he must always be thought a great poet, he is no longer esteemed a good writer,' said Dryden in 1700. Addison praised him with even more discrimination. Two editions of his works appeared early in the eighteenth century, but in 1737 Pope was able to ask 'Who now reads Cowley?' Then followed Johnson's celebrated Life, which has eclipsed for almost every one the works of its subject. Except for a few students like Lamb and Sir Egerton Brydges, Cowley's verse is in this century unread and unreadable. Not even the antiquarian curiosity of an age which reprints Brath. waite and Crowne has yet availed to present him in a new edition. The reasons of this extraordinary decline in a poetical reputation are not difficult to find; Dryden absorbed all that was best in Cowley, and superseded him for the readers of the eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century, which reads Dryden little, naturally reads Cowley less. Yet criticism has to justify great names. There must be something in a man who was regarded by his age, and that an age which boasted of having outgrown all illusions, as the most profound and ingenious of its writers. A rapid review of Cowley's work will help us to judge between the estimate of his time and the estimate of posterity.

With the volume of Poetical Blossomes which he published at fifteen, when he was a schoolboy at Westminster, we are not further concerned than to note its vast superiority to the verses of most clever boys. If Cowley, like Chatterton, had died befor manhood, these verses might perhaps have kept his name alive; but as it is he soon outdid them, and in his mature writings he valued them justly as 'commendable extravagance in a boy,' but declined to give them a place in the permanent collection of his poems. Some stanzas from The Wish he excepted, quoting them in his pleasant essay Of Myself as verses of which ‘I should hardly now be ashamed.' He wrote them at thirteen, he says; and our extracts may fairly begin with them. But in the main we shall be right in confining ourselves to the mature poems of the Folio of 1656, with the additions that were made to it during his lifetime. He meant it to be a definitive edition of his poems; he excluded much from it deliberately, and he intended to add nothing to it. In 1656, as he says in his most interesting Freface-a class of writing which he raised to a new importancein 1656 he felt in no mood for making poetry. The times were against it, his own health of body and mind were against it. A warlike, various, and tragical age is best to write of, but worst tc

write in.' Living as a political suspect, with scanty means and no prospects, he had no encouragement to write. The soul must be filled with bright and delightful ideas when it urdertakes to com. monicate delight to others, which is the main end of poesy.' He was seriously turning his thoughts away from Cromwell's England; planning an 'obscure retreat' in the American plantations; and the book was to be a legacy to the world to which he would soon be dead. As every one knows, times changed, and he did not go to America. The Restoration brought him, not success indeed— his failure to obtain the Mastership of the Savoy was pathetically bewailed by him-but relief from all pressing necessities, and a quiet home first at Barnes and then at Chertsey, not beyond the reach of visits from Evelyn and Dean Sprat and other appreciative friends. In such surroundings he made his peace with the Muse and wrote during the years that remained to him some of his best poems.

The divisions of the Folio are (1) Miscellanies, including Anacreontiques; (2) The Mistress, a collection of love poems; (3) Pindarique Odes; (4) Davideis, an heroic poem of the troubles of David; and, in the later issues, (5) Verses on various occasions, and (6) Several Discourses by way of Essays in verse and prose. The Miscellanies, he tells us, are poems preserved by chance from a much larger number-some of them the works of his early youth, and some, like the celebrated Elegy on Crashaw, belonging to his best years. What we notice in these pages, as in all that Cowley published, is his curious inability to distinguish good from bad; he prints rubbish, like the intolerable Ode 'Here's to thee Dick,' side by side with the touching verses on the death of his friend Mr. William Hervey; he mars poem after poem with some scholastic absurdity or comparison drawn from a science that has nothing to do with poetry. The fine lines on Falkland, for example-lines that we should prize if only as a memorial of the friendship between two such interesting men—these lines are ruined, poetically speaking, by Cowley's science. Falkland is gone on the expedition against the Scots, and the poet addresses the North :

'Great is thy charge, O North! be wise and just:

England commits her Falkland to thy trust;

Return him safe; Learning would rather choose

Her Bodley or her Vatican to lose.

All things that are but writ or printed there

In his unbounded breast engraven are.'

So far the conceit may pass; but what are we to say of the illustrations by which Cowley would show us the order that reigns in the crowded mind of his hero?

'So thousand divers species fill the air,

Yet neither crowd nor mix confusedly there.'

What are we to say of the political image under which, with elephantine humour, he pretends to complain of Falkland's too great learning?

'How could he answer 't, if the State saw fit

To question a monopoly of wit?'

It is a painful but inevitable thought that Cowley was better pleased with his 'species' and his 'monopoly' than with the noble lines which follow-lines whose force, condensation, dignity and rhythm have hardly been surpassed by Dryden himself:

'Such is the man whom we require the same
We lent the North, untouched as is his fame.
He is too good for war, and ought to be
As far from danger as from fear he's free.
Those men alone (and they are useful too)
Whose valour is the only art they know

Were for sad war and bloody battles born:
Let them the state defend, and he adorn!

The Mistress (which had been printed in 1647) is a collection c about a hundred love-poems, explained by the author in the presace to the Folio as being mere feigned addresses to some fair creature of the fancy. 'So it is that Poets are scarce thought Freemen of the Company without paying some duties and obliging themselves to be true to Love.' The apology, even if true, was hardly required even by Puritan strictness; for with two or three exceptions the poems are as cold as icy conceits can make them. Johnson's characteristic judgment is hardly too severe '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.' It is as though in the course of a hundred years the worst fancies which Wyatt had borrowed from Petrarch had become fossilized, and were yet brought out by Cowley to do duty for living thoughts. What is love? he seems to ask: it is an interchange of hearts, a flame, a worship, a river to be frozen by disdain-he has a hundred such physical and psychological images of it; and the poetry consists in taking the images one by one and developing them in merciless disregard of taste and truth of feeling. Is lo ́a

fire? (we may give two or three of his illustrations even after Addison's page-long summary) :—

'Another from my mistress' door

Saw me with eyes all watery come;
Nor could the hidden cause explore,

But thought some smoke was in the room :—
Such ignorance from unwounded learning came;

He knew tears made by smoke, but not by flame!'

The lover writes his love-letters in lemon-juice, that the fire of his mistress' eyes may bring the letters to light. At another time he pictures his heart as not inflammable only, but explosive :—

m!

Into the selfsame room

'Twill tear and blow up all within,

Like a grenado shot into a magazine.'

At another, the story of his love cut in the bark has burnt and withered up the tree. Again, if love is worship, his mistress, who has proved unfaithful, is like the idolators of old who sinned against light

'So the vain Gentiles, when they left t'adore

One Deity, could not stop at thousands more...
Ah, fair Apostate! could'st thou think to flee
From Truth and Coodness, yet keep Unity?'

Or again; is his mistress dressed out for conquest? Then her beauty, which had been a civil government before, becomes a tyranny. But we have said enough: The Mistress, Cowley's most elaborate and sustained effort, is clearly a failure. Nothing of what we require of love-poetry is there-neither grace nor glow nor tenderness nor truth. The passion is neither deeply felt nor lightly uttered.

We cannot judge so simply the Pindarique Odes, a form of composition of which Cowley was the inventor, and which found universal favour in England down to the time of Gray. He was well aware that in writing in this way, which he thought to be an imitation of Pindar, he was making a questionable innovation. 'I am in great doubt,' he says, 'whether they will be understood by most readers; nay even by very many who are well enough acquainted with the common roads and ordinary tracks of poesy. . . The digressions are many and sudden, and sometimes long, according to the fashion of all lyrics, and of Pindar above all men iving. The figures are unusual and bold, even to temerity, and

such as I durst not have to do withal in any other kind of poetry; the numbers are various and irregular, and sometimes, especially some of the long ones, seem harsh and uncouth if the just measures and cadences be not observed in the pronunciation. So hat almost all their sweetness and numerosity (which is to be found, if I mistake not, in the roughest, if rightly repeated) lies in a manner wholly at the mercy of the reader.' For himself, however, he had no doubts about the value of the new style of poetry ; nay, he found a pleasure in comparing the 'liberty' of the ode with the moral liberty of which he was always a votary :

If Life should a well-ordered poem be

(In which he only hits the white

Who joins true profit with the best delight)
The more heroic way let others take,

Mine the l'indaric way I'll make.

6

The matter shall be garve, the numbers loose and free.' But the analogy was a very imperfect one with him; for while the moral liberty which he enjoyed led him to a life of great simplicity, unworldliness and charm, his liberty of verse led him too often into mere intellectual athleticism and display. That for which I think this inequality of number is chiefly to be preferred,' says Dr. Sprat with great artlessness, 'is its affinity with prose'; and that no doubt was the reason which induced the Flatmans and the Samuel Wesleys of the next generation to choose that mode of dress for their platitudes. But with Cowley the attractiveness of the Ode seems to have been the wealth of opportunity which it afforded for what he called 'bold figures,' that is, for imagery such as could and would have occurred to no one else than to himself. Only Cowley, and only in an Ode, could have paused in the midst of a solemn address to the Muse and bidden her 'rein her Pindaric Pegasus closely in '—for

"Tis an unruly and a hard-mouthed horse.'

Only Cowley, and only in an Ode, could have set the same Muse in her chariot, with Eloquence and Wit and Memory and Invention in the traces and the ‘airy footmen' of Conceits to run by her side, and then have suddenly turned to compare this Muse with the Creator:

Where never yet did pry

The busy Morning's curious eye,

The wheels of thy bold Coach pass quick and free,

And all's an open road to thee.