the continuator and imitator of Lucan; and Cowley, whose taste and thought are English and metaphysical while his verse walks upon Roman feet, will never, as I am confident, be placed in competition with our author by any adequate and unprejudiced judge. I speak with more direct reference to his elegies, which were all written in that interval of his life immediately under our review, and which, evidently composed with the most entire affection, are executed on the whole with the most complete success. He was particularly fond in his youth, as he tells us himself, of "the smooth elegiac poets, whom, both for the pleasing sound of their numerous writing, which in imitation he found most easy and most agreeable to nature's part in him; and for their matter, which what it is there be few who know not, he was so allured to read that no recreation came to him better welcome

38 "

But of the elegiac writers Ovid seems to have been his favorite and his model. We may sometimes discover Tibullus in his pages, but Ovid is diffused over them. He will not, however, suffer his respect for the Roman models, as Mr. Warton has justly remarked, to oppress his powers or to deprive him of his own distinct and original character. He wields their language with the most perfect mastery, and, without wishing, like

37 That Cowley was capable of writing Latin poetry with classical purity would be attested by his beautiful epitaph on himself, if even this short composition were not injured by the intrusion of one line of Cow. leian quaintness and conceit.

"Nam vita gaudet mortua floribus."

38 Apol. for Smect. P. W. 1. 23,

Cowley, to compel it to any unclassical service, employs it as an obedient instrument.

Of these poems, which are all of great though various merit, the fifth, written in the author's twentieth year on the return of spring, and the sixth, addressed in his twenty-first year to his friend Deodati, seem to be entitled to the praise of superior excellence. In these elegies there appears to be a more masterly arrangement and a greater variety of poetic imagery and allusion than in their fellows; though the fourth written in his eighteenth year to his former preceptor Young; and the seventh, in which the poet, at the age of nineteen, describes with tenderness and sensibility the transient effects of love upon his bosom, must be admitted to very high and distinguished praise. The object, as it may be proper to mention, of the love, which he has thus commemorated, was a lady whom he accidentally saw in one of the public walks near the metropolis, and of whom, on her sudden disappearance among the crowd, he could never obtain any further intelligence.

A critical eye may sometimes detect in these compositions an expression which an Augustan writer would not, perhaps, acknowledge as authentic; and a reader of taste may sometimes wish for more compression in the style, and may be sorry that the youthful poet did not occasionally follow some model of more nerve than the diffuse and languid Ovid. On the whole, however, these productions must be regarded as possessing rare and preeminent merit. To Eng

land, indeed, they are peculiarly interesting, as they were the first pieces which extended her fame for Latin poetry to the continent; and as they evince the various power of her illustrious bard by showing that he, who subsequently approved himself to be her Eschylus and her Homer, could once flow in the soft numbers and breathe the tender sentiments of Ovid and Tibullus.

The only prose compositions of this date, which we possess of our author's, are some of his college and University exercises, under the title of "Prolusiones oratoriæ," and five of his familiar letters; four of them in Latin to his old preceptors, Young and Gill, and one in English, forming his answer to a friend who had censured him for wasting his life in literary pursuits, and had urged him to forsake his study for some of the active occupations of the world. This letter, of which Dr. Birch has published the rough and the corrected draught from the author's MSS. in the library of Trinity college, Cambridge, concludes with a very impressive sonnet; and is particularly interesting for the view which it gives to us of the writer's delicacy of principle and of the high motives which actuated his bosom. The reader, as I persuade myself, will thank me for communicating it.

"Besides that in sundry other respects I must acknowledge me to profit by you whenever we meet, you are often to me, and were

yesterday especially, as a good watchman to admonish that the hours of the night pass on (for so I call my life as yet obscure and unserviceable to mankind) and that the day with me is at hand, wherein Christ commands all to labor while there is light. Which, because I am persuaded you do to no other purpose than out of a true desire that God should be honored in every one, I therefore think myself bound, though unasked, to give you account, as oft as occasion is, of this my tardy moving, according to the precept of my conscience, which, I firmly trust, is not without God. Yet now I will not strain for any set apology, but only refer myself to what my mind shall have at any time to declare herself at her best ease. But if you think, as you said, that too much learning is in fault, and that I have given up myself to dream away my years in the arms of studious retirement, like Endymion with the moon, as the tale of Latmus goes; yet consider, that if it were no more but the mere love of learning, whether it proceeds from a principle bad, good, or natural, it could not have held out thus long against so strong opposition on the other side of every kind. For if it be bad, why should not all the fond hopes that forward youth and vanity are fledge with, together with gain, pride, and ambition, call me forward more powerfully than a poor regardless and unprofitable sin of curiosity should be able to withhold me, whereby a man cuts himself off from all action, and becomes the most helpless pusillanimous and unweaponed creature in the world, the most unfit

and unable to do that which all mortals most aspire to, either to be useful to his friends or to offend his enemies. Or if it be to be thought a natural proneness, there is against that a much more potent inclination inbred, which about this time of a man's life solicits most, the desire of house and family of his own, to which nothing is esteemed more helpful than the early entering into credible employment, and nothing hindering than this affected solitariness. And though this were enough, yet there is to this another act, if not of pure yet of refined nature, no less available to dissuade prolonged obscurity, a desire of honor and repute and immortal fame seated in the breast of every true scholar, which all make haste to by the readiest ways of publishing and divulging conceived merits, as well those that shall as those that never shall obtain it. Nature, therefore, would presently work the more prevalent way, if there were nothing but this inferior bent of herself to restrain her. Lastly, the love of learning, as it is the pursuit of something good, it would sooner follow the more excellent and supreme good known and presented, and so be quickly diverted from the empty and fantastic chace of shadows and notions to the solid good flowing from due and timely obedience to that command in the gospel set out by the terrible seizing of him that hid the talent. It is more probable, therefore, that not the endless delight of speculation, but this very consideration of that great commandment does not press forward, as soon as many do, to undergo, but keeps off with