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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.

2 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'.

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 car; 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 TÉXVη μμNTIKÝ3, 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.

5

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 μnoeis (cf. Poet. ch. i); ἡ μιμητική or 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 ἡ μιμητική 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.

* See Appendix F.

5 'When the poet writes humour he makes folly ridiculous; when wit, 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 art 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.

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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". 58 Nor was the sublime more within their reach than the pathetick; for they never attempted that comprehension and expanse

of thought which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second rational admiration. Sublimity is produced by aggregation, and littleness by dispersion. Great thoughts are always general, and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minuteness. It is with great propriety that subtlety, which in its original inport means exility of particles, is taken in its metaphorical meaning for nicety of distinction. Those writers who lay on the watch for novelty could have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation. Their attempts were always analytick: they broke every image into fragments, and could no more represent by their slender conceits and laboured particularities the prospects of nature or the scenes of life, than he who dissects a sun-beam with a prism can exhibit the wide effulgence of a summer noon.

What they wanted however of the sublime they endeavoured 59 to supply by hyperbole; their amplification had no limits: they left not only reason but fancy behind them, and produced combinations of confused magnificence that not only could not be credited, but could not be imagined.

:

Yet great labour directed by great abilities is never wholly 60 lost if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth 2: if their conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage. To write on their plan it was at least necessary to read and think. No man could be born a metaphysical poet, nor assume the dignity of a writer by descriptions copied from descriptions, by imitations borrowed from imitations, by traditional imagery and hereditary similes, by readiness of rhyme and volubility of syllables 3.

61 In perusing the works of this race of authors the mind is exercised either by recollection or inquiry; either something already learned is to be retrieved, or something new is to be examined. If their greatness seldom elevates their acuteness often surprises; if the imagination is not always gratified, at least the powers of reflection and comparison are employed; and in the mass of materials, which ingenious absurdity has thrown together, genuine wit and useful knowledge may be sometimes found, buried perhaps in grossness of expression, but useful to those who know their value, and such as, when they are expanded to perspicuity and polished to elegance, may give lustre to works which have more propriety though less copiousness of sentiment.

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This kind of writing, which was, I believe, borrowed from Marino and his followers, had been recommended by the example of Donne, a man of very extensive and various knowledge, and by Jonson, whose manner resembled that of Donne more in the ruggedness of his lines than in the cast of his sentiments". 63 When their reputation was high they had undoubtedly more imitators than time has left behind. Their immediate successors, of whom any remembrance can be said to remain, were Suckling, Waller, Denham, Cowley, Cleiveland3, and Milton*. Denham and Waller sought another way to fame, by improving the harmony of our numbers 5. Milton tried the metaphysick style only in his lines upon Hobson the Carrier. Cowley adopted it, and excelled his predecessors; having as much sentiment and more musick. Suckling neither improved versification nor abounded in conceits. The fashionable style remained chiefly with Cowley: Suckling could not reach it, and Milton disdained it". 64 CRITICAL REMARKS are not easily understood without exmost fantastic and arbitrary.' COLERIDGE, Biog. Lit. i. 22.

'I always said about Cowley, Donne, &c., whom Johnson calls the metaphysical poets, that their very quibbles of fancy showed a power of logic which could follow fancy through such remote analogies.' Letters of Edward FitzGerald, ii. 26.

Dryden defines Cleivelandism as 'wresting and torturing a word into another meaning.' Works, xv. 287.

* Johnson omits Sprat (post, SPRAT, 22). Cunningham points out (i. 22) the omission of Crashaw and Herbert. 5 Post, DENHAM, 21; WALLER, 5, 142.

"Milton's Poetical Works (ed. W. Aldis Wright), p. 23.

7 6

'Wit,' said Gray, 'had gone entirely out of fashion since the reign of Charles II.' Mitford's Gray, v. 39.