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ALEXANDER V. BLAKE, PUBLISHER.

SOLD BY COLLINS, KEESE, & CO., NEW-YORK; OTIS, BROADERS, & CO., BOSTON;
THOMAS, COWPERTHWAIT, & CO., PHILADELPHIA.

1840.

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LIVES OF THE ENGLISH POETS

COWLEY.

THE Life of COWLEY, notwithstanding the pen-time, that his teachers never could bring it to reury of English biography, has been written by tain the ordinary rules of grammar." Dr. Sprat, an author whose pregnancy of imagin- This is an instance of the natural desire of man ation and elegance of language have deservedly to propagate a wonder. It is surely very difficult set him high in the ranks of literature; but his to tell any thing as it was heard, when Sprat zeal of friendship, or ambition of eloquence, has could not refrain from amplifying a commodious produced a funeral oration rather than a history: incident, though the book to which he prefixhe has given the character, not the life, of Cow-ed his narrative contained his confutation. A ley; for he writes with so little detail, that scarcely memory admitting some things, and rejecting any thing is distinctly known, but all is shown others, an intellectual digestion that concocted confused and enlarged through the mist of panegyric.

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."

the pulp of learning, but refused the husks, had the appearance of an instinctive elegance, of a ABRAHAM COWLEY was born in the year one particular provision made by Nature for literary thousand six hundred and eighteen. His father was politeness. But in the author's own honest relaa grocer, whose condition Dr. Sprat conceals un- tion, the marvel vanishes: he was, he says, such der the general appellation of a citizen; and, what "an enemy to all constraint, that his master would probably not have been less carefully sup-never could prevail on him to learn the rules pressed, the omission of his name in the register of St. Dunstan'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.

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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 more tardy minds seem 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 thirteenth 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.

In the window of his mother's apartment lay Spenser's Fairy Queen; 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 While he was yet at school he produced a coremembered, and perhaps sometimes forgotten, medy called "Love's Riddle," though it was not produce that particular designation of mind, and published till he had been some time at Campropensity for some certain science or employ-bridge. This comedy is of the pastoral kind, ment, which is commonly called genius. The which requires no acquaintance with the living true genius is a mind of large general powers, world, and therefore the time at which it was accidentally determined to some particular direc- composed adds little to the wonders of Cowley's tion. 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!

minority.

This volume was not published before 1633, when Cowley was fifteen years old. Dr. Johnson, as well as portrait of Cowley being by mistake marked with the former biographers, seems to have been misled by the age of thirteen years.-R.

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