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Most of these petty faults are in his first productions, where he was less skilful, or at least less dexterous in the use of words; and though they had been more frequent, they could only have lessened the grace, not the strength of his composition. He is one of the writers that improved our taste and advanced our language, and whom we ought therefore to read with gratitude; though, having done much, he left much to do.

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The life of Cowley, notwithstanding the penury of English biography, has been written by Dr. Sprat, an author whose pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language have deservedly set him high in the ranks of literature; but his zeal of friendship, or ambition of eloquence, has produced a funeral oration rather than a history: he has given the character, not the life, of Cowley; for he writes with so little detail, that scarcely any thing is distinctly known, but all is shown confused and enlarged through the mist of panegyric.

Abraham Cowley was born in the year 1618. His father was a grocer, whose condition Dr. Sprat conceals under the general appellation of a citizen; and what would probably not have been less carefully suppressed, the omission of his name in the register of St. Dun

* Johnson.

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stan's parish gives reason to suspect that his father was a sectary. Whoever he was, he died before the birth of his son, and consequently left him to the care of his mother; whom Wood represents as struggling earnestly to procure him a literary education, and who, as she lived to the age of eighty, had her solicitude rewarded by seeing her son eminent, and, I hope, by seeing him fortunate, and partaking his prosperity. We know, at least, from Sprat's account, that he always acknowledged her care, and justly paid the dues of filial gratitude.

*

In the window of his mother's apartment lay Spenser's Faerie Queene, in which he very early took delight to read; till, by feeling the charms of verse, he became, as he relates, irrecoverably a poet. Such are the accidents which, sometimes remembered and perhaps sometimes forgotten, produce that particular designation of mind, and propensity for some certain science or employment, which is commonly called genius. The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great painter of the present age, had the first fondness for his art excited by the perusal of Richardson's treatise.

By his mother's solicitation he was admitted into Westminster School, where he was soon distinguished. He was wont, says Sprat, to relate, "that he had this defect in his memory at that time, that his teachers never could bring it to retain the ordinary rules of grammar."

This is an instance of the natural desire of man to propagate a wonder. It is surely very difficult to tell any thing as it was heard, when Sprat could not refrain from amplifying a commodious incident, though the book to which he prefixed his narrative contained its confutation. A memory admitting some things and rejecting others, an intellectual digestion that concocted the pulp of learning but refused the husks, had the appearance of an instinctive elegance, of a particular provision made by nature for literary politeness. But in the author's own honest relation the marvel vanishes: he was, he says, such an enemy to all constraint, that his master never could prevail on him to learn the rules without book." He does not tell that he could not learn the rules; but that being able to perform his exercises without them, and being an enemy to constraint," he spared himself the labour.

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Among the English poets, Cowley, Milton, and Pope might be said "to lisp in numbers ;" and have given such early proofs, not only of powers of language, but of comprehension of things, as to

"I believe," says he, in his essay on himself, "I can tell the particular little chance that filled my head first with such chimes of verses as have never since left ringing there. For I remember, when I began to read and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour,-I know not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read any book but of devotion, but there was wont to lie Spenser's works. This I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights, and giants, and monsters, and brave houses, which I found every where (though my understanding had little to do with all this), and by degrees with the tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the numbers; so that I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a poet as immediately as a child is made an eunuch.",

more tardy minds seems scarcely credible. But of the learned puerilities of Cowley there is no doubt, since a volume of his poems was not only written but printed in his fifteenth year, containing, with other poetical compositions, The Tragical History of Pyramus and Thisbe, written when he was ten years old; and Constantia and Philetus, written two years after.

While he was yet at school he produced a comedy called Love's Riddle, though it was not published till he had been some time at Cambridge. This comedy is of the pastoral kind, which requires no acquaintance with the living world, and therefore the time at which it was composed adds little to the wonders of Cowley's minority.

In 1636 he was removed to Cambridge,* where he continued his studies with great intenseness; for he is said to have written, while he was yet a young student, the greater part of his Davideis; a work of which the materials could not have been collected without the study of many years, but by a mind of the greatest vigour and activity.

Two years after his settlement at Cambridge he published Love's Riddle, with a poetical dedication to Sir Kenelm Digby, of whose acquaintance all his contemporaries seem to have been ambitious; and Naufragium Joculare, a comedy written in Latin, but without due attention to the ancient models, for it is not loose verse, but mere prose. It was printed with a dedication in verse to Dr. Comber, master of the college; but having neither the facility of a popular nor the accuracy of a learned work, it seems to be now universally neglected.

At the beginning of the civil war, as the prince passed through Cambridge in his way to York, he was entertained with a representation of the Guardian, a comedy which Cowley says was neither written nor acted, but rough-drawn by him and repeated by the scholars. That this comedy was printed during his absence from his country, he appears to have considered as injurious to his reputation; though during the suppression of the theatres, it was sometimes privately acted with sufficient approbation.

In 1643, being now M.A., he was, by the prevalence of the Parliament, ejected from Cambridge, and sheltered himself at St. John's College in Oxford; where, as is said by Wood, he published a satire called The Puritan and Papist, which was only inserted in the last collection of his works;† and so distinguished himself by the warmth of his loyalty and the elegance of his conversation, that he gained the kindness and confidence of those who attended 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 ciphering and deciphering the letters that passed between the king

*He was candidate this year at Westminster School for election to Trinity College, but proved unsuccessful.

The satire was added to Cowley's works by the particular direction of Dr. Johnson.

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