm of genius, and vast materials, with which learning as well as fancy had supplied him for it to work upon. He had besides a prodigious command of expression, and a natural and copious flow of eloquence on every occasion, and understood our language in all its force and energy. Yet betwixt the native exuberance of his wit, which hurried him frequently on conceits, and the epidemical contagion of that time, which possessed all writers with the love of points, of affected turns, and hard unnatural allusion, there are few of his poems which a man of just taste will read with admiration, or even with pleasure. Some few there are and enough to save his name from oblivion, or rather to consecrate it, with those of the master spirits of our country, to immortality.

  The mind of Cowley was beautiful, but a querulous tenderness in his nature breathes not only through his works, but influenced his habits and his views of human affairs.

  The metre of Pindar is regular, that of Cowley is utterly lawless; and his perpetual straining after points of wit, seems to show that he had formed no correcter notion of his manner than of his style.

  For mere ease and grace, is Cowley inferior to Addison, being as he is so much more thoughtful and full of fancy? Cowley, with the omission of a quaintness here and there, is probably the best model of style for modern imitation in general.

  He wrote verses while yet a child; and amidst his best poetry as well as his worst, in his touching and tender as well as extravagant passages, there is always something that reminds us of childhood in Cowley…. Misanthropy, as far as so gentle a nature could cherish it, naturally strengthened his love of retirement, and increased that passion for a country life which breathes in the fancy of his poetry, and in the eloquence of his prose.

  Cowley, with all his admirable wit and ingenuity, had little imagination; nor indeed do we think his classical diction comparable to that of Milton.

  The Pindaric odes of Cowley were not published within this period. But it is not worth while to defer mention of them. They contain, like all his poetry, from time to time, very beautiful lines; but the faults are still of the same kind: his sensibility and good sense, nor has any poet more, are choked by false taste; and it would be difficult to fix on any one poem in which the beauties are more frequent than the blemishes. Johnson has selected the elegy on Crashaw as the finest of Cowley’s works. It begins with a very beautiful couplet, but I confess that little else seems, to my taste, of much value. “The Complaint,” probably better known than any other poem, appears to me the best in itself. His disappointed hopes give a not unpleasing melancholy to several passages. But his Latin ode in a similar strain is much more perfect. Cowley, perhaps, upon the whole, has had a reputation more above his deserts than any English poet; yet it is very easy to perceive that some, who wrote better than he, did not possess so fine a genius.

  Cowley was coarsely curious: he went to the shamoles for his chambers of imagery, and very often through the mud. All which faults appear to us attributable to his coldness of temperament, and his defectiveness in the instinct towards Beauty; to having the intellect only of a great poet, not the sensibility…. Yet his influence was for good rather than for evil, by inciting to a struggle backward, a delay in the revolutionary movement: and this, although a wide gulf yawned between him and the former age, and his heart’s impulse was not strong enough to cast him across it. For his actual influence, he lifts us up and casts us down—charms, and goes nigh to disgust us—does all but make us love and weep.

  On the other side of the corner of Chancery Lane was born a man of genius and benevolence, who would not have hurt a fly—Abraham Cowley. His father was a grocer; himself, one of the kindest, wisest, and truest gentlemen that ever graced humanity. He has been pronounced by one, competent to judge, to have been “if not a great poet, a great man.” But his poetry is what every other man’s poetry is, the flower of what was in him; and it is at least so far good poetry, as it is the quintessence of amiable and deep reflection, not without a more festive strain, the result of his sociality. Pope says of him—

	“Forgot his epic, nay pindaric art;
	Yet still we love the language of his heart.”

His prose is admirable, and his character of Cromwell a masterpiece of honest enmity, more creditable to both parties than the zealous royalist was aware. Cowley, notwithstanding the active part he took in politics, never ceased to be a child at heart. His mind lived in books and bowers—in the sequestered “places of thought;” and he wondered and lamented to the last, that he had not realised the people he found there. His consolation should have been, that what he found in himself was an evidence that the people exist.

  His imagination is tinsel, or mere surface gilding, compared to Donne’s solid gold; his wit little better than word-catching, to the profound meditative quaintness of the elder poet; and of passion, with which all Donne’s finest lines are tremulous, Cowley has none. Considerable grace and dignity occasionally distinguish his Pindaric Odes (which, however, are Pindaric only in name); and he has shown much elegant playfulness of style and fancy in his translations from and imitations of Anacreon, and in some other verses written in the same manner. As for what he intends for love verses, some of them are pretty enough frost-work; but the only sort of love there is in them is the love of point and sparkle.

  Cowley’s “Essays” are delightful reading. Nor shall I forgive his biographer for destroying the letters of a man of whom King Charles said at his interment in Westminster Abbey, “Mr. Cowley has not left a better in England.” The friend and correspondent of the most distinguished poets, statesmen, and gentlemen of his day, his letters must have been most interesting and important, and but for the unsettled temper of affairs, would doubtless have been added to our polite literature.

  On this boundary line of a closing and a dawning literature a poet appeared, one of the most fanciful and illustrious of his time, Abraham Cowley, a precocious child, a reader and a versifier like Pope, having known passions less than books, busied himself less about things than about words. Literary exhaustion has seldom been more manifest. He possesses all the capacity to say whatever pleases him, but he has just nothing to say. The substance has vanished, leaving in its place a hollow shadow. In vain he tries the epic, the Pindaric strophe, all kinds of stanzas, odes, little lines, long lines; in vain he calls to his assistance botanical and philosophical similes, all the erudition of the university, all the relics of antiquity, all the ideas of new science: we yawn as we read him. Except in a few descriptive verses, two or three graceful tendernesses, he feels nothing, he speaks only; he is a poet of the brain. His collection of amorous pieces is but a vehicle for a scientific test, and serves to show that he has read the authors, that he knows his geography, that he is well versed in anatomy, that he has a dash of medicine and astronomy, that he has at his service references and allusions enough to break the head of his readers.

  Cowley is one of the poets of remote and brilliant turns of thought, and elaborated literary distinction. One does not love his poetry; but one can admire it often—if only one would read it.

  Cowley is defective through a redundancy of wit.

  Except for a few students like Lamb and Sir Egerton Brydges, Cowley’s verse is in this century unread and unreadable. Not even the antiquarian curiosity of an age which reprints Brathwaite and Crowne has yet availed to present him in a new edition. The reasons of this extraordinary decline in a poetical reputation are not difficult to find; Dryden absorbed all that was best in Cowley, and superseded him for the readers of the eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century, which reads Dryden little, naturally reads Cowley less. Yet criticism has to justify great names. There must be something in a man who was regarded by his age, and that an age which boasted of having outgrown all illusions, as the most profound and ingenious of its writers.

  What a change from the musical songs of Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Ben Jonson, or from the dainty love-lyrics of Cowley’s contemporary, Robert Herrick, to these painful and mechanical efforts! The student who wishes to see how a poetic judgment may be perverted—for Cowley unquestionably was a poet—should read the passages given in Dr. Johnson’s masterly criticism, which is the more interesting inasmuch as it shows that the intellectual vice of Cowley was not peculiar to that poet. Earlier writers had been infected by it, later versemen were not wholly free from it. These quiddities and once fashionable follies proved Cowley’s death-warrant as a poet, for although some of his verses have a vital force and beauty, the great body of his poetry is as dead as that of Sir Richard Blackmore, or the once popular Cleveland.

  The period of English poetry which lies between the decline of Ben Jonson and the rise of Dryden was ruled with undisputed sway by a man whose works are now as little read as those of any fifth-rate Elizabethan dramatist. During the whole lifetime of Milton, the fame of that glorious poet was obscured and dwarfed by the exaggerated reputation of this writer, and so general and so unshaken was the belief in the lyrist of the day, that a Royalist gentleman of Cambridge or an exiled courtier at Paris in the year 1650 would have laughed in your face, had you suggested that time could ever wither the deathless laurels of Mr. Cowley, or untune the harmonies of his majestic numbers. Yet in a very short space this work of destruction was most thoroughly done. The generation of Dryden admired his genius passionately, but not without criticism. The generation of Pope praised him coldly, but without reading him, and within fifty years of his own decease this nonpariel of the Restoration fell into total disfavour and oblivion. With the revival of naturalistic poetry, the lyrists and dramatists of the reign of Charles I. came once more into favour. Crashaw, Quarles, Lovelace, martyrs, pietists, and rakes, all the true children of the Muses, whatever their mode or matter, were restored and reprinted.

  Cowley was still mentioned with high respect during the eighteenth century, and was the first poet in the collection to which Johnson contributed prefaces. Johnson’s life in that collection was famous for its criticism of the “metaphysical” poets, the hint of which is given in Dryden’s “Essay on Satire.” It assigns the obvious cause for the decline of Cowley’s fame. The “metaphysical poets” are courtier pedants. They represent the intrusion into poetry of the love of dialectical subtlety encouraged by the still prevalent system of scholastic disputation. In Cowley’s poems, as in Donne’s, there are many examples of the technical language of the schools, and the habit of thought is perceptible throughout. In the next generation the method became obsolete and then offensive. Cowley can only be said to survive in the few pieces where he condescends to be unaffected, and especially in the prose of his essays, which are among the earliest examples in the language of simple and graceful prose, with some charming poetry interspersed.

  But cleverness and sense, both of which he has to a very high degree, when wanting good taste and that indescribable something which eternally severs poetry from verse, have long since placed him amongst those writers who are rarely read, but never read without profit.

  A constitutional sentiment for ease permeates all his prose works. His poems are labored and more prosy than his prose.

  A rhetorician rather than a poet, without passion, without imagination, but rich in fancy and rich in thought, his style insensibly took its colour from the temper of his genius.

  In Abraham Cowley we are presented with a striking example of original genius breaking through the restraints of the traditional methods of his time.

  His somewhat voluminous poems contain many passages that are well worth perusal.

  He introduced the form known as the irregular or Pindaric ode, based on a misconception of the meter of the Greek poet, which Cowley did not perceive to consist of groups of three stanzas of definite forms. Cowley’s epic “The Davideis” is unfinished, and his verse has not life enough to be of interest to any but special students of the period.