who aended 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. In the year 1647, his "Mistress" was published; for he imagined, as he declared in his preface to a subsequent edition, that poets are scarcely thought "freemen of their company without paying some ❝duties, or obliging themselves to be true to love.

This obligation to amorous ditties owes, I believe, its original to the fame of Petrarch, who in an age rude and uncultivated, by his tuneful homage to his Laura, refined the manners of the lettered world, and filled Europe with love and poetry. But the basis of all excellence is truth: he that professes love ought to feel its power. Petrarch was a real lover, and Laura doubtless deserved his tenderness. 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.

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

*Barnesii Anacreontem. Dr. J.

for the lover to solicit reciprocal regard by an elabarate 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."

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 burthened with life as to squander it in voluntary dreams of fictitious occurrences. The man that sits down to suppose himself charged with treason or peculation, and heats his mind to an elaborate purgation of his character from crimes which he was never within the possibility of committing, differs only by the infrequency of his folly from him who praises beauty which he never saw; complains of jealousy which he never felt; supposes himself sometimes invited, and sometimes forsaken; fatigues his fancy, and ransacks his memory, for images which may exhibit the gaiety 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 Jermyn, he was engaged in transacting things of real importance 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. Bennet, 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 shew him to have been above the affectation of unseasonable elegance, and to have known that the business of a statesman can be little forwarded by flowers of rhetorick.

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: I 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 necessity of an accord ❝ is visible, the king is persuaded of it. And to tell 66 you the truth (which I 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.

Consulting the Virgilian lots, sortes Virgilianæ, is a method of divination by the opening of Virgil and applying to the circumstances of the peruser the first passage in either of the two pages that he accidently fixes his eye on. It is said that king Charles I. and lord Falkland, being in the Bodleian library, made this experiment of their future fortunes, and met with passages equally ominious to each. That of the king was the following:

At bello audacis populi vexatus & armis,
Finibus extorris, complexu avulsus Iuli,
Auxilium imploret, videatque indigna suorum

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

Funera, nec, cum se sub leges pacis iniquæ
Tradiderit, regno aut optata luce fruatur:

Sed cadat ante diem, mediaque inhumatus arena.

Eneid IV. 615.

Yet let a race untam'd, and haughty foes,
His peaceful entrance with dire arms oppose,
Oppressed with numbers in th' unequal field,
His men discourag'd, and himself expell'd:
Let him for succour sue from place to place,
Torn from his subjects and his son's embrace.
First let him see his friends in battle slain,
And their untimely fate lament in vain:
And when, at length, the cruel war shall cease,
On hard conditions may he buy his peace;
Nor let him then enjoy supreme command,
But fall untimely by some hostile hand,

And lie unbury'd on the barren sand.

LORD FALKLAND's:

Non hæc, O Palla, dederas promissa parenti,
Cautius ut sævo vellas te credere Marti.

DRYDEN.

Haud ignarus eram, quantum nova gloria in armis,
Et prædulce decus primo certamine posset.
Primitia jnvenis misera belique propinqui
Dura rudimenta, & nulla exaudita Deorum,
Vota precesque mere'

Eneid XI. 152.

O,Pallas, thou hast fail'd thy plighted word,
To fight with caution, not to tempt the sword;
I warn'd thee, but in vain, for well I knew
What perils youthful ardour would pursue;
That boiling blood would carry thee too far,
Young as thou wert to dangers, raw to war.
O curst essay of arms, disastrous doom,
Prelude of bloody fields and fights to come!
Hard elements of unauspicious war,
Vain vows to Heaven, and unavailing care!

DRYDEN.

into England, that, "under pretence 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 confinement, from which he was not dismissed without the security of a thousand pounds given by Dr. Scarborough.

This year he published his poems, with a preface, in which he seems to have inserted something suppressed in subsequent editions, which was interpreted to denote some relaxation of his loyalty. In this preface he declares, that "his desire had been for some "days past, and did still very vehemently continue, to "retire himself to some of the American plantations, "and to forsake this world for ever."

From the obloquy which the appearance of submission to the usurpers brought upon him, his 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 easily believe to be undissembled; a man harassed in one kingdom, and persecuted in another, who, after a course of business that employed all his 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 neither our revcrence for a genius, nor our pity for a sufferer, dispose us to forget that, if his activity was virtue, his retreat was cowardice.

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 tabbins, and even the early Christians; the latter taking the New Testament for their oracle. H.