minance 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 heroick numbers.

At the same time were produced, from the same university, the two great Poets, Cowley and Milton, of dissimilar genius, of opposite principles; 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,

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.

he produced it*under the title of "The Cutter of Cole"man-street.”+ It was treated on the stage with great severity, and was afterwards censured as a satire on the King's party.

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 shewn 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 gradation 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 followed the royal family through all their distresses, " he should chuse 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 his 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 for

*1663.

+Here is an error in the designation of this comedy, which our author copied from the title-page of the latter editions of Cowley's Works: the title of the play itself is without the article, "Cutter of "Coleman-street," and that because a merry sharking fellow about the town, named Cutter, is a principal character in it. H.

tune 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 introduced by Suckling, perhaps every generation of poets has been teazed.

Savoy-missing Cowley came into the court,
Making apologies for his bad play;
Every one gave him so good a report,
That Apollo gave heed to all he could say:
Nor would he have had, 'tis thought, a rebuke,
Unless he had done some notable folly:
Writ verses unjustly in praise of Sam Tuke,
Or printed his pitiful melancholy.

away most

His vehement desire of retirement now came again upon him. "Not finding," says the morose Wood, "that preferment conferred upon him which he expect"ed, while others for their money carried places, he retired discontented into Surrey." "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 mo"derate revenue below the malice and flatteries of "fortune."

So differently are things seen! and so differently are they shewn! but actions are visible, though motives are secret. Cowley certainly retired; first to Barn-elms, and afterwards to Chertsey, in Surrey. He seems, however, to have lost part of his dread of the hum of He thought himself now safe enough from in

men.*

* L'Allegro of Milton. Dr. J.

trusion, 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 in

come.

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.

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To Dr. THOMAS SPRAT.

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 for"tune here to begin with. And, besides, I can get no 66 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 less "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 farre within five or six days (though it be uncer"tain yet whether I shall ever recover it), as to walk "about again. And then, methinks, 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,”

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He did not long enjoy the pleasure, or suffer the uneasiness of solitude; for he died at the Porch-house* in Chertsey, in 1667, in the 49th year of his age.

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He was buried with great pomp near Chaucer and Spenser; 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 faction.

Such are the remarks and memorials which I have been able to add to the narrative of Dr. Sprat; who, writing when the feuds of the civil war were yet recent, and the minds of either party were easily irritated, was obliged to pass over many transactions in general expressions, and to leave curiosity often unsatisfied. What 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.

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 nature 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 shew their learning was their whole endeavour: but, unluckily resolving to shew it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry they only wrote verses, and very often such

*Now in the possession of Mr. Clark, Alderman of London. Dr. J.-Mr. Clark was in 1798 elected to the important office of Chamberlain of London; and has every year since been unani、 mously re-elected, N.,