45

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 men. He thought himself now safe enough from intrusion, 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. Albans and the duke of Buckingham, such a lease of the Queen's lands as afforded him an ample income 3. By the lover 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 5.

To Dr. THOMAS SPRAT.

'Chertsey, 21 May, 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,

Hurd's Cowley, i. 52. Evelyn recorded on May 14, 1663 :-' To Barnes, to visit my excellent and ingenious friend, Abraham Cowley.' Diary, i. 396. Pepys, who rowed up the river to 'Barne Elmes' on May 26, 1667, recorded in his Diary, iv. 53:-'I walked the length of the Elmes, and with great pleasure saw some gallant ladies and people come with their bottles, and basket, and chairs, and form, to sup under the trees by the water-side, which was mighty pleasant.' L'Allegro

2

JOHNSON.

of Milton [1. 118].

3 See Appendix D.

In Memoir of Oliver Cromwell, &c. by Francis Peck, 1740, Part ii. p. 81. Sprat, addressing Clifford (post, DRYDEN, 94), says:-'In his letters to his private friends he always expressed the native tenderness and innocent gaiety of his mind. I think, Sir, you and I have the greatest collection of this sort. But I know you agree with me that nothing of this nature should be published.' Hurd's Cowley, i. 37; ante, COWLEY,

I n.

5 In his Essay Of Solitude he writes:

Oh Solitude, first state of humankind!

Which blest remain'd till man did find

Ev'n his own helper's company. As soon as two, alas! together join'd,

The serpent made up three.' Eng. Poets, ix. 32. See also ib. p. 106.

Atterbury wrote to Pope from Bromley 'I generally keep here what Mr. Cowley calls the worst of company in the world, my own.' Atterbury Corres. i. 81. He refers, perhaps, to the following:-'And yet our dear self is so wearisome to us that we can scarcely support its conversation for an hour together.' Eng. Poets, ix. 28.

6 In The Garden he had written :'Here health itself does live, That salt of life which does to all a

relish give.' Ib. ix. 75.

In his Essay Of Myself he writes: -'God laughs at a man who says to his soul, Take thy ease. I meet presently... with so much sickness

that I am yet unable to move or turn myself in my bed. This is my personal fortune here to begin with. And, besides, I can get no 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. Bois3 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 uncertain 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. Anne's Hill 5. 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".

He did not long enjoy the pleasure or suffer the uneasiness 46 of solitude, for he died at the Porch-house in Chertsey in 1667, in the 49th year of his age'.

He was buried with great pomp near Chaucer and Spenser 8; 47 and king Charles pronounced 'That Mr. Cowley had not left

(a new misfortune to me) as would have spoiled the happiness of an emperor as well as mine.' Ib. ix. 125.

In his Essay Of Agriculture he asserted that the means of improving estates is as easy and certain in agriculture as in any other track of commerce.' Ib. ix. 41.

In his will, written four months later, he says of his estate, 'which it has pleased God to bestow upon me much above my deserts.' Cunningham, Lives of the Poets, i. 62.

3 Pepys mentions Mr. Bois, whose house in Cheapside was burnt down in Aug. 1664. Diary, ii. 368.

'Eho, nonne hoc monstri simile

est?' TERENCE, Eun. ii. 3. 43. 5 At St. Anne's Hill was Fox's last home.

"Dictum sapienti sat est.' TERENCE, Phor. iii. 3. 8.

7'He died at a house called the Porch house, towards the west end of the town of Chertsey, on July 28, aged 49 years.' WOOD, Fasti Oxon. ii. 212. Johnson says in a note that the house is 'now in the possession of Mr. Clarke, Alderman of London.' See post, MILTON, 97 n. Clarke be

LIVES OF POETS, 1

8

Evelyn recorded on Aug. 3:'Went to Mr. Cowley's funeral, whose corpse was conveyed to Westminster Abbey in a hearse with six horses and all funeral decency, near a hundred coaches of noblemen and persons of quality following; among these all the wits of the town, divers bishops and clergymen.' Diary, ii. 30.

Pepys did not hear of his death till Aug. 10, when he recorded:-' To the New Exchange, to the bookseller's there.... Cowley, he tells me, is dead; who, it seems, was a mighty civil, serious man; which I did not C

48

49

50

a better man behind him in England'.' He is represented by Dr. Sprat as the most amiable of mankind, and this posthumous praise may be safely 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 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 pleasure to its natural sources in the mind of man, paid their court to temporary prejudices, has been at one time too much praised and too much neglected at another 2.

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

know before.' Diary, iv. 153. 'The New Exchange was at the western end of the Strand.' N. & Q. 4 S. x. 73.

On his monument we read how he was 'honorifica pompa elatus ex Aedibus Buckinghamianis.' Aubrey adds:-'His Grace the Duke of Bucks held a tassell of the pall.' Brief Lives, i. 190.

Of his epitaph in Latin verse Johnson writes:-'It is always with indignation or contempt that I read it. ... I condemn them [the expressions in it] as uninstructive and unaffecting, as too ludicrous for reverence and grief, for Christianity and a temple.' Johnson's Works, v. 262. Post, POPE, 410.

Hurd's Cowley, i. 55.

• Wood describes Cowley as 'Anglorum Pindarus, Flaccus, Maro, deliciae, decus et desiderium aevi sui.' Fasti Oxon. ii. 209. Dryden wrote of him in 1699:-'One of our late great poets is sunk in his reputation because he could never forego any conceit which came in his way, but swept, like a drag-net, great and

small.... For this reason, though he must always be thought a great poet, he is no longer esteemed a good writer; and for ten impressions which his works have had in so many successive years, yet at present a hundred books are scarcely purchased once a twelve month: for, as my last Lord Rochester said, though somewhat profanely, "Not being of God he could not stand."' Dryden's Works, xi. 223.

Pope, in 1737, in Imit. Hor. 2 Epis. i. 75 asks:'Who now reads Cowley? if he pleases yet, [wit.' His moral pleases, not his pointed Richardson (Corres. ii. 229), in 1750, wonders 'why Cowley is so absolutely neglected.' In the eighteenth century only two complete editions of his works (exclusive of those in English Poets) were published. Malone's Dryden, iii. 611. Hurd's Select Works in Verse and Prose of Cowley, published in 1772 in two small octavo volumes, reached a third edition in five years.

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 1.

The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to shew 51 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 verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables.

If the father of criticism has rightly denominated poetry 52 Téxη μμntikn2, an imitative art, these writers will without great wrong lose their right to the name of poets, for they cannot be said to have imitated any thing: they neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter nor represented the operations of intellect.

Those however who deny them to be poets allow them to be 53 wits. Dryden confesses of himself and his contemporaries that they fall below Donne in wit, but maintains that they surpass him in poetry 3.

If Wit be well described by Pope as being 'that which has 54 been often thought, but was never before so well expressed',' they certainly never attained nor ever sought it, for they · endeavoured to be singular in their thoughts, and were careless ✔ of their diction. But Pope's account of wit is undoubtedly erroneous; he depresses it below its natural dignity, and reduces it from strength of thought to happiness of language.

* See Appendix E.

✓

If by a more noble and more adequate conception that 55 3 Doctor Donne, the greatest wit, though not the best poet of our nation.' DRYDEN, Works, xi. 123. 'If we are not so great wits as Donne, yet certainly we are better poets.' Ib. xiii. 109.

2 An Aristotelian scholar informs me that he does not think 'Aristotle uses the phrase τέχνη μιμητική, totidem verbis, of poetry. It is no doubt contained by implication in Poetics, ch. viii, but the prevailing mode of expression is to speak of poetry as a form of μίμησις (μίμησίς TIS), or of the several kinds of poetry as so many unσeis (cf. Poet. ch. i); ἡ μιμητική οι ἡ μιμητική τέχνη, as a whole, would cover many other arts besides poetry, and so Plato uses the phrase ἡ τῆς ποιήσεως μιμητική, ex. gr. in Rep. p. 603 c, substituting for it hμμnrikh a few lines lower down.'

'Donne had no imagination, but as much wit, I think, as any writer can possibly have.' POPE, Spence's Anec. p. 136.

4 See Appendix F.

5 When the poet writes humour he makes folly ridiculous; when wil, he moves you, if not always to laughter, yet to a pleasure that is more noble.' DRYDEN, Works, iii. 248.

be considered as Wit which is at once natural and new, that which though not obvious is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that, which he that never found it, wonders how he missed; to wit of this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen. Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found. 56 But Wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors1; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, they have more than enough. The most ✔heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and vart are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

57

From this account of their compositions it will be readily inferred that they were not successful in representing or moving the affections. As they were wholly employed on something unexpected and surprising they had no regard to that uniformity of sentiment, which enables us to conceive and to excite the pains and the pleasure of other minds: they never enquired what on any occasion they should have said or done, but wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human nature; as beings looking upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure; as Epicurean deities making remarks on the actions of men and the vicissitudes of life, without interest and without emotion. Their courtship was void of fondness and their lamentation of sorrow. Their wish was only to say what they hoped had been never said before 2. 58 Nor was the sublime more within their reach than the pathetick; for they never attempted that comprehension and expanse