No poetical name in history carries with it a greater charm than Cowley's. During one of the brightest periods of our literature; the public voice was unanimous in his praise. Milton elevated him to a seat between Shakespeare and Spenser; Dryden, who knew him well, honoured what he affectionately termed his sacred ashes; and Pope always spoke of him with high regard and admiration. "Cowley," he said to Spence, "is a fine poet, in spite of all his faults." But even in that age he was fallen from his pedestal; the worshippers had dethroned their idol. His poems, which a few years before had been, as Mr. Bentley would say, the most popular book of the season, ceased to be in demand; the curiosity of a new taste had subjected them to an inspection which magnified their peculiarities into frightfulness; his gushes of sensibility, his moral pathos, his purity of sentiment, were passed into oblivion. He was become a fit subject for a retrospective review. But, though forgotten by the multitude, the eyes of a few studious men were still turned to his pages. In an essay in the Literary Magazine (vol. iii. p. 198), with which Johnson is known to have been connected, and which may, therefore, have proceeded from his pen, it is remarked.

The

will be done to Mr. Cowley's prose, as well as his poetical writings.' Lives of the Poets certainly rekindled some of the early interest respecting him; but his reputation only glimmered. Years rolled by, and Cowley crept along with little regard. The smoothness of the Anglo-French school carried the day. Cowley was by disposition the reverse of his poetry. Every reader must have been struck by the remarkable difference between his prose and verse. One was natural, the other artificial; one was the language of his heart, the other the dialect of a sect. He entered the literary world at a season most unfavourable to the developement of a pure and genuine taste.

Donne, whose eloquence and learning as a preacher imparted a dignity to his poetical name, divided with his friend Ben Jonson the applause of the town. Cowley, therefore, misled by the shout of popular favour, started on the same road which he knew had conducted them to the Temple of Fame; and he who afterwards denounced Persius as no poet, because of his obscurity, was content to involve his own beautiful thoughts in the jargon of a learned but corrupt school, to sacrifice the sweetest

Nothing can be more unfounded than Mr. Campbell's assertion, that his unnatural flights arose less from affectation than self-deception; or that he cherished false thoughts, as men often associate with false friends, not from insensibility to the difference between truth and falsehood, but from being too indolent to examine the difference. This elaborate metaphor might have been spared. We have not any reason to suppose that Cowley wrote against his better judgment, or that his poetical errors were the fruit of indolence, and not of intention. It is worth while to reflect how powerful the current of public feeling must have been which so entirely drifted away his tastes from the model of his early inspiration. But let justice be done to Cowley; he yielded to no slight temptation. The fame he thirsted after was not what Oldham so bitterly calls

"The false and foolish fire that's whisk'd about

By popular air, and glares awhile, and then goes out;'

the breath of a puling coterie, or the bray of an ignorant and presumptuous journalist. The brotherhood of which he strove to become a member gloried in the proudest names of English literature; and was honoured and beloved by men whose memory will live while learning and virtue bave any home: by Clarendon, much of whose early time was spent in the company of Jonson; by Selden, the admiration of a learned age; and by Falkland, who united the esteem and affection of all parties. No man, it has been well said, could be born a metaphysical poet, nor assume the dignity of a writer, by descriptions copied from descriptions, by imitations borrowed from imitations, by traditional imagery and hereditary similes, by readiness of rhyme and volubility of syllables. They were men of deep and extensive scholarship,- trained in all the learning of the schools, and equally prepared to solve a problem or to pen a stanza. The happiest and fairest parallel between the metaphysical poets, as they have been called after Dryden, and the modern imbeciles, is drawn by Coleridge, in the Biographia Literaria. "In the former," he says, " from Donne

most pure and genuine mother-English; in the latter, the most obvious thoughts in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and the starts of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous, imagery. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery."

With these men, therefore, poetry was, in the words of Davenant, the dexterity of thought rounding the world, like the sun, with unimaginable motion, and bringing swiftly home to the memory universal surveys. The metaphysical school would never have furnished the Laureate with a volume of uneducated poets; John Jones must have been contented with his wages. Hazlitt's distinction between poetry and eloquence, that the one is the eloquence of the imagination, and the other of the understanding, would not have stood for a moment at the Dog or the Triple Tun.* How Jonson, or Beaumont, or Cartwright, would have smashed it over a flask of Canary; Herrick would have made the walls ring with his mirth; while the Dean of St. Paul's recalled with amazement those verses to his mistress in which he displays at once his astronomy and his attachment. With them poetry was, indeed, the blossom of all human knowledge; and the more rare and distant the tree, the more precious the fruit. In this sense it was that Dryden pronounced Donne the greatest wit, though not the greatest poet, of the age; where wit may be understood to express what Johnson calls a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Their delight was to vex rude subjects into comeliness; no marble was too hard for their chisel, no metal too coarse for their alchemy. Upon the most desolate and unfruitful spots their fancy loved to throw up its many-coloured domes, and from the intricate labyrinths of a perplexed and discordant imagery forms of beauty and grace continually start up before us. Johnson's account of the descendants of Donne and Jonson is exceedingly imerfect. "Their immediate success

brance can be said to remain, were Suckling, Waller, Denham, Cowley, Cleveland, and Milton. Denham and Waller sought another way to fame, by improving the harmony of our numbers. Milton tried the metaphysic style only in his lines upon Hobson the carrier. Cowley adopted it, and excelled his predecessors, having as much sentiment, and more music. Suckling neither improved versification nor abounded in conceits. The fashionable style remained chiefly with Cowley; Suckling could not reach it, and Milton disdained it." Thus, after subtracting the names of Milton, Denham, Waller, and Suckling, we have only Cowley and Cleveland remaining of a school which the learned crowned with the laurel. If Johnson's acquaintance with the literature of the preceding century had equalled the stores of learning he had amassed on almost every other subject of literary inquiry, we should have been furnished with a different catalogue. Not to attempt a minute and unnecessary enumeration, we may inquire for Herbert, the Cowley of religious verse, and who seems to have exercised an almost equal influence over the sacred poetry of his age; for his disciple Crashaw; for Cartwright, of whom Ben Jonson emphatically declared-" My son Cartwright writes all like a man ;” for Oldham, whose rage Pope said was too much like Billingsgate, but whom Dryden, in an affectionate elegy, called the Marcellus of our tongue; for Randolph, another of Jonson's adopted sons, whose tree of life was soon cut down; and others, whom we have neither time nor space to reckon. Our business is now with the greatest of them all, who yet lives a splendid example of their beauties and defects.

Our own age has made no reparation for the neglect of the preceding. Even the learned and accomplished editor of the Aldine Poets-a collection, particularly in the later volumes, deserving very high commendationhas stepped over the grave of Cowley; yet the ashes of Parnell, the pleasant, elegant, feeble, and -alas! that we should write the word -- drunken author of the Hermit, have been gathered into a golden urn; and Swift's dunghill has been tossed about with a most ungratifying curiosity. Why should these things be? The life of Cowley

as well as more fine, than any in the language. This must have been put hypothetically. The biography of Cowley as it stands in Johnson is peculiarly barren of incidents, and the bruise in his ribs towards the conclusion is quite a relief to the lover of adventure. For this deficiency of interest Johnson is not to be blamed. The folly of Spratt, in keeping back all those letters in which the poet poured out his heart to his friends, effectually lopped off one of the most beautiful branches of biography. "What lite"has not

rary man," says Coleridge, regretted the prudery of Spratt in refusing to let Cowley appear in his slippers and dressing-gown?" The question has naturally been asked, What has become of these letters? Did the dean destroy the correspondence he thought it right to suppress? Six months ago this inquiry would have been unanswered. We are now, by a most fortunate circumstance, enabled to state that a large portion of these letters is preserved, and has been placed in our hands for arrangement and publication, by a descendant of Dr. Spratt. Of their authenticity, proofs can be afforded which will satisfy even the incredulity of Mr. Disraeli, by whom, we are certain, the discovery will be hailed with great delight, in his forthcoming History of Literature. Our first proposition was to print the correspondence with a few explanatory notes; but a little reflection suggested that a series of letters, throwing so much light on the personal history and feelings of the poet, would be perused with greater interest in connexion with a running notice of his life, and sketches of some of his friends and contemporaries. No labour has been spared to fill up what we have always viewed as a blank in our poetical biography. The letters are printed from the original MSS.; but it has been deemed advisable to accommodate the orthography to our present system. In a few places, perhaps, the diction may appear more florid and ornate than Cowley's PROSE REMAINS Would lead us to expect; but even from those essays we can easily perceive that his style abounded in imagery, and that his letters were all prose by a poet. His influence upon our literature seems never to have been sufficiently appreciated. But in those

with so much mildness and dignity, may be traced the qualities afterwards expanded by Addison into an elegance and purity which have linked his memory with his land's language. Cowley was the earliest of those writers who may be said to have embellished the second period of English prose.

Of Cowley's early history we know nothing, except that bis father was a grocer, who, dying before the birth of his son, left him to the protection of an affectionate mother, through whose exertions he was admitted into Westminster School. In that delightful fragment of autobiography entitled

Myself," we are presented with a few interesting particulars of his boyish days. They cannot be told in any language so beautiful as his own. His essays, which Pope has happily styled the language of his heart, are among the most touching poetical confessions ever given to the world. They form a species of composition, says Disraeli, in our language-a mixture of prose and verse-the man with the poet. The self-painter has sat to himself, and with the utmost simplicity has copied out the image of his soul. Some of Cowper's letters to Lady Hesketh bear the greatest resemblance to the naïveté and charm of these mental revelations.

"As far as my memory can return back into my past life, before I knew, or was capable of guessing, what the world, or glories, or business of it were, the natural affections of my soul gave me a secret bent of aversion from them, as some plants are said to turn away from others, by an antipathy imperceptible to themselves, and inscrutable to man's understanding. Even when I was a very young boy at school, instead of running about on holidays, 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 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 of the same mind then as I am now (which I confess I wonder at myself) may appear by the

this part which I have set down (if a very little were corrected), I should hardly now be much ashamed.

"This only grant me, that my means may lie

Too low for envy, for contempt too high.
Some honour I would have,-
Not from great deeds, but good alone.
The unknown are better than ill-known.
Rumour can ope the grave.
Acquaintance I would have, but when 't
depends

Not on the number, but the choice of friends.

Books should, not business, entertain the

me.

"You may see by it I was even then acquainted with the poets (for the conclusion is taken out of Horace); and perhaps it was the immature and immoderate love of them which stamped first, or, rather, ingraved, these characters in They were like letters cut on the bark of a young tree, which with the tree still grow proportionably. But how this love came to be produced in me so early is a hard question. I believe I can tell the particular little chance that filled my head first with such chimes of verse as have never since left ringing there; for I remember when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not by what accident,-for she herself never in her life read any book but of devotion)-but there was wont to lie Spenser's works: this I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights, and giants, and monsters, and brave bouses

fundarer where there (though