reades, and perhaps, if they would honestly de- | tion the ancients, he might have found it fullclare their own perceptions, to far the greater part of those whom courtesy and ignorance are content to style the learned. blown in modern Italy. Thus Sannazaro: These little pieces will be found more finished in their kind than any other of Cowley's works. The diction shows nothing of the mould of time, and the sentiments are at no great dis-sured him as having published a book of profane tance from our present habitudes of thought. Reas mirth must always be natural, and nature is uniform. Men have been wise in very different modes; but they have always laughed the same way. Levity of thought naturally produced familiarity of language, and the familiar part of language continues long the same; the dialogue of comedy, when it is transcribed from popular manners and real life, is read from age to age with equal pleasure. The artifices of inversion, by which the established order of words is changed, or of innovation, by which new words or meanings of words are introduced, is practised, not by those who talk to be understood, but by those who write to be admired. and lascivious verses. From the charge of profaneness, the constant tenor of his life, which seems to have been eminently virtuous, and the general tendency of his opinions, which discovers no irreverence of religion, must defend him; but that the accusation of lasciviousness is unjust, the perusal of his work will sufficiently evince. Cowley's Mistress has no power of seduction; she "plays round the head, but reaches not the heart." Her beauty and absence, her kindness and cruelty, her disdain and inconstancy, produce no correspondence of emotion. His poetical account of the virtues of plants, and colours of flowers, is not perused with more sluggish frigidity. The compositions are such as might have been written for penance by a hermit, or for hire by a philosophical rhymer who had only heard of another sex; for they turn the mind only on the writer, whom, without thinking on a woman but as the subject for his task, we sometimes esteem as learned, and sometimes despise as trifling, always admire as ingenious, and always con demn as unnatural. The Anacreontiques therefore of Cowley give now all the pleasure which they ever gave. If he was formed by nature for one kind of writing more than for another, his power seems to have been greatest in the familiar and in the festive. The next class of his poems is called The Mistress, of which it is not necessary to select any particular pieces for praise or censure. They have all the same beauties and faults, and The Pindarique Odes are now to be consinearly in the same proportion. They are writ-dered; a species of composition, which Cowley ten with exuberance of wit, and with copious- thinks Panciolus might have counted in his list ness of learning and it is truly asserted by of the lost inventions of antiquity, and which he Sprat, that the plenitude of the writer's know has made a bold and vigorous attempt to reledge flows in upon his page, so that the reader cover. is commonly surprised into some improvement. But 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. The principal artifice by which The Mistress is filled with conceits is very copiously displayed by Addison. Love is by Cowley, as by other peets, expressed metaphorically by flame and fire; and that which is true of real fire is said of love, for figurative fire, the same word in the same sentence retaining both significations. Thus, "observing the cold regard of his mistress's eyes, and at the same time their power of producing love in him, he considers them as burning-glasses made of ice. Finding himself able to live in the greatest extremities of love, he concludes the torrid zone to be habitable. Upon the dying of a tree on which he had cut his loves, he observes that his flames had burnt up and withered the tree." The purpose with which he has paraphrased an Olympic and Nemean ode is by himselt sufficiently explained. His endeavour was, not to show precisely what Pindar spoke, but his manner of speaking. He was therefore not at all restrained to his expressions, nor much to his sentiments; nothing was required of him, but not to write as Pindar would not have written. Of the Olympic ode, the beginning is, I think, above the original in elegance, and the conclusion below it in strength. The connexion is supplied with great perspicuity; and thoughts, which to a reader of less skill seem thrown together by chance, are concatenated without any abruption. Though the English mode cannot be called a translation, it may be very properly consulted as a commentary. The spirit of Pindar is indeed not every where equally preserved. The following pretty lines are not such as his deep mouth was used to pour ⚫ Great Rhea's son, If in Olympus' top, where thou If in my verse thou take delight, In the Nemean ode the reader must, in mere of the original new moon, her tender forehead and justice to Pindar, observe, that whatever is said her horns, is superadded by his paraphrast, who has many other plays of words and fancy unsuitable to the original: as, The table, free for ev'ry guest, And feast more upon thee. than thou on it. He sometimes extends his author's thoughts | of magnificence; yet I cannot refuse myself the without improving them. In the Olympionic four next lines. an oath is mentioned in a single word, and Cowley spends three lines in swearing by the Castalian stream. We are told of Theron's bounty, with a hint that he had enemies, which Cowley thus enlarges in rhyming prose: But in this thankless world the giver Lest men should think we owe. It is hard to conceive that a man of the first rank in learning and wit, when he was dealing out such minute morality in such feeble diction, could imagine, either waking or dreaming, that he imitated Pindar. In the following odes, where Cowley chooses his own subjects, he sometimes rises to dignity truly Pindaric; and if some deficiences of language be forgiven, his strains are such as those of the Theban bard were to his contemporaries: Begin the song, and strike the living lyre; Lo how the years to come, a numerous and well-fitted quire All hand in hand do decently advance, In the last trumpet's dreadful sound. After such enthusiasm, who will not lament to find the poet conclude with lines like these: But stop, my muse Hold thy Pindaric Pegasus closely in, Which does to rage begin 'Tis an unruly and a hard-mouth'd horse "Twill no unskilful touch endure, But flings writer and reader too that sits not sure. The fault of Cowley, and perhaps all the writers of the metaphysical race, is that of pursuing his thoughts to the last ramifications, by which he loses the grandeur of generality; for of the greatest things the parts are little; what is little can be but pretty, and by claiming dignity becomes ridiculous. Thus all the power of description is destroyed by a scrupulous enumeration; and the force of metaphors is lost when the mind by the mention of particulars is turned more upon the original than the secondary sense, more upon that from which the illustration is drawn, than that to which it is applied. Of this we have a very eminent example in the ode intitled The Muse, who goes to take the air in an intellectual chariot, to which he harnesses fancy and judgment, wit and eloquence, memory and invention. How he distinguished wit from fancy, or how memory could properly contribute to motion, he has not explained: we are however content to suppose that he could have justified his own fiction, and wish to see the muse begin her career; but there is yet more to be done. Let the postillion Nature mount, and let And let the airy footmen, running all beside, Figures, conceits, raptures, and sentences, And innocent loves, and pleasant truths, and useful lies, Every mind is now disgusted with this cumber Mount, glorious queen, thy travelling throne, For long though cheerful is the way, In the same ode, celebrating the power of the muse, he gives her prescience, or, in poetical language, the foresight of events hatching in futurity; but, having once an egg in his mind, he cannot forbear to show us that he knows what an egg contains: Thou into the close nests of Time dost peep, Through the firm shell and the thick white dost spy Close in their sacred secundine asleep. The same thought is more generally, and therefore more poetically expressed by Casimir, a writer who has many of the beauties and faults of Cowley; Omnibus Mundi Dominator horis have been carried, by a kind of destiny, to the Cowley, whatever was his subject, seems to light and the familiar, or to conceits which require still more ignoble epithets. A slaughter in the Red Sea, new dies the water's name and England, during the civil war, was Albion no more, nor to be named from white. It is surely by some professing to revive the noblest and highest wri fascination not easily surmounted, that a writer ting in verse, makes this address to the new year, Nay if thou lov'st me, gentle year, Let not so much as love be there, Vain, fruitless love I mean; for, gentle year, There's of this caution little need, Yet, gentle year, take heed Such a mistake; Such love I mean alone As by thy cruel predecessors has been shown!! I fain would try, for once, if life can live without It. The reader of this will be inclined to cry out with Prior, Ye critics, say, How poor to this was Pindar's style! Even those who cannot perhaps find in the Isthmian or Nemaan songs what antiquity has disposed them to expect, will at least see that they are ill-represented by such puny poetry; and all will determine that if this be the old Theban strain, it is not worthy of revival. To the disproportion and incongruity of Cowley's sentiments must be added the uncertainty and looseness of his measures. He takes the liberty of using in any place a verse of any length from two syllables to twelve. The verses of Pindar have, as he observes, very little harmony to a modern ear; yet, by examining the syllables we perceive them to be regular, and have reason enough for supposing that the ancient audiences were delighted with the sound. The imitator ought therefore to have adopted what he found, and to have added what was wanting; to have preserved a constant return of the same numbers, and to have supplied smoothness of transition and continuity of thought. It is urged by Dr. Sprat, that the irregularity of numbers is the very thing which makes that kind of poesy fit for all manner of subjects. But he should have remembered, that what is fit for every thing can fit nothing well. The great pleasure of verse arises from the known measure of the lines, and uniform structure of the stanzas, by which the voice is regulated, and the memory relieved. If the Pindaric style be, what Cowley thinks Sacred history has been always read with subit, the highest and noblest kind of writing in verse, missive reverence, and an imagination overaw it can be adapted only to high and noble sub-ed and controlled. We have been accustomed jects; and it will not be easy to reconcile the poet with the critic, or to conceive how that can be the highest kind of writing in verse, which, according to Sprat, is chiefly to be preferred for its near affinity to prose. to acquiesce in the nakedness and simplicity of the authentic narrative, and to repose on its veracity with such humble confidence as suppresses curiosity. We go with the historian as he goes, and stop with him when he stops. All amplification is frivolous and vain; all addition to that which is already sufficient for the purposes of religion seems not only useless, but in some degree profane. This lax and lawless versification so much concealed the deficiencies of the barren, and flattered the laziness of the idle, that it immediately overspread our books of poetry; all the boys and girls caught the pleasing fashion, and Such events as were produced by the visible they that could do nothing else could write like interposition of Divine Power are above the Pindar. The rights of antiquity were invaded, power of human genius to dignify. The miraand disorder tried to break into the Latin: a cle of creation, however it may teem with imapoem on the Sheldonian Theatre, in which all ges, is best described with little diffusion of lankinds of verses are shaken together, is unhap- guage: He spake the word, and they were made. pily inserted in the Musa Anglicana. Pindar- We are told that Saul was troubled with an ism prevailed about half a century; but at last evil spirit; from this Cowley takes an opportudied gradually away, and other imitations sup-nity of describing hell, and telling the history of ply its place. Lucifer, who was, he says, Once general of a gilded host of sprites, Lucifer makes a speech to the inferior agents of mischief, in which there is something of heathenism, and therefore of impropriety; and to give efficacy to his words, concludes by lashing his breast with his long tail. Envy, after a pause, steps out, and among other declarations of her The Pindaric odes have so long enjoyed the highest degree of poetical reputation, that I am not willing to dismiss them with unabated censure; and surely, though the mode of their composition be erroneous, yet many parts deserve at least that admiration which is due to great comprehension of knowledge, and great fertility of fancy. The thoughts are often new, and often striking; but the greatness of one part is disgraced by the littleness of another; and total negligence of language gives the no-zeal utters these lines: blest conceptions the appearance of a fabric august in the plan, but mean in the materials. Yet surely those verses are not without a just claim to praise; of which it may be said with truth, that no man but Cowley could have written them. Do thou but threat, loud storms shall make reply, The Davideis now remains to be considered; It is not only when the events are confessedly miraculous, that fancy and fiction lose their effect: the whole system of life, while the theocracy was yet visible, has an appearance so different from all other scenes of human action, that the reader of the Sacred Volume habitually considers it as the peculiar mode of existence of a distinct species of mankind, that lived and acted with manners uncommunicable: so that it is difficult even for imagination to place in the state of them whose story is related, and by consequence their joys and griefs are not easily adopted, nor can the attention be often interest To the subject thus originally indisposed to the reception of poetical embellishments the writer brought little that could reconcile impaFirst published in quarto, 1669, under the title of tience, or attract curiosity. Nothing can be 4 Carmen Pindaricum in Theatrum Sheldonianum in more disgusting than a narrative spangled with conceits; and conceits are all that Davideis supplies. solennibus magnifici Operis Encaniis. Recitatum Julii die 9, Anno 1669, a Crobeuo Owen, A. B. Ed. Chr. Alumno Authore."-R. One of the great sources of poetical delight is description,* or the power of presenting pictures to the mind. Cowley gives inferences instead of images, and shows not what may be supposed to have been seen, but what thoughts the sight might have suggested. When Virgil describes the stone which Turnus lifted against Æneas, he fixes the attention on its bulk and weight: Saxum circumspicit ingens, I saw him fling the stone, as if he meant Of the sword taken from Goliah, he says, A sword so great, that it was only fit To cut off his great head that came with it. Other poets describe death by some of its common appearances. Cowley says, with a learned allusion to sepulchral lamps, real or fabulous, Twixt his right ribs deep pierc'd the furious blade, And open'd wide those secret vessels where Life's light goes out, when first they let in air. But he has allusions vulgar as well as learned. In a visionary succession of kings, Joas at first does bright and glorious show, His forces seem'd no army, but a crowd, he gives them a fit of the ague. The allusions however are not always to vulgar things; he offends by exaggeration as much as by diminution: The king was plac'd alone, and o'er his head A well-wrought heaven of silk and gold was spread Whatever he writes is always polluted with some conceit : Where the sun's fruitful beams give metals birth, This he with starry vapours sprinkles all, The choicest piece cut out, a scarf is made. what might in general expressions be great and This is a just specimen of Cowley's imagery. forcible, he weakens and makes ridiculous by branching it into small parts. That Gabriel was invested with the softest or brightest colours of the sky, we might have been told, and been dismissed to improve the idea in our different proportions of conception; but Cowley could not let us go till he had related where Gabriel got first his skin, and then his mantle, then his lace, and then his scarf, and related it in the terms of the mercer and tailor. Sometimes he indulges himself in a digression, always conceived with his natural exuberance, and commonly, even where it is not long, continued till it is tedious. I' th' library a few choice authors stood, Yet 'twas well stor'd, for that small store was good. And with the spurious brood loads now the press; As the Davideis affords only four books, though intended to consist of twelve, there is no opportunity for such criticisms as epic poems com monly supply. The plan of the whole work is very imperfectly shown by the third part. The duration of an unfinished action cannot be known. Of characters either not yet introduced, or shewn but upon few occasions, the full extent and the nice discriminations cannot be ascertained. The fable is plainly implex, formed rather from the Odyssey than the Iliad: and many artifices of diversification are employed, with the skill of a man acquainted with the best models. The past is recalled by narration, and the future anticipated by vision: but he has been so lavish of his poetical art, that it is difficult to imagine how he could fill eight books more without practising again the same modes of disposing of his matter: and perhaps the perception of this growing incumbrance inclined him to stop. By In one passage he starts a sudden question, to this abruption posterity lost more instruction the confusion of philosophy: Ye learned heads, whom ivy garlands grace, Why does that twining plant the oak embrace; The oak for courtship most of all unfit, And rough as are the winds that fight with it? than delight. If the continuation of the Davideis can be missed it is for the learning that had been diffused over it, and the notes in which it had been explained. Had not his characters been depraved, like His expressions have sometimes a degree of every other part, by improper decorations, they meanness that surpasses expectation: Nay, gentle guests, he cries, since now you're in, would have deserved uncommon praise. He gives Saul both the body and mind of a hero : His way once chose, he forward thrust outright, Nor turn'd aside for danger or delight. And the different beauties of the lofty Merah and the gentle Michol are very justly conceived and strongly painted. Rymer has declared the Davideis superior to the Jerusalem of Tasso, "which," says he, "the poet, with all his care, has not totally purged from pedantry." If by pedantry is meant that minute knowledge which is derived from particular sciences and studies, in opposition to the general notions supplied by a wide survey of life and nature, Cowley certainly errs, by introduI know not, indeed, why they should be com cing pedantry, far more frequently than Tasso. pared; for the resemblance of Cowley's work to Tasso's is only that they both exhibit the agency of celestial and infernal spirits, in which however they differ widely; for Cowley supposes them commonly to operate upon the mind by suggestion; Tasso represents them as promoting or obstructing events by external agency. Of particular pages that can be properly compared, I remember only the description of Heaven, in which the different manner of the two writers is sufficiently discernible. Cowley's is scarcely description, unless it be possible to describe by negatives; for he tells us only what there is not in Heaven. Tasso endeavours to represent the splendours and pleasures of the regions of happiness. Tasso affords images, and Cowley sentiments. It happens, however, that Tasso's descriptions afford some reason for Rhymer's censure. He says of the Supreme Being, Hà sotto i piedi e fato e la natura Ministri humili, e'l moto, e ch'il misura. The second line has in it more of pedantry than perhaps can be found in any other stanza of the poem. In the perusal of the Davideis, as of all Cowley's works, we find wit and learning unprofitably squandered. Attention has no relief; the affections are never moved; we are sometimes surprised, but never delighted, and find much to admire, but little to approve. Still however it is the work of Cowley, of 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 with 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 pro found. It is said by Denham in his elegy, To him no author was unknown, This wide position requires less limitation, when it is affirmed of Cowley, than perhaps of any other poet.- He read much, and yet borrowed little. His character of writing was indeed, not his own: he unhappily adopted that which was predominant. He saw a certain way to present praise; and, not sufficiently inquiring by what means the ancients have continued to delight through all the changes of human manners, he contented himself with a deciduous laurel, of which the verdure in its spring was bright and gay, but which time has been continually stealing from his brows. He was in his own time considered as of unrivalled excellence. Clarendon represents him as having taken a flight beyond all that went before him; and Milton is said to have declared, that the three greatest English poets were Spenser, Shakspeare, and Cowley. 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. In his elegy on Sir Henry Wotton, the last lines have such resemblance to the noble epigram of Grotius on the death of Scaliger, that I cannot but think them copied from it, though they are copied by no servile hand. One passage in his Mistress is so apparently borrowed from Donne, that he probably would not have written it, had it not mingled with his own thoughts, so as that he did not perceive himself taking it from another : Although I think thou never found wilt be, Yet things well worth his toil he gains: Cowley. Some that have deeper digg'd Love's mine than I, And as no chymic yet th' elixir got, Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal, So lovers dream a rich and long delight, But get a winter-seeming summer's night. Jonson and Donne, as Dr. Hurd remarks, were then in the highest esteem. It is related by Clarendon that Cowley always industry of Jonson; but I have found no traces acknowledges his obligation to the learning and of Jonson in his works: to emulate Donne appears to have been his purpose; and from Donne he may have learned that familiarity with religious images, and that light allusion to sacred things, by which readers far short of sanctity be borne in the present age, when devotion, perare frequently offended; and which would not haps not more fervent, is more delicate. Having produced one passage taken by Cowley from Donne, I will recompense him by another which Milton seems to have borrowed from him. He says of Goliah, His spear, the trunk was of a lofty tree, His spear, to equal which the tallest pine His diction was in his own time censured as negligent. He seems not to have known, or not to have considered, that words being arbitrary must owe their power to association, and have the influence, and that only, which custom has given them. Language is the dress of thought: and as the noblest mien, or most graceful action, would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rustics or mechanics: so the most heroic sentiments will lose their efficacy, and the most splendid ideas drop their magnificence, if they are conveyed by words used commonly upon low and trivial occasions, debased by vulgar mouths, and contaminated by inelegant applications. Truth indeed is always truth, and reason is always reason; they have an intrinsic and unalterable value, and constitute that intellectua! gold which defies destruction; but gold may be so concealed in baser matter, that only a chymist can recover it; sense may be so hidden in |