ACT II.

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DR. JOHNSON'S WORKS.

LIVES OF THE POETS.

VOL. I.

THE

WORKS

OF

SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.

IN NINE VOLUMES.

VOLUME THE SEVENTH.

MDCCCXXV.

CONTENTS OF THE SEVENTH VOLUME.

THE LIVES OF THE ENGLISH POETS.

Cowley

Denham

Milton

Butler

Rochester

Roscommon

Otway

Waller

Pomfret

Dorset

Stepney

J. Philips

Walsh

Dryden

Smith

Duke

King

Sprat

Halifax

Parnell

Garth

Rowe

Addison

Hughes

Sheffield, duke of Buckinghamshire

PREFATORY NOTICE

TO

THE LIVES OF THE POETS.

Such was the simple and unpretending advertisement that announced the

Lives of the English Poets; a work that gave to the British nation a new

style of biography. Johnson's decided taste for this species of writing,

and his familiarity with the works of those whose lives he has recorded,

peculiarly fitted him for the task; but it has been denounced by some as

dogmatical, and even morose; minute critics have detected inaccuracies;

the admirers of particular authors have complained of an insufficiency

of praise to the objects of their fond and exclusive regard; and the

political zealot has affected to decry the staunch and unbending

champion of regal and ecclesiastical rights. Those, again, of high and

imaginative minds, who "lift themselves up to look to the sky of poetry,

and far removed from the dull-making cataract of Nilus, listen to the

planet-like music of poetry;" these accuse Johnson of a heavy and

insensible soul, because he avowed that nature's "world was brazen, and

that the poets only delivered a golden[1]."

But in spite of the censures of political opponents, private friends,

and angry critics, it will be acknowledged, by the impartial, and

by every lover of virtue and of truth, that Johnson's honest heart,

penetrating mind, and powerful intellect, has given to the world

memoirs fraught with what is infinitely more valuable than mere verbal

criticism, or imaginative speculation; he has presented, in his Lives of

the English Poets, the fruits of his long and careful examination of men

and manners, and repeated in his age, with the authoritative voice of

experience, the same dignified lessons of morality, with which he

had instructed his readers in his earlier years. And if these lives

contained few merits of their own, they confessedly amended the

criticism of the nation, and opened the path to a more enlarged and

liberal style of biography than had, before their publication, appeared.

The bold manner in which Johnson delivered what he believed to be the

truth, naturally provoked hostile attack, and we are not prepared to

say, that, in many instances, the strictures passed upon him might not

be just. We will call the attention of our readers to some few of the

charges brought against the work now before us, and then leave it to

their candid and unbiased judgment to decide, whether the deficiencies

pointed out are but as dust in the balance, when brought to weigh

against the sterling excellence with which this last and greatest

production of our Moralist abounds.

He has been accused of indulging a spirit of political animosity, of an

illiberal and captious method of criticism, of frequent inaccuracies,

and of a general haughtiness of manner, indicative of a feeling of

superiority over the subjects of his memorial.

In the life of Milton his political prejudices are most apparent. It is

not our duty, neither our inclination, in this place, to discuss the

accuracy of Johnson's political wisdom. We cannot, however, but respect

the integrity with which he clung to the instructions of his youth,

amidst poverty, and all those inconveniencies which usually drive men to

a discontent with things as they are.

Those who censure him without qualification or reserve, are as bad, or

worse, on the opposite side.

They accuse him of narrow-minded prejudice, and of bigoted attachment to

powers that be with a rancour little befitting the liberality of which

they make such vaunting professions. Johnson had a really benevolent

heart, but despised and detested the affectation of a sentimental and

universal philanthropy, which neglects the practical charities of

home and kindred, in its wild and excursive flights after distant and

romantic objects. He was no tyrant, even in theory, but he dreaded, and,

therefore, sought to expose, the lurking designs of those who opposed

constituted authorities, because they hated subjection; and who, when

they gained power themselves, proved the well-grounded nature of the

fears entertained respecting their sincerity. Johnson was a firm

English character, and his surly expressions were often philanthropy in

disguise. They have little studied his real disposition, who impute his

occasional austerity of manner to misanthropy at heart. The man who is

smooth to all alike, is frequently the friend of none, and those who

entertain no aversions, have, perhaps, few of the warmer emotions of

friendship.

In dwelling thus long on a part of Johnson's character, on which we have

elsewhere[2] avowed that we could not speak with perfect pleasure, we

are not attempting to vindicate him in all his violent reproaches of

those whom he politically disliked. We would, however, wish to deprecate

unmitigated condemnation, and also to ask, whether the conduct of those

whom he denounced, was not, in its turn, so harsh and arbitrary, as

almost to justify the utmost severity of censure. Were they not men who

would "scarcely believe in the substance of their liberty, if they did

not see it cast a shadow of slavery over others."

With respect to Johnson's powers as a critic, we confess that he had but

little natural taste for poetry, as such; for that poetry of emotion

which produces in its cultivators and admirers an intensity of

excitement, to which language can scarcely afford an utterance, to which

art can give no body, and which spreads a dream and a glory around us.

All this Johnson felt not, and, therefore, understood not; for he wanted

that deep feeling which is the only sure and unerring test of poetic

excellence. He sought the didactic in poetry, and wished for reasoning

in numbers. Hence his undivided admiration of Pope and the French

school, who cultivated exclusively the poetry of idea, where each moral

problem is worked out with detailed, and often tedious, analysis; where

all intense emotion is frittered away by a ratiocinative process.

Johnson, we repeat, had no natural perception nor relish for the high

and excursive range of poetic fancy, and the age at which he composed

his criticisms on the English poets, was far advanced beyond that when

purely imaginative poetry usually affords delight. Hence, no doubt,

proceeded his capricious strictures on the odes of Gray to which

we, with painful candour, advert. In criticism and in poetry, for

indignation only poured forth the torrent of his song, he kept steadily

in view the interests of morality and virtue: these he would not

compromise for the glitter of genius, and for their maintenance of

these, the main objects of his own life and labour, he praised many an

author whom other more courtly critics have thought it not cruelty to

ridicule. He sums up his eulogium on a poet with the reflection, that he

left

No line which, dying, he could wish to blot.

Johnson has also not escaped animadversion for entitling his collection

The Lives of the English Poets, when he has taken so confined a range.

It must be remembered, that he only professed, in the first instance,

to prefix lives to the works which the booksellers chose to publish; he

was, therefore, confined to a task, at which he more than once expressed

his repugnance to Boswell. It should also, in fairness to his memory,

be borne in mind, that he wrote, as he confesses in his preface, from

scanty materials, and on various authors. It was very easy, therefore,

for each successive biographer, who devoted his time to the collection

of memoirs for some single individual, to point out inaccuracies in

Johnson's general statements; and very natural, also for one who had

contracted an affection for the subject of his labours, by continually

having him present in his thoughts, to carp at all those who were not as

alive to the merits, and as blind to the defects of his idol as himself.

But Johnson, feeling a manly consciousness of ability, which he affected

not to hide, was not dazzled by the lustre of brilliant talents, and was

far too honest to veil from public view the faults and failings of the

sons of genius. This he did not from a sour delight in detecting and

exposing the frailties of his fellow men, but from a belief that, in so

doing, he was promoting the good of mankind. "It is particularly the

duty," says he, "of those who consign illustrious names to posterity,

to take care lest their readers be misled by ambiguous examples. That

writer may justly be condemned as an enemy to goodness, who suffers

fondness or interest to confound right with wrong, or to shelter the

faults, which even the wisest and the best have committed, from that

ignominy which guilt ought always to suffer, and with which it should be

more deeply stigmatized, when dignified by its neighbourhood to uncommon

worth: since we shall be in danger of beholding it without abhorrence,

unless its turpitude be laid open, and the eye secured from the

deception of surrounding splendour[3]." "If nothing but the bright side

of characters should be shown," he once remarked to Malone, "we should

sit down in despondency, and think it utterly impossible to imitate them

in any thing[4]." It was this conscientious freedom, we believe, that

has, more than any other cause, subjected the Lives of the Poets to

severe censure. We readily avow this our belief, since we are persuaded

that it is now generally admitted by all, but those who are influenced

by an irreligious or a party spirit. We might diffuse these remarks to

a wide extent, by allusions to the opinions of different authors on the

Lives, and by critiques on the separate memoirs themselves; but we will

not longer occupy our readers, since the literary history of the Lives

has been elsewhere so fully detailed, and is now so almost universally

known[5].

What we have already advanced, has chiefly been with a view to invite to

the perusal of a work, which, for sound criticism, instructive memoir,

pleasing diction, and pure morality, must constitute the most lasting

monument of Johnson's fame.

[Footnote 1: See sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poetry.]

[Footnote 2: See vol. vi. 153.]

[Footnote 3: Rambler, 164.]

[Footnote 4: See Malone's letter, in Boswell, iv. 55.]

[Footnote 5: See Boswell; Dr. Drake's Literary Life of Johnson; and,

since we dread not examination, Potter's Inquiry into some Passages in

Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets; Graves's Recollections of Shenstone;

Mitford's preface to Gray's works; Roscoe's preface to Pope's works, &c.]

COWLEY

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 panegyrick.

Abraham Cowley was born in the year one thousand six hundred and

eighteen. 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. 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.

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 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.

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,

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 thirteenth year[6]; 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[7], 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 master of arts, 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[8]; 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 and

queen; an employment of the highest confidence and honour. So wide was

his province of intelligence, that, for several years, it filled all his

days and two or three nights in the week.

In the year 1647, his Mistress was published; for he imagined, as

he declared in his preface to a subsequent edition, that "poets are

scarcely thought freemen of their company without paying some duties, or

obliging themselves to be true to love."

This obligation to amorous ditties owes, I believe, its original to the

fame of Petrarch, who, in an age rude and uncultivated, by his tuneful

homage to his Laura, refined the manners of the lettered world, and

filled Europe with love and poetry. But the basis of all excellence is

truth: he that professes love ought to feel its power. Petrarch was a

real lover, and Laura doubtless deserved his tenderness. Of Cowley, we

are told by Barnes, who had means enough of information, that, whatever

he may talk of his own inflammability, and the variety of characters by

which his heart was divided, he, in reality, was in love but once, and

then never had resolution to tell his passion.

This consideration cannot but, abate, in some measure, the reader's

esteem for the work and the author. To love excellence is natural; it

is natural, likewise, for the lover to solicit reciprocal regard by an

elaborate display of his own qualifications. The desire of pleasing has,

in different men, produced actions of heroism, and effusions of wit; but

it seems as reasonable to appear the champion as the poet of an "airy

nothing," and to quarrel as to write for what Cowley might have learned

from his master Pindar, to call "the dream of a shadow."

It is surely not difficult, in the solitude of a college, or in the

bustle of the world, to find useful studies and serious employment. No

man needs to be so burdened with life, as to squander it in voluntary

dreams of fictitious occurrences. The man that sits down to suppose

himself charged with treason or peculation, and heats his mind to an

elaborate purgation of his character from crimes which he was never

within the possibility of committing, differs only by the infrequency of

his folly from him who praises beauty which he never saw; complains of

jealousy which he never felt; supposes himself sometimes invited, and

sometimes forsaken; fatigues his fancy, and ransacks his memory, for

images which may exhibit the gaiety of hope, or the gloominess of

despair; and dresses his imaginary Chloris or Phyllis, sometimes in

flowers fading as her beauty, and sometimes in gems lasting as her

virtues.

At Paris, as secretary to lord Jermyn, he was engaged in transacting

things of real importance with real men and real women, and, at that

time, did not much employ his thoughts upon phantoms of gallantry. Some

of his letters to Mr. Bennet, afterwards earl of Arlington, from April

to December, in 1650, are preserved in Miscellanea Aulica, a collection

of papers, published by Brown. These letters, being written, like those

of other men, whose minds are more on things than words, contribute no

otherwise to his reputation, than as they show him to have been above

the affectation of unseasonable elegance, and to have known, that the

business of a statesman can be little forwarded by flowers of rhetorick.

One passage, however, seems not unworthy of some notice. Speaking of the

Scotch treaty, then in agitation: "The Scotch treaty," says he, "is the

only thing now in which we are vitally concerned; I am one of the last

hopers, and yet cannot now abstain from believing that an agreement will

be made; all people upon the place incline to that of union. The Scotch

will moderate something of the rigour of their demands; the mutual

necessity of an accord is visible, the king is persuaded of it. And, to

tell you the truth, which I take to be an argument above all the rest,

Virgil has told the same thing to that purpose."

This expression from a secretary of the present time would be considered

as merely ludicrous, or, at most, as an ostentatious display of

scholarship; but the manners of that time were so tinged with

superstition, that I cannot but suspect Cowley of having consulted,

on this great occasion, the Virgilian lots[9], and to have given some

credit to the answer of his oracle.

Some years afterwards, "business," says Sprat, "passed of course into

other hands;" and Cowley, being no longer useful at Paris, was, in 1656,

sent back into England, that, "under pretence of privacy and retirement,

he might take occasion of giving notice of the posture of things in this

nation."

Soon after his return to London, he was seized by some messengers of the

usurping powers, who were sent out in quest of another man; and, being

examined, was put into confinement, from which he was not dismissed

without the security of a thousand pounds, given by Dr. Scarborough.

This year he published his poems, with a preface, in which he seems to

have inserted something suppressed in subsequent editions, which was

interpreted to denote some relaxation of his loyalty. In this preface he

declares, that "his desire had been for some days past, and did still

very vehemently continue, to retire himself to some of the American

plantations, and to forsake this world for ever."

From the obloquy which the appearance of submission to the usurpers

brought upon him, his biographer has been very diligent to clear him,

and, indeed, it does not seem to have lessened his reputation. His wish

for retirement we can easily believe to be undissembled; a man harassed

in one kingdom, and persecuted in another, who, after a course of

business that employed all his days, and half his nights, in ciphering

and deciphering, comes to his own country, and steps into a prison, will

be willing enough to retire to some place of quiet and of safety. Yet

let neither our reverence for a genius, nor our pity for a sufferer,

dispose us to forget, that, if his activity was virtue, his retreat was

cowardice[10].

He then took upon himself the character of physician, still, according

to Sprat, with intention "to dissemble the main design of his coming

over;" and, as Mr. Wood relates, "complying with the men then in power,

which was much taken notice of by the royal party, he obtained an order

to be created doctor of physick; which being done to his mind, whereby

he gained the ill will of some of his friends, he went into France

again, having made a copy of verses on Oliver's death."

This is no favourable representation, yet even in this not much wrong

can be discovered. How far he complied with the men in power, is to be

inquired before he can be blamed. It is not said, that he told them any

secrets, or assisted them by intelligence or any other act. If he only

promised to be quiet, that they in whose hands he was might free him

from confinement, he did what no law of society prohibits.

The man whose miscarriage in a just cause has put him in the power

of his enemy may, without any violation of his integrity, regain his

liberty, or preserve his life, by a promise of neutrality; for, the

stipulation gives the enemy nothing which he had not before: the

neutrality of a captive may be always secured by his imprisonment or

death. He that is at the disposal of another may not promise to aid him

in any injurious act, because no power can compel active obedience. He

may engage to do nothing, but not to do ill.

There is reason to think that Cowley promised little. It does not appear

that his compliance gained him confidence enough to be trusted without

security, for the bond of his bail was never cancelled; nor that it made

him think himself secure, for, at that dissolution of government which

followed the death of Oliver, he returned into France, where he resumed

his former station, and staid till the restoration[11].

"He continued," says his biographer, "under these bonds, till the

general deliverance;" it is, therefore, to be supposed, that he did not

go to France, and act again for the king, without the consent of his

bondsman; that he did not show his loyalty at the hazard of his friend,

but by his friend's permission.

Of the verses on Oliver's death, in which Wood's narrative seems to

imply something encomiastick, there has been no appearance. There is a

discourse concerning his government, indeed, with verses intermixed, but

such as certainly gained its author no friends among the abettors of

usurpation.

A doctor of physick, however, he was made at Oxford, in December, 1657;

and, in the commencement of the Royal Society, of which an account

has been given by Dr. Birch, he appears busy among the experimental

philosophers, with the title of Dr. Cowley.

There is no reason for supposing that he ever attempted practice: but

his preparatory studies have contributed something to the honour of his

country. Considering botany as necessary to a physician, he retired into

Kent to gather plants; and as the predominance of a favourite study

affects all subordinate operations of the intellect, botany, in the mind

of Cowley, turned into poetry. He composed, in Latin, several books on

plants, of which the first and second display the qualities of herbs, in

elegiac verse; the third and fourth, the beauties of flowers, in various

measures; and the fifth and sixth, the uses of trees, in heroick

numbers.

At the same time were produced, from the same university, the two great

poets, Cowley and Milton, of dissimilar genius, of opposite principles;

but concurring in the cultivation of Latin poetry, in which the English,

till their works and May's poem appeared[12], seemed unable to contest

the palm with any other of the lettered nations.

If the Latin performances of Cowley and Milton be compared, (for May I

hold to be superiour to both,) the advantage seems to lie on the side

of Cowley. Milton is generally content to express the thoughts of the

ancients in their language; Cowley, without much loss of purity or

elegance, accommodates the diction of Rome to his own conceptions.

At the restoration, after all the diligence of his long service, and

with consciousness not only of the merit of fidelity, but of the dignity

of great abilities, he naturally expected ample preferments; and, that

he might not be forgotten by his own fault, wrote a song of triumph. But

this was a time of such general hope, that great numbers were inevitably

disappointed; and Cowley found his reward very tediously delayed. He had

been promised, by both Charles the first and second, the mastership of

the Savoy, "but he lost it," says Wood, "by certain persons, enemies to

the muses."

The neglect of the court was not his only mortification; having by such

alteration, as he thought proper, fitted his old comedy of the Guardian

for the stage, he produced it[13], under the title of the Cutter of

Coleman street[14]. It was treated on the stage with great severity, and

was afterwards censured as a satire on the king's party.

Mr. Dryden, who went with Mr. Sprat to the first exhibition, related

to Mr. Dennis, "that, when they told Cowley how little favour had been

shown him, he received the news of his ill success, not with so much

firmness as might have been expected from so great a man."

What firmness they expected, or what weakness Cowley discovered, cannot

be known. He that misses his end will never be as much pleased as he

that attains it, even when he can impute no part of his failure to

himself; and when the end is to please the multitude, no man, perhaps,

has a right, in things admitting of gradation and comparison, to throw

the whole blame upon his judges, and totally to exclude diffidence and

shame by a haughty consciousness of his own excellence.

For the rejection of this play, it is difficult now to find the reason:

it certainly has, in a very great degree, the power of fixing attention

and exciting merriment. From the charge of disaffection he exculpates

himself, in his preface, by observing, how unlikely it is, that, having

followed the royal family through all their distresses, "he should

choose the time of their restoration to begin a quarrel with them." It

appears, however, from the Theatrical Register of Downes, the prompter,

to have been popularly considered as a satire on the royalists.

That he might shorten this tedious suspense, he published his

pretensions and his discontent, in an ode called the Complaint; in which

he styles himself the _melancholy_ Cowley. This met with the usual

fortune of complaints, and seems to have excited more contempt than

pity.

These unlucky incidents are brought, maliciously enough, together in

some stanzas, written about that time on the choice of a laureate; a

mode of satire, by which, since it was first introduced by Suckling,

perhaps, every generation of poets has been teased.

Savoy-missing Cowley came into the court,

Making apologies for his bad play;

Every one gave him so good a report,

That Apollo gave heed to all he could say:

Nor would he have had, 'tis thought, a rebuke,

Unless he had done some notable folly;

Writ verses unjustly in praise of Sam Tuke,

Or printed his pitiful Melancholy.

His vehement desire of retirement now came again upon him. "Not

finding," says the morose Wood, "that preferment conferred upon him

which he expected, while others for their money carried away most

places, he retired discontented into Surrey."

"He was now," says the courtly Sprat, "weary of the vexations and

formalities of an active condition. He had been perplexed with a long

compliance to foreign manners. He was satiated with the arts of a court;

which sort of life, though his virtue made it innocent to him, yet

nothing could make it quiet. Those were the reasons that moved him to

follow the violent inclination of his own mind, which, in the greatest

throng of his former business, had still called upon him, and

represented to him the true delights of solitary studies, of temperate

pleasures, and a moderate revenue below the malice and flatteries of

fortune."

So differently are things seen! and so differently are they shown!

But actions are visible, though motives are secret. Cowley 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[15]."

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. Alban's and the duke of Buckingham, such a lease of

the queen's lands, as afforded him an ample income[16].

By the lovers 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.

"TO DR. THOMAS SPRAT.

"Chertsey, May 21, 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, 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. Bois 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. Ann's hill. 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, of

solitude; for he died at the Porch-house[17] in Chertsey, in 1667, in

the forty-ninth year of his age.

He was buried, with great pomp, near Chaucer and Spenser; and king

Charles pronounced, "that Mr. Cowley had not left behind him a better

man in England." He is represented, by Dr. Sprat, as the most amiable of

mankind; and this posthumous praise may safely be 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 were 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 pleasures in the minds of men, paid

their court to temporary prejudices, has been at one time too much

praised, and too much neglected at another.

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,

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 show their learning

was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show 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, 'technae

mimaetikhae', 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 wits. Dryden

confesses of himself and his contemporaries, that they fall below Donne

in wit; but maintains, that they surpass him in poetry.

If wit be well described by Pope, as being "that which has 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.

If, by a more noble and more adequate conception, that 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.

But wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more

rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of "discordia

concors;" 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.

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 inquired 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 never been said before.

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 subtilty, which, in its original import, 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 sunbeam with a prism can exhibit

the wide effulgence of a summer noon.

What they wanted, however, of the sublime, they endeavoured 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 lost;

if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they,

likewise, sometimes struck out unexpected truth; 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[18].

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.

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.

When their reputation was high, they had, undoubtedly, more imitators

than time has left behind. Their immediate successours, of whom any

remembrance can be said to remain, were Suckling, Waller, Denham,

Cowley, Cleiveland, and Milton. Denham and Waller sought another way

to fame, by improving the harmony of our numbers. 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.

Critical remarks are not easily understood without examples; and I have,

therefore, collected instances of the modes of writing by which this

species of poets, for poets they were called by themselves and their

admirers, was eminently distinguished.

As the authors of this race were, perhaps, more desirous of being

admired than understood, they sometimes drew their conceits from

recesses of learning, not very much frequented by common readers of

poetry. Thus Cowley, on knowledge:

The sacred tree 'midst the fair orchard grew;

The phoenix, truth, did on it rest,

And built his perfum'd nest:

That right Porphyrian tree which did true logic shew;

Each leaf did learned notions give,

And th' apples were demonstrative;

So clear their colour and divine,

The very shade they cast did other lights outshine.

On Anacreon continuing a lover in his old age:

Love was with thy life entwin'd,

Close as heat with fire is join'd;

A powerful brand prescrib'd the date

Of thine, like Meleager's fate

Th' antiperistasis of age

More enflam'd thy amorous rage.

In the following verses we have an allusion to a rabbinical opinion

concerning manna:

Variety I ask not: give me one

To live perpetually upon.

The person love does to us fit,

Like manna, has the taste of all in it.

Thus Donne shows his medicinal knowledge in some encomiastick verses:

In every thing there naturally grows

A balsamum to keep it fresh and new,

If 'twere not injur'd by extrinsique blows;

Your youth and beauty are this balm in you.

But you, of learning and religion,

And virtue and such ingredients, have made

A mithridate, whose operation

Keeps off, or cures what can be done or said.

Though the following lines of Donne, on the last night of the year, have

something in them too scholastick, they are not inelegant:

This twilight of two years, not past nor next,

Some emblem is of me, or I of this,

Who, meteor-like, of stuff and form perplext,

Whose what and where in disputation is,

If I should call me any thing, should miss.

I sum the years and me, and find me not

Debtor to th' old, nor creditor to th' new.

That cannot say, my thanks I have forgot;

Nor trust I this with hopes; and yet scarce true

This bravery is, since these times shew'd me you.

Yet more abstruse and profound is Donne's reflection upon man as a

microcosm:

If men be worlds, there is in every one

Something to answer in some proportion

All the world's riches: and in good men, this

Virtue, our form's form, and our soul's soul, is.

Of thoughts so far-fetched, as to be not only unexpected, but unnatural,

all their books are full.

To a lady, who wrote poesies for rings:

They, who above do various circles find,

Say, like a ring, th' equator heaven does bind.

When heaven shall be adorn'd by thee,

(Which then more heaven than 'tis will be,)

'Tis thou must write the poesy there,

For it wanteth one as yet,

Then the sun pass through 't twice a year,

The sun, which is esteem'd the god of wit. COWLEY.

The difficulties which have been raised about identity in philosophy,

are, by Cowley, with still more perplexity applied to love:

Five years ago (says story) I lov'd you,

For which you call me most inconstant now;

Pardon me, madam, you mistake the man;

For I am not the same that I was then:

No flesh is now the same 'twas then in me;

And that my mind is chang'd yourself may see.

The same thoughts to retain still, and intents,

Were more inconstant far; for accidents

Must of all things most strangely inconstant prove,

If from one subject they t' another move;

My members, then, the father members were,

From whence these take their birth which now are here.

If then this body love what th' other did,

'Twere incest, which by nature is forbid.

The love of different women is, in geographical poetry, compared to

travels through different countries:

Hast thou not found each woman's breast

(The land where thou hast travelled)

Either by savages possest,

Or wild, and uninhabited?

What joy could'st take, or what repose,

In countries so unciviliz'd as those?

Lust, the scorching dogstar, here

Rages with immoderate heat;

Whilst pride, the rugged northern bear,

In others makes the cold too great.

And where these are temperate known,

The soil's all barren sand, or rocky stone. COWLEY.

A lover, burnt up by his affection, is compared to Egypt:

The fate of Egypt I sustain,

And never feel the dew of rain

From clouds which in the head appear;

But all my too much moisture owe

To overflowings of the heart below. COWLEY.

The lover supposes his lady acquainted with the ancient laws of augury,

and rites of sacrifice:

And yet this death of mine, I fear,

Will ominous to her appear:

When sound in every other part,

Her sacrifice is found without an heart.

For the last tempest of my death

Shall sigh out that too, with my breath.

That the chaos was harmonized, has been recited of old; but whence the

different sounds arose remained for a modern to discover:

Th' ungovern'd parts no correspondence knew;

An artless war from thwarting motions grew;

Till they to number and fixt rules were brought.

Water and air he for the tenor chose;

Earth made the base; the treble,

flame arose. COWLEY.

The tears of lovers are always of great poetical account; but Donne has

extended them into worlds. If the lines are not easily understood, they

may be read again:

On a round ball

A workman, that hath copies by, can lay

An Europe, Afric, and an Asia,

And quickly make that, which was nothing, all.

So doth each tear,

Which thee doth wear,

A globe, yea world, by that impression grow,

Till thy tears mixt with mine do overflow

This world, by waters sent from thee my heaven dissolved so.

On reading the following lines, the reader may, perhaps, cry out,

"Confusion worse confounded:"

Here lies a she-sun, and a he-moon here,

She gives the best light to his sphere,

Or each is both, and all, and so

They unto one another nothing owe. DONNE.

Who but Donne would have thought that a good man is a telescope?

Though God be our true glass, through which we see

All, since the being of all things is he,

Yet are the trunks, which do to us derive

Things in proportion fit, by perspective

Deeds of good men; for by their living here,

Virtues, indeed remote, seem to be near.

Who would imagine it possible, that in a very few lines so many remote

ideas could be brought together?

Since 'tis my doom, love's undershrieve,

Why this reprieve?

Why doth my she-advowson fly

Incumbency?

To sell thyself dost thou intend

By candle's end,

And hold the contrast thus in doubt,

Life's taper out?

Think but how soon the market fails,

Your sex lives faster than the males;

And if, to measure age's span,

The sober Julian were th' account of man,

Whilst you live by the fleet Gregorian. CLEIVELAND.

Of enormous and disgusting hyperboles, these may be examples:

By every wind that comes this way,

Send me, at least, a sigh or two,

Such and so many I'll repay

As shall themselves make winds to get to you. COWLEY.

In tears I'll waste these eyes,

By love so vainly fed;

So lust of old the deluge punished. COWLEY.

All arm'd in brass, the richest dress of war,

(A dismal glorious sight!) he shone afar.

The sun himself started with sudden fright,

To see his beams return so dismal bright. COWLEY.

An universal consternation:

His bloody eyes he hurls round, his sharp paws

Tear up the ground; then runs he wild about,

Lashing his angry tail, and roaring out.

Beasts creep into their dens, and tremble there;

Trees, though no wind is stirring, shake with fear;

Silence and horror fill the place around;

Echo itself dares scarce repeat the sound. COWLEY.

Their fictions were often violent and unnatural.

Of his mistress bathing:

The fish around her crowded, as they do

To the false light that treacherous fishers shew,

And all with as much ease might taken be,

As she at first took me;

For ne'er did light so clear

Among the waves appear,

Though every night the sun himself set there. COWLEY.

The poetical effect of a lover's name upon glass:

My name engrav'd herein

Doth contribute my firmness to this glass;

Which, ever since that charm, hath been

As hard as that which grav'd it was. DONNE.

Their conceits were sentiments slight and trifling. On an inconstant

woman:

He enjoys the calmy sunshine now,

And no breath stirring hears;

In the clear heaven of thy brow,

No smallest cloud appears.

He sees thee gentle, fair and gay,

And trusts the faithless April of thy May. COWLEY

Upon a paper, written with the juice of lemon, and read by the fire:

Nothing yet in thee is seen,

But when a genial heat warms thee within,

A new-born wood of various lines there grows:

Here buds an L, and there a B;

Here sprouts a V, and there a T;

And all the flourishing letters stand in rows. COWLEY.

As they sought only for novelty, they did not much inquire, whether

their allusions were to things high or low, elegant or gross; whether

they compared the little to the great, or the great to the little.

Physick and chirurgery for a lover:

Gently, ah gently, madam, touch

The wound, which you yourself have made;

That pain must needs be very much,

Which makes me of your hand afraid,

Cordials of pity give me now,

For I too weak for purgings grow. COWLEY.

The world and a clock:

Mahol th' inferior world's fantastic face

Thro' all the turns of matter's maze did trace;

Great nature's well-set clock in pieces took;

On all the springs and smallest wheels did look

Of life and motion, and with equal art

Made up the whole again of every part. COWLEY.

A coal-pit has not often found its poet; but, that it may not want its

due honour, Cleiveland has paralleled it with the sun:

The moderate value of our guiltless ore

Makes no man atheist, and no woman whore;

Yet why should hallow'd vestal's sacred shrine

Deserve more honour than a flaming mine?

These pregnant wombs of heat would fitter be,

Than a few embers, for a deity.

Had he our pits, the Persian would admire

No sun, but warm 's devotion at our fire:

He'd leave the trotting whipster, and prefer

Our profound Vulcan 'bove that wagoner.

For wants he heat, or light? or would have store

Of both? 'tis here: and what can suns give more?

Nay, what's the sun, but in a different name,

A coal-pit rampant, or a mine on flame!

Then let this truth reciprocally run,

The sun's heaven's coalery, and coals our sun.

Death, a voyage:

No family

E'er rigg'd a soul for heaven's discovery,

With whom more venturers might boldly dare

Venture their stakes, with him in joy to share. DONNE.

Their thoughts and expressions were sometimes grossly absurd, and such

as no figures or license can reconcile to the understanding.

A lover neither dead nor alive:

Then down I laid my head,

Down on cold earth; and for awhile was dead,

And my freed soul to a strange somewhere fled;

Ah, sottish soul, said I,

When back to its cage again I saw it fly;

Fool to resume her broken chain,

And row her galley here again!

Fool, to that body to return

Where it condemn'd and destin'd is to burn!

Once dead, how can it be,

Death should a thing so pleasant seem to thee,

That thou should'st come to live it o'er again in me? COWLEY.

A lover's heart, a hand grenado:

Wo to her stubborn heart, if once mine come

Into the self-same room;

'Twill tear and blow up all within,

Like a grenado shot into a magazin.

Then shall love keep the ashes and torn parts,

Of both our broken hearts;

Shall out of both one new one make;

From hers th' allay, from mine the metal take. COWLEY.

To poetical propagation of light;

The prince's favour is diffus'd o'er all,

From which all fortunes, names, and natures fall:

Then from those wombs of stars, the bride's bright eyes,

At every glance a constellation flies,

And sowes the court with stars, and doth prevent,

In light and power, the all-ey'd firmament:

First her eye kindles other ladies' eyes,

Then from their beams their jewels' lustres rise:

And from their jewels torches do take fire,

And all is warmth, and light, and good desire. DONNE.

They were in very little care to clothe their notions with elegance of

dress, and, therefore, miss the notice and the praise which are often

gained by those who think less, but are more diligent to adorn their

thoughts.

That a mistress beloved is fairer in idea than in reality, is, by

Cowley, thus expressed:

Thou in my fancy dost much higher stand,

Than woman can be plac'd by nature's hand;

And I must needs, I'm sure, a loser be,

To change thee, as thou'rt there, for very thee.

That prayer and labour should cooperate, are thus taught by Donne:

In none but us are such mix'd engines found,

As hands of double office: for the ground

We till with them; and them to heaven we raise:

Who prayerless labours, or, without this, prays,

Doth but one half, that's none.

By the same author, a common topick, the danger of procrastination, is

thus illustrated:

That which I should have begun

In my youth's morning, now late must be done;

And I, as giddy travellers must do,

Which stray or sleep all day, and, having lost

Light and strength, dark and tir'd must then ride post.

All that man has to do is to live and die; the sum of humanity is

comprehended by Donne in the following lines:

Think in how poor a prison thou didst lie;

After enabled but to suck and cry.

Think, when 'twas grown to most, 'twas a poor inn,

A province pack'd up in two yards of skin,

And that usurp'd, or threaten'd with a rage

Of sicknesses, or their true mother, age.

But think that death hath now enfranchis'd thee;

Thou hast thy expansion now, and liberty;

Think, that a rusty piece discharg'd is flown

In pieces, and the bullet is his own,

And freely flies: this to thy soul allow,

Think thy shell broke, think thy soul hatch'd but now.

They were sometimes indelicate and disgusting. Cowley thus apostrophises

beauty:

Thou tyrant, which leav'st no man free!

Thou subtle thief, from whom nought safe can be!

Thou murderer, which hast kill'd; and devil, which would'st damn me!

Thus he addresses his mistress:

Thou who, in many a propriety,

So truly art the sun to me,

Add one more likeness, which I'm sure you can,

And let me and my sun beget a man.

Thus he represents the meditations of a lover:

Though in thy thoughts scarce any tracks have been

So much as of original sin,

Such charms thy beauty wears, as might

Desires in dying confest saints excite.

Thou with strange adultery

Dost in each breast a brothel keep;

Awake, all men do lust for thee,

And some enjoy thee when they sleep.

The true taste of tears:

Hither with crystal vials, lovers, come,

And take my tears, which are love's wine,

And try your mistress' tears at home;

For all are false, that taste not just like mine. DONNE.

This is yet more indelicate:

As the sweet sweat of roses in a still,

As that which from chaf'd musk-cat's pores doth trill,

As the almighty balm of th' early east;

Such are the sweet drops of my mistress' breast.

And on her neck her skin such lustre sets,

They seem no sweat-drops, but pearl coronets:

Rank, sweaty froth thy mistress' brow defiles. DONNE.

Their expressions sometimes raise horrour, when they intend, perhaps, to

be pathetick:

As men in hell are from diseases free,

So from all other ills am I,

Free from their known formality:

But all pains eminently lie in thee. COWLEY.

They were not always strictly curious, whether the opinions from which

they drew their illustrations were true; it was enough that they were

popular. Bacon remarks, that some falsehoods are continued by tradition,

because they supply commodious allusions.

It gave a piteous groan, and so it broke:

In vain it something would have spoke;

The love within too strong for't was,

Like poison put into a Venice-glass. COWLEY.

In forming descriptions, they looked out, not for images, but for

conceits. Night has been a common subject, which poets have contended to

adorn. Dryden's Night is well known; Donne's is as follows:

Thou seest me here at midnight, now all rest:

Time's dead low-water; when all minds divest

To-morrow's business; when the labourers have

Such rest in bed, that their last church-yard grave,

Subject to change, will scarce be a type of this;

Now when the client, whose last hearing is

To-morrow, sleeps; when the condemned man,

Who, when he opes his eyes, must shut them then

Again by death, although sad watch he keep,

Doth practise dying by a little sleep;

Thou at this midnight seest me.

It must be, however, confessed of these writers, that if they are upon

common subjects often unnecessarily and unpoetically subtile; yet, where

scholastick speculation can be properly admitted, their copiousness and

acuteness may justly be admired. What Cowley has written upon hope shows

an unequalled fertility of invention:

Hope, whose weak being ruin'd is,

Alike if it succeed and if it miss;

Whom good or ill does equally confound,

And both the horns of fate's dilemma wound;

Vain shadow! which dost vanish quite,

Both at full noon and perfect night!

The stars have not a possibility

Of blessing thee;

If things then from their end we happy call,

'Tis hope is the most hopeless thing of all.

Hope, thou bold taster of delight,

Who, whilst thou should'st but taste, devour'st it quite!

Thou bring'st us an estate, yet leav'st us poor,

By clogging it with legacies before!

The joys which we entire should wed,

Come deflower'd virgins to our bed;

Good fortunes without gain imported be,

Such mighty custom's paid to thee;

For joy, like wine, kept close, does better taste;

If it take air before its spirits waste.

To the following comparison of a man that travels and his wife that

stays at home, with a pair of compasses, it may be doubted whether

absurdity or ingenuity has better claim:

Our two souls, therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show

To move, but doth if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,

Yet, when the other far doth roam,

It leans, and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must

Like th' other foot obliquely run,

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

And makes me end where I begun. DONNE[19].

In all these examples it is apparent, that whatever is improper or

vitious is produced by a voluntary deviation from nature, in pursuit of

something new and strange; and that the writers fail to give delight by

their desire of exciting admiration.

Having thus endeavoured to exhibit a general representation of the style

and sentiments of the metaphysical poets, it is now proper to examine,

particularly, the works of Cowley, who was almost the last of that race,

and undoubtedly the best.

His miscellanies contain a collection of short compositions, written

some as they were dictated by a mind at leisure, and some as they were

called forth by different occasions; with great variety of style and

sentiment, from burlesque levity to awful grandeur. Such an assemblage

of diversified excellence no other poet has hitherto afforded. To choose

the best, among many good, is one of the most hazardous attempts of

criticism. I know not whether Scaliger himself has persuaded many

readers to join with him in his preference of the two favourite odes,

which he estimates, in his raptures, at the value of a kingdom. I will,

however, venture to recommend Cowley's first piece, which ought to be

inscribed, To my Muse, for want of which the second couplet is without

reference. When the title is added, there will still remain a defect;

for every piece ought to contain, in itself, whatever is necessary to

make it intelligible. Pope has some epitaphs without names; which are,

therefore, epitaphs to be let, occupied, indeed, for the present, but

hardly appropriated.

The ode on wit is almost without a rival. It was about the time of

Cowley, that _wit_, which had been, till then, used for _intellection_,

in contradistinction to _will_, took the meaning, whatever it be, which

it now bears.

Of all the passages in which poets have exemplified their own precepts,

none will easily be found of greater excellence than that in which

Cowley condemns exuberance of wit:

Yet 'tis not to adorn and gild each part,

That shews more cost than art.

Jewels at nose and lips but ill appear;

Rather than all things wit, let none be there.

Several lights will not be seen,

If there be nothing else between.

Men doubt, because they stand so thick i'th' sky,

If those be stars which paint the galaxy.

In his verses to lord Falkland, whom every man of his time was proud to

praise, there are, as there must be in all Cowley's compositions, some

striking thoughts, but they are not well wrought. His elegy on sir

Henry Wotton is vigorous and happy; the series of thoughts is easy and

natural; and the conclusion, though a little weakened by the intrusion

of Alexander, is elegant and forcible.

It may be remarked, that in this elegy, and in most of his

encomiastick poems, he has forgotten or neglected to name his heroes.

In his poem on the death of Hervey, there is much praise, but little

passion; a very just and ample delineation of such virtues as a studious

privacy admits, and such intellectual excellence as a mind not yet

called forth to action can display. He knew how to distinguish, and how

to commend, the qualities of his companion; but, when he wishes to make

us weep, he forgets to weep himself, and diverts his sorrow by imagining

how his crown of bays, if he had it, would crackle in the fire. It

is the odd fate of this thought to be the worse for being true. The

bay-leaf crackles remarkably as it burns; as, therefore, this property

was not assigned it by chance, the mind must be thought sufficiently at

ease that could attend to such minuteness of physiology. But the power

of Cowley is not so much to move the affections, as to exercise the

understanding.

The Chronicle is a composition unrivalled and alone: such gaiety of

fancy, such facility of expression, such varied similitude, such a

succession of images, and such a dance of words, it is in vain to

expect, except from Cowley. His strength always appears in his agility;

his volatility is not the flutter of a light, but the bound of an

elastick mind. His levity never leaves his learning behind it; the

moralist, the politician, and the critick, mingle their influence even

in this airy frolick of genius. To such a performance Suckling could

have brought the gaiety, but not the knowledge; Dryden could have

supplied the knowledge, but not the gaiety.

The verses to Davenant, which are vigorously begun and happily

concluded, contain some hints of criticism very justly conceived

and happily expressed. Cowley's critical abilities have not been

sufficiently observed: the few decisions and remarks, which his prefaces

and his notes on the Davideis supply, were, at that time, accessions

to English literature, and show such skill as raises our wish for more

examples.

The lines from Jersey are a very curious and pleasing specimen of the

familiar descending to the burlesque.

His two metrical disquisitions _for_ and _against_ reason are no mean

specimens of metaphysical poetry. The stanzas against knowledge produce

little conviction. In those which are intended to exalt the human

faculties, reason has its proper task assigned it; that of judging, not

of things revealed, but of the reality of revelation. In the verses for

reason, is a passage which Bentley, in the only English verses which

he is known to have written, seems to have copied, though with the

inferiority of an imitator.

The holy book like the eighth sphere doth shine

With thousand lights of truth divine,

So numberless the stars, that to our eye

It makes all but one galaxy.

Yet reason must assist too; for, in seas

So vast and dangerous as these,

Our course by stars above we cannot know

Without the compass too below.

After this, says Bentley[20]:

Who travels in religious jars,

Truth mix'd with error, shade with rays,

Like Whiston wanting pyx or stars,

In ocean wide or sinks or strays.

Cowley seems to have had what Milton is believed to have wanted, the

skill to rate his own performances by their just value, and has,

therefore, closed his miscellanies with the verses upon Crashaw, which

apparently excel all that have gone before them, and in which there are

beauties which common authors may justly think not only above their

attainment, but above their ambition.

To the miscellanies succeed the Anacreontiques, or paraphrastical

translations of some little poems, which pass, however justly, under

the name of Anacreon. Of these songs dedicated to festivity and gaiety,

in which even the morality is voluptuous, and which teach nothing but

the enjoyment of the present day, he has given rather a pleasing, than

a faithful representation, having retained their sprightliness, but

lost their simplicity. The Anacreon of Cowley, like the Homer of Pope,

has admitted the decoration of some modern graces, by which he is

undoubtedly more amiable to common readers, and, perhaps, if they would

honestly declare their own perceptions, to far the greater part of those

whom courtesy and ignorance are content to style the learned.

These little pieces will be found more finished in their kind than any

other of Cowley's works. The diction shows nothing of the mould of time,

and the sentiments are at no great distance from our present habitudes

of thought. Real mirth must be always natural, and nature is uniform.

Men have been wise in very different modes; but they have always laughed

the same way.

Levity of thought naturally produced familiarity of language, and the

familiar part of language continues long the same; the dialogue of

comedy, when it is transcribed from popular manners, and real life, is

read, from age to age, with equal pleasure. The artifices of inversion,

by which the established order of words is changed, or of innovation, by

which new words, or meanings of words, are introduced, is practised,

not by those who talk to be understood, but by those who write to be

admired.

The Anacreontiques, therefore, of Cowley, give now all the pleasure

which they ever gave. If he was formed by nature for one kind of writing

more than for another, his power seems to have been greatest in the

familiar and the festive.

The next class of his poems is called the Mistress, of which it is not

necessary to select any particular pieces for praise or censure.

They have all the same beauties and faults, and nearly in the same

proportion. They are written with exuberance of wit, and with

copiousness of learning; and it is truly asserted by Sprat, that the

plenitude of the writer's knowledge flows in upon his page, so that the

reader is commonly surprised into some improvement. But, considered as

the verses of a lover, no man that has ever loved will much commend

them. They are neither courtly nor pathetick, have neither gallantry nor

fondness. His praises are too far-sought, and too hyperbolical, either

to express love, or to excite it; every stanza is crowded with darts

and flames, with wounds and death, with mingled souls, and with broken

hearts.

The principal artifice by which the Mistress is filled with conceits,

is very copiously displayed by Addison. Love is by Cowley, as by other

poets, expressed metaphorically by flame and fire; and that which is

true of real fire is said of love, or figurative fire, the same word in

the same sentence retaining both significations. Thus, "observing the

cold regard of his mistress's eyes, and, at the same time, their power

of producing love in him, he considers them as burning-glasses made of

ice. Finding himself able to live in the greatest extremities of love,

he concludes the torrid zone to be habitable. Upon the dying of a tree

on which he had cut his loves, he observes that his flames had burnt up

and withered the tree."

These conceits Addison calls mixed wit; that is, wit which consists of

thoughts true in one sense of the expression, and false in the other.

Addison's representation is sufficiently indulgent: that confusion of

images may entertain for a moment; but, being unnatural, it soon grows

wearisome. Cowley delighted in it, as much as if he had invented it;

but, not to mention the ancients, he might have found it full-blown in

modern Italy. Thus Sannazaro:

Aspice quam variis distringar, Lesbia, curis!

Uror, et heu! nostro manat ab igne liquor:

Sum Nilus, sumque Aetna simul; restringite flammas

O lacrimae, aut lacrimas ebibe, flamma, meas.

One of the severe theologians of that time censured him, as having

published "a book of profane and lascivious verses." From the charge of

profaneness, the constant tenour of his life, which seems to have been

eminently virtuous, and the general tendency of his opinions, which

discover no irreverence of religion, must defend him; but that the

accusation of lasciviousness is unjust, the perusal of his work will

sufficiently evince.

Cowley's Mistress has no power of seduction: she "plays round the head,

but reaches not the heart." Her beauty and absence, her kindness and

cruelty, her disdain and inconstancy, produce no correspondence of

emotion. His poetical account of the virtues of plants, and colours of

flowers, is not perused with more sluggish frigidity. 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; for they

turn the mind only on the writer, whom, without thinking on a woman

but as the subject for his task, we sometimes esteem as learned, and

sometimes despise as trifling, always admire as ingenious, and always

condemn as unnatural.

The Pindarique odes are now to be considered; a species of composition,

which Cowley thinks Pancirolus might have counted in "his list of the

lost inventions of antiquity," and which he has made a bold and vigorous

attempt to recover.

The purpose with which he has paraphrased an Olympick and Nemaean ode,

is, by himself, sufficiently explained. His endeavour was, not to show

"precisely what Pindar spoke, but his manner of speaking." He was,

therefore, not at all restrained to his expressions, nor much to his

sentiments; nothing was required of him, but not to write as Pindar

would not have written.

Of the Olympick ode, the beginning is, I think, above the original in

elegance, and the conclusion below it in strength. The connexion is

supplied with great perspicuity; and the thoughts, which, to a reader of

less skill, seem thrown together by chance, are concatenated without any

abruption. Though the English ode cannot be called a translation, it may

be very properly consulted as a commentary.

The spirit of Pindar is, indeed, not every where equally preserved. The

following pretty lines are not such as his _deep mouth_ was used to

pour:

Great Rhea's son,

If in Olympus' top, where thou

Sitt'st to behold thy sacred show,

If in Alpheus' silver flight,

If in my verse thou take delight,

My verse, great Rhea's son, which is

Lofty as that, and smooth as this.

In the Nemaean ode the reader must, in mere justice to Pindar, observe,

that whatever is said of "the original new moon, her tender forehead,

and her horns," is super-added by his paraphrast, who has many other

plays of words and fancy unsuitable to the original, as

The table, free for ev'ry guest,

No doubt will thee admit,

And feast more upon thee, than thou on it.

He sometimes extends his author's thoughts without improving them. In

the Olympionick an oath is mentioned in a single word, and Cowley spends

three lines in swearing by the Castalian stream. We are told of Theron's

bounty, with a hint that he had enemies, which Cowley thus enlarges in

rhyming prose:

But in this thankless world the giver

Is envied even by the receiver;

'Tis now the cheap and frugal fashion

Rather to hide than own the obligation:

Nay, 'tis much worse than so;

It now an artifice does grow

Wrongs and injuries to do,

Lest men should think we owe.

It is hard to conceive that a man of the first rank in learning and wit,

when he was dealing out such minute morality in such feeble diction,

could imagine, either waking or dreaming, that he imitated Pindar.

In the following odes, where Cowley chooses his own subjects, he

sometimes rises to dignity truly Pindarick; and, if some deficiencies of

language be forgiven, his strains are such as those of the Theban bard

were to his contemporaries:

Begin the song, and strike the living lyre:

Lo, how the years to come, a numerous and well-fitted quire,

All hand in hand do decently advance.

And to my song with smooth and equal measure dance;

While the dance lasts, how long soe'er it be,

My musick's voice shall bear it company;

Till all gentle notes be drown'd

In the last trumpet's dreadful sound.

After such enthusiasm, who will not lament to find the poet conclude

with lines like these:

But stop, my muse--

Hold thy Pindarick Pegasus closely in,

Which does to rage begin

--'Tis an unruly and a hard-mouth'd horse--

'Twill no unskilful touch endure,

But flings writer and reader too that sits not sure.

The fault of Cowley, and, perhaps, of all the writers of the

metaphysical race, is that of pursuing his thoughts to the last

ramifications, by which he loses the grandeur of generality; for of the

greatest things the parts are little; what is little can be but pretty,

and, by claiming dignity, becomes ridiculous. Thus all the power of

description is destroyed by a scrupulous enumeration, and the force of

metaphors is lost, when the mind, by the mention of particulars, is

turned more upon the original than the secondary sense, more upon that

from which the illustration is drawn, than that to which it is applied.

Of this we have a very eminent example in the ode entitled the Muse, who

goes to "take the air" in an intellectual chariot, to which he harnesses

fancy and judgment, wit and eloquence, memory and invention: how he

distinguished wit from fancy, or how memory could properly contribute to

motion, he has not explained; we are, however, content to suppose that

he could have justified his own fiction, and wish to see the muse begin

her career; but there is yet more to be done:

Let the _postillion_, nature, mount, and let

The _coachman_ art be set;

And let the airy _footmen_, running all beside,

Make a long row of goodly pride;

Figures, conceits, raptures, and sentences,

In a well-worded dress,

And innocent loves, and pleasant truths, and useful lies,

In all their gaudy _liveries_.

Every mind is now disgusted with this cumber of magnificence; yet I

cannot refuse myself the four next lines:

Mount, glorious queen, thy travelling throne,

And bid it to put on;

For long, though cheerful, is the way,

And life, alas! allows but one ill winter's day.

In the same ode, celebrating the power of the muse, he gives her

prescience, or, in poetical language, the foresight of events hatching

in futurity; but, having once an egg in his mind, he cannot forbear to

show us that he knows what an egg contains:

Thou into the close nests of time dost peep,

And there with piercing eye

Through the firm shell and the thick white dost spy

Years to come a-forming lie,

Close in their sacred fecundine asleep.

The same thought is more generally, and, therefore, more poetically

expressed by Casimir, a writer who has many of the beauties and faults

of Cowley:

Omnibus mundi dominator horis

Aptat urgendas per inane pennas,

Pars adhuc nido latet, et futuros

Crescit in annos.

Cowley, whatever was his subject, seems to have been carried, by a kind

of destiny, to the light and the familiar, or to conceits which require

still more ignoble epithets. A slaughter in the Red sea "new dies the

water's name;" and England, during the civil war, was "Albion no more,

nor to be named from white." It is, surely, by some fascination not

easily surmounted, that a writer professing to revive "the noblest and

highest writing in verse," makes this address to the new year:

Nay, if thou lov'st me, gentle year,

Let not so much as love be there,

Vain, fruitless love I mean; for, gentle year,

Although I fear

There's of this caution little need,

Yet, gentle year, take heed

How thou dost make

Such a mistake;

Such love I mean alone

As by thy cruel predecessors has been shewn:

For, though I have too much cause to doubt it,

I fain would try, for once, if life can live without it.

The reader of this will be inclined to cry out, with Prior,

Ye criticks, say,

How poor to this was Pindar's style!

Even those who cannot, perhaps, find in the Isthmian or Nemaean songs

what antiquity has disposed them to expect, will, at least, see that

they are ill represented by such puny poetry; and all will determine,

that if this be the old Theban strain, it is not worthy of revival.

To the disproportion and incongruity of Cowley's sentiments, must be

added the uncertainty and looseness of his measures. He takes the

liberty of using, in any place, a verse of any length, from two

syllables to twelve. The verses of Pindar have, as he observes, very

little harmony to a modern ear; yet, by examining the syllables, we

perceive them to be regular, and have reason enough for supposing that

the ancient audiences were delighted with the sound. The imitator ought,

therefore, to have adopted what he found, and to have added what was

wanting; to have preserved a constant return of the same numbers, and to

have supplied smoothness of transition and continuity of thought.

It is urged by Dr. Sprat, that the "irregularity of numbers is the very

thing" which makes "that kind of poesy fit for all manner of subjects."

But he should have remembered, that what is fit for every thing can fit

nothing well. The great pleasure of verse arises from the known measure

of the lines, and uniform structure of the stanzas, by which the voice

is regulated, and the memory relieved.

If the Pindarick style be, what Cowley thinks it, "the highest and

noblest kind of writing in verse," it can be adapted only to high and

noble subjects; and it will not be easy to reconcile the poet with the

critick, or to conceive how that can be the highest kind of writing in

verse, which, according to Sprat, is "chiefly to be preferred for its

near affinity to prose."

This lax and lawless versification so much concealed the deficiencies of

the barren, and flattered the laziness of the idle, that it immediately

overspread our books of poetry; all the boys and girls caught the

pleasing fashion, and they that could do nothing else could write like

Pindar. The rights of antiquity were invaded, and disorder tried to

break into the Latin: a poem[21] on the Sheldonian theatre, in which all

kinds of verse are shaken together, is unhappily inserted in the Musae

Anglicanae. Pindarism prevailed about half a century; but, at last, died

gradually away, and other imitations supply its place.

The Pindarick odes have so long enjoyed the highest degree of poetical

reputation, that I am not willing to dismiss them with unabated censure;

and, surely, though the mode of their composition be erroneous, yet many

parts deserve, at least, that admiration which is due to great

comprehension of knowledge, and great fertility of fancy. The thoughts

are often new, and often striking; but the greatness of one part is

disgraced by the littleness of another; and total negligence of language

gives the noblest conceptions the appearance of a fabrick, august in

the plan, but mean in the materials. Yet, surely, those verses are not

without a just claim to praise; of which it may be said with truth, that

no man but Cowley could have written them.

The Davideis now remains to be considered; a poem which the author

designed to have extended to twelve books, merely, as he makes no

scruple of declaring, because the Aeneid had that number; but he had

leisure or perseverance only to write the third part. Epick poems have

been left unfinished by Virgil, Statius, Spenser, and Cowley. That we

have not the whole Davideis, is, however, not much to be regretted; for

in this undertaking Cowley is, tacitly, at least, confessed to have

miscarried. There are not many examples of so great a work, produced by

an author generally read, and generally praised, that has crept through

a century with so little regard. Whatever is said of Cowley, is meant of

his other works. Of the Davideis no mention is made; it never appears in

books, nor emerges in conversation. By the Spectator it has been once

quoted; by Rymer it has once been praised; and by Dryden, in Mac

Flecknoe, it has once been imitated; nor do I recollect much other

notice from its publication till now, in the whole succession of English

literature.

Of this silence and neglect, if the reason be inquired, it will be found

partly in the choice of the subject, and partly in the performance of

the work.

Sacred history has been always read with submissive reverence, and

an imagination overawed and controlled. We have been accustomed to

acquiesce in the nakedness and simplicity of the authentick narrative,

and to repose on its veracity with such humble confidence as suppresses

curiosity. We go with the historian as he goes, and stop with him when

he stops. All amplification is frivolous and vain; all addition to that

which is already sufficient for the purposes of religion seems not only

useless, but, in some degree, profane.

Such events as were produced by the visible interposition of divine

power are above the power of human genius to dignify. The miracle of

creation, however it may teem with images, is best described with little

diffusion of language: "He spake the word, and they were made."

We are told, that Saul "was troubled with an evil spirit;" from this

Cowley takes an opportunity of describing hell, and telling the history

of Lucifer, who was, he says,

Once gen'ral of a gilded host of sprites,

Like Hesper leading forth the spangled nights;

But down, like lightning which him struck, he came,

And roar'd at his first plunge into the flame.

Lucifer makes a speech to the inferiour agents of mischief, in which

there is something of heathenism, and, therefore, of impropriety; and,

to give efficacy to his words, concludes by lashing "his breast with

his long tail." Envy, after a pause, steps out, and, among other

declarations of her zeal, utters these lines:

Do thou but threat, loud storms shall make reply,

And thunder echo to the trembling sky:

Whilst raging seas swell to so bold an height,

As shall the fire's proud element affright.

Th' old drudging sun, from his long-beaten way,

Shall, at thy voice, start, and misguide the day.

The jocund orbs shall break their measur'd pace,

And stubborn poles change their allotted place,

Heaven's gilded troops shall flutter here and there,

Leaving their boasting songs tun'd to a sphere.

Every reader feels himself weary with this useless talk of an

allegorical being.

It is not only when the events are confessedly miraculous, that fancy

and fiction lose their effect: the whole system of life, while the

theocracy was yet visible, has an appearance so different from all other

scenes of human action, that the reader of the sacred volume habitually

considers it as the peculiar mode of existence of a distinct species of

mankind, that lived and acted with manners uncommunicable; so that it is

difficult, even for imagination, to place us in the state of them whose

story is related, and, by consequence, their joys and griefs are not

easily adopted, nor can the attention be often interested in any thing

that befalls them.

To the subject thus originally indisposed to the reception of poetical

embellishments, the writer brought little that could reconcile

impatience, or attract curiosity. Nothing can be more disgusting than a

narrative spangled with conceits; and conceits are all that the Davideis

supplies.

One of the great sources of poetical delight, is description, or the

power of presenting pictures to the mind. Cowley gives inferences

instead of images, and shows not what may be supposed to have been seen,

but what thoughts the sight might have suggested. When Virgil describes

the stone which Turnus lifted against Aeneas, he fixes the attention on

its bulk and weight:

Saxum circumspicit ingens,

Saxum antiquum, ingens, campo quod forte jacebat,

Limes agro positus, litem ut discerneret arvis.

Cowley says of the stone with which Cain slew his brother,

I saw him fling the stone, as if he meant

At once his murther and his monument.

Of the sword taken from Goliah, he says,

A sword so great, that it was only fit,

To cut off his great head that came with it.

Other poets describe death by some of its common appearances. Cowley

says, with a learned allusion to sepulchral lamps, real or fabulous,

'Twixt his right ribs deep pierc'd the furious blade,

And open'd wide those secret vessels where

Life's light goes out, when first they let in air.

But he has allusions vulgar, as well as learned. In a visionary

succession of kings:

Joas at first does bright and glorious shew,

In life's fresh morn his fame does early crow.

Describing an undisciplined army, after having said with elegance,

His forces seem'd no army, but a crowd

Heartless, unarm'd, disorderly, and loud,

he gives them a fit of the ague.

The allusions, however, are not always to vulgar things; he offends by

exaggeration, as much as by diminution:

The king was plac'd alone, and o'er his head

A well-wrought heaven of silk and gold was spread.

Whatever he writes is always polluted with some conceit:

Where the sun's fruitful beams give metals birth,

Where he the growth of fatal gold doth see,

Gold, which alone more influence has than he.

In one passage he starts a sudden question, to the confusion of

philosophy:

Ye learned heads, whom ivy garlands grace,

Why does that twining plant the oak embrace;

The oak, for courtship most of all unfit,

And rough as are the winds that fight with it?

His expressions have, sometimes, a degree of meanness that surpasses

expectation:

Nay, gentle guests, he cries, since now you're in,

The story of your gallant friend begin.

In a simile descriptive of the morning:

As glimm'ring stars just at th' approach of day,

Cashier'd by troops, at last drop all away.

The dress of Gabriel deserves attention:

He took for skin a cloud most soft and bright,

That e'er the mid-day sun pierc'd through with light;

Upon his cheeks a lively blush he spread,

Wash'd from the morning beauties' deepest red;

An harmless flatt'ring meteor shone for hair,

And fell adown his shoulders with loose care;

He cuts out a silk mantle from the skies,

Where the most sprightly azure pleas'd the eyes;

This he with starry vapours sprinkles all,

Took in their prime ere they grow ripe and fall;

Of a new rainbow, ere it fret or fade,

The choicest piece cut out, a scarf is made.

This is a just specimen of Cowley's imagery: what might, in general

expressions, be great and forcible, he weakens and makes ridiculous

by branching it into small parts. That Gabriel was invested with the

softest or brightest colours of the sky, we might have been told, and

been dismissed to improve the idea in our different proportions of

conception; but Cowley could not let us go, till he had related where

Gabriel got first his skin, and then his mantle, then his lace, and then

his scarf, and related it in the terms of the mercer and tailor.

Sometimes he indulges himself in a digression, always conceived with his

natural exuberance, and commonly, even where it is not long, continued

till it is tedious.

I' th' library a few choice authors stood,

Yet 'twas well stor'd, for that small store was good;

Writing, man's spiritual physick, was not then

Itself, as now, grown a disease of men.

Learning (young virgin) but few suitors knew;

The common prostitute she lately grew,

And with the spurious brood loads now the press;

Laborious effects of idleness.

As the Davideis affords only four books, though intended to consist

of twelve, there is no opportunity for such criticism as epick poems

commonly supply. The plan of the whole work is very imperfectly shown by

the third part. The duration of an unfinished action cannot be known. Of

characters, either not yet introduced, or shown but upon few occasions,

the full extent and the nice discriminations cannot be ascertained. The

fable is plainly implex, formed rather from the Odyssey than the Iliad;

and many artifices of diversification are employed, with the skill of a

man acquainted with the best models. The past is recalled by narration,

and the future anticipated by vision: but he has been so lavish of his

poetical art, that it is difficult to imagine how he could fill eight

books more without practising again the same modes of disposing his

matter; and, perhaps, the perception of this growing incumbrance

inclined him to stop. By this abruption posterity lost more instruction

than delight. If the continuation of the Davideis can be missed, it is

for the learning that had been diffused over it, and the notes in which

it had been explained.

Had not his characters been depraved, like every other part, by improper

decorations, they would have deserved uncommon praise. He gives Saul

both the body and mind of a hero:

His way once chose, he forward thrust outright,

Nor turn'd aside for danger or delight.

And the different beauties of the lofty Merah and the gentle Michol, are

very justly conceived and strongly painted.

Rymer has declared the Davideis superiour to the Jerusalem of Tasso;

"which," says he, "the poet, with all his care, has not totally purged

from pedantry." If by pedantry is meant that minute knowledge which

is derived from particular sciences and studies, in opposition to the

general notions supplied by a wide survey of life and nature, Cowley

certainly errs, by introducing pedantry far more frequently than Tasso.

I know not, indeed, why they should be compared; for the resemblance of

Cowley's work to Tasso's is only that they both exhibit the agency of

celestial and infernal spirits, in which, however, they differ

widely; for Cowley supposes them commonly to operate upon the mind by

suggestion; Tasso represents them as promoting or obstructing events by

external agency.

Of particular passages that can be properly compared, I remember only

the description of heaven, in which the different manner of the two

writers is sufficiently discernible. Cowley's is scarcely description,

unless it be possible to describe by negatives: for he tells us

only what there is not in heaven. Tasso endeavours to represent the

splendours and pleasures of the regions of happiness. Tasso affords

images, and Cowley sentiments. It happens, however, that Tasso's

description affords some reason for Rymer's censure. He says of the

supreme being,

Ha sotto i piedi e fato e la natura,

Ministri umili, e'l moto, e chi'l misura.

The second line has in it more of pedantry than, perhaps, can be found

in any other stanza of the poem.

In the perusal of the Davideis, as of all Cowley's works, we find wit

and learning unprofitably squandered. Attention has no relief; the

affections are never moved: we are sometimes surprised, but never

delighted; and find much to admire, but little to approve. Still,

however, it is the work of Cowley; of a mind capacious by nature, and

replenished by study.

In the general review of Cowley's poetry it will be found, that he wrote

with abundant fertility, but negligent or unskilful selection; with much

thought, but with little imagery; that he is never pathetick, and

rarely sublime; but always either ingenious or learned, either acute or

profound.

It is said by Denham, in his elegy,

To him no author was unknown,

Yet what he writ was all his own.

This wide position requires less limitation, when it is affirmed of

Cowley, than, perhaps, of any other poet.--He read much, and yet

borrowed little.

His character of writing was, indeed, not his own: he unhappily adopted

that which was predominant. He saw a certain way to present praise; and,

not sufficiently inquiring by what means the ancients have continued to

delight through all the changes of human manners, he contented himself

with a deciduous laurel, of which the verdure, in its spring, was bright

and gay, but which time has been continually stealing from his brows.

He was, in his own time, considered as of unrivalled excellence.

Clarendon represents him as having taken a flight beyond all that went

before him; and Milton is said to have declared, that the three greatest

English poets were Spenser, Shakespeare, and Cowley.

His manner he had in common with others; but his sentiments were his

own. Upon every subject he thought for himself; and such was his

copiousness of knowledge, that something at once remote and applicable

rushed into his mind; yet it is not likely that he always rejected a

commodious idea merely because another had used it: his known wealth was

so great, that he might have borrowed without loss of credit.

In his elegy on sir Henry Wotton, the last lines have such resemblance

to the noble epigram of Grotius on the death of Scaliger, that I cannot

but think them copied from it, though they are copied by no servile

hand.

One passage in his Mistress is so apparently borrowed from Donne, that

he probably would not have written it, had it not mingled with his own

thoughts, so as that he did not perceive himself taking it from another:

Although I think thou never found wilt be,

Yet I'm resolv'd to search for thee:

The search itself rewards the pains.

So, though the chymic his great secret miss

(For neither it in art or nature is,)

Yet things well worth his toil he gains;

And does his charge and labour pay

With good unsought experiments by the way. COWLEY.

Some that have deeper digg'd love's mine than I,

Say, where his centric happiness doth lie:

I have lov'd, and got, and told;

But should I love, get, tell, till I were old;

I should not find that hidden mystery;

Oh, 'tis imposture all!

And as no chymic yet th' elixir got,

But glorifies his pregnant pot,

If by the way to him befall

Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal,

So lovers dream a rich and long delight,

But get a winter-seeming summer's night. DONNE.

Jonson and Donne, as Dr. Hurd remarks, were then in the highest esteem.

It is related by Clarendon, that Cowley always acknowledges his

obligation to the learning and industry of Jonson; but I have found no

traces of Jonson in his works: to emulate Donne appears to have been

his purpose; and from Donne he may have learned that familiarity with

religious images, and that light allusion to sacred things, by which

readers far short of sanctity are frequently offended; and which would

not be borne, in the present age, when devotion, perhaps, not more

fervent, is more delicate.

Having produced one passage taken by Cowley from Donne, I will

recompense him by another which Milton seems to have borrowed from him.

He says of Goliah:

His spear, the trunk was of a lofty tree,

Which nature meant some tall ship's mast should be.

Milton of Satan:

His spear, to equal which the tallest pine

Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast

Of some great admiral, were but a wand,

He walked with.

His diction was, in his own time, censured as negligent. He seems not to

have known, or not to have considered, that words, being arbitrary, must

owe their power to association, and have the influence, and that only,

which custom has given them. Language is the dress of thought: and,

as the noblest mien, or most graceful action, would be degraded and

obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rusticks or

mechanicks; so the most heroick sentiments will lose their efficacy, and

the most splendid ideas drop their magnificence, if they are conveyed by

words used commonly upon low and trivial occasions, debased by vulgar

mouths, and contaminated by inelegant applications.

Truth, indeed, is always truth, and reason is always reason; they have

an intrinsick and unalterable value, and constitute that intellectual

gold which defies destruction; but gold may be so concealed in baser

matter, that only a chymist can recover it; sense may be so hidden in

unrefined and plebeian words, that none but philosophers can distinguish

it; and both may be so buried in impurities, as not to pay the cost of

their extraction.

The diction, being the vehicle of the thoughts, first presents itself to

the intellectual eye; and, if the first appearance offends, a further

knowledge is not often sought. Whatever professes to benefit by

pleasing, must please at once. The pleasures of the mind imply something

sudden and unexpected; that which elevates must always surprise. What

is perceived by slow degrees may gratify us with the consciousness of

improvement, but will never strike with the sense of pleasure.

Of all this, Cowley appears to have been without knowledge, or without

care. He makes no selection of words, nor seeks any neatness of phrase:

he has no elegancies, either lucky or elaborate: as his endeavours were

rather to impress sentences upon the understanding than images on

the fancy, he has few epithets, and those scattered without peculiar

propriety or nice adaptation. It seems to follow from the necessity of

the subject, rather than the care of the writer, that the diction of his

heroick poem is less familiar than that of his slightest writings. He

has given not the same numbers, but the same diction, to the gentle

Anacreon and the tempestuous Pindar.

His versification seems to have had very little of his care; and, if

what he thinks be true, that his numbers are unmusical only when they

are ill read, the art of reading them is at present lost; for they are

commonly harsh to modern ears. He has, indeed, many noble lines, such as

the feeble care of Waller never could produce. The bulk of his thoughts

sometimes swelled his verse to unexpected and inevitable grandeur; but

his excellence of this kind is merely fortuitous: he sinks willingly

down to his general carelessness, and avoids, with very little care,

either meanness or asperity.

His contractions are often rugged and harsh:

One flings a mountain, and its rivers too

Torn up with 't.

His rhymes are very often made by pronouns, or particles, or the like

unimportant words, which disappoint the ear, and destroy the energy of

the line.

His combination of different measures is, sometimes, dissonant and

unpleasing; he joins verses together, of which the former does not slide

easily into the latter.

The words _do_ and _did_, which so much degrade, in present estimation,

the line that admits them, were, in the time of Cowley, little censured

or avoided; how often he used them, and with how bad an effect, at least

to our ears, will appear by a passage, in which every reader will lament

to see just and noble thoughts defrauded of their praise by inelegance

of language:

Where honour or where conscience _does_ not bind,

No other law shall shackle me;

Slave to myself I ne'er will be;

Nor shall my future actions be confin'd

By my own present mind.

Who by resolves and vows engag'd _does_ stand

For days, that yet belong to fate,

_Does_, like an unthrift, mortgage his estate,

Before it falls into his hand;

The bondman of the cloister so,

All that he _does_ receive _does_ always owe:

And still, as time comes in, it goes away,

Not to enjoy, but debts to pay!

Unhappy slave, and pupil to a bell,

Which his hour's work, as well as hours, _does_ tell!

Unhappy till the last, the kind releasing knell.

His heroick lines are often formed of monosyllables; but yet they are

sometimes sweet and sonorous.

He says of the Messiah:

Round the whole earth his dreaded name shall sound,

_And reach to worlds that must not yet be found_.

In another place, of David:

Yet bid him go securely, when he sends;

_'Tis Saul that is his foe, and we his friends.

The man who has his God, no aid can lack;

And we who bid him go, will bring him back._

Yet, amidst his negligence, he sometimes attempted an improved and

scientifick versification; of which it will be best to give his own

account subjoined to this line:

Nor can the glory contain itself in th' endless space.

"I am sorry that it is necessary to admonish the most part of readers,

that it is not by negligence that this verse is so loose, long, and,

as it were, vast; it is to paint in the number the nature of the thing

which it describes, which I would have observed in divers other places

of this poem, that else will pass for very careless verses: as before,

And overruns the neighb'ring fields with violent course.

"In the second book,

Down a precipice deep, down he casts them all.

"And,

And fell a-down his shoulders with loose care

"In the third,

Brass was his helmet, his boots brass, and o'er

His breast a thick plate of strong brass he wore.

"In the fourth,

Like some fair pine o'erlooking all th' ignobler wood.

"And,

Some from the rocks cast themselves down headlong.

"And many more: but it is enough to instance in a few. The thing is,

that the disposition of words and numbers should be such, as that,

out of the order and sound of them, the things themselves may be

represented. This the Greeks were not so accurate as to bind themselves

to; neither have our English poets observed it, for aught I can find.

The Latins (qui musas colunt severiores) sometimes did it; and their

prince, Virgil, always, in whom the examples are innumerable, and taken

notice of by all judicious men, so that it is superfluous to collect

them."

I know not whether he has, in many of these instances, attained the

representation or resemblance that he purposes. Verse can imitate only

sound and motion. A _boundless_ verse, a _headlong_ verse, and a verse

of _brass_, or of _strong brass_, seem to comprise very incongruous

and unsociable ideas. What there is peculiar in the sound of the line

expressing _loose care_, I cannot discover; nor why the _pine_ is

_taller_ in an alexandrine than in ten syllables.

But, not to defraud him of his due praise, he has given one example of

representative versification, which, perhaps, no other English line can

equal:

Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise:

He, who defers this work from day to day,

Does on a river's bank expecting stay

Till the whole stream that stopp'd him shall be gone,

_Which runs, and, as it runs, for ever shall run on_.

Cowley was, I believe, the first poet that mingled alexandrines, at

pleasure, with the common heroick of ten syllables; and from him Dryden

borrowed the practice, whether ornamental or licentious. He considered

the verse of twelve syllables as elevated and majestick, and has,

therefore, deviated into that measure, when he supposes the voice heard

of the supreme being.

The author of the Davideis is commended by Dryden for having written it

in couplets, because he discovered that any staff was too lyrical for

an heroick poem; but this seems to have been known before by May and

Sandys, the translators of the Pharsalia and the Metamorphoses.

In the Davideis are some hemistichs, or verses left imperfect by the

author, in imitation of Virgil, whom he supposes not to have intended

to complete them: that this opinion is erroneous, may be probably

concluded, because this truncation is imitated by no subsequent Roman

poet; because Virgil himself filled up one broken line in the heat of

recitation; because in one the sense is now unfinished; and because all

that can be done by a broken verse, a line intersected by a _caesura_

and a full stop, will equally effect.

Of triplets, in his Davideis, he makes no use, and, perhaps, did not, at

first, think them allowable; but he appears afterwards to have changed

his mind, for, in the verses on the government of Cromwell, he inserts

them liberally with great happiness.

After so much criticism on his poems, the essays which accompany them

must not be forgotten. What is said by Sprat of his conversation, that

no man could draw from it any suspicion of his excellence in poetry, may

be applied to these compositions. No author ever kept his verse and his

prose at a greater distance from each other. His thoughts are natural,

and his style has a smooth and placid equability, which has never yet

obtained its due commendation. Nothing is far-sought, or hard-laboured;

but all is easy without feebleness, and familiar without grossness.

It has been observed by Felton, in his essay on the Classicks, that

Cowley was beloved by every muse that he courted; and that he has

rivalled the ancients in every kind of poetry but tragedy.

It may be affirmed, without any encomiastick fervour, that he brought to

his poetick labours a mind replete with learning, and that his pages are

embellished with all the ornaments which books could supply; that he was

the first who imparted to English numbers the enthusiasm of the greater

ode, and the gaiety of the less; that he was equally qualified for

sprightly sallies, and for lofty flights; that he was among those who

freed translation from servility, and, instead of following his author

at a distance, walked by his side; and that if he left versification

yet improvable, he left likewise, from time to time, such specimens of

excellence as enabled succeeding poets to improve it.

* * * * *

The insertion of Cowley's epitaph may be interesting to our readers.

Epitaphium

Autoris

In Ecclesia D. Petri apud Westmonasterienses

Sepulti.

Abrahamus Cowleius,

Anglorum Pindarus, Flaccus, Maro,

Deliciae, Decus, Desiderium, Aevi sui,

Hic juxta situs est.

Aurea dum volitant late tua scripta per orbem,

Et fama aeternum vivis, divine poeta,

Hic placida jaceas requie: custodiat urnam

Cana fides, vigilentque perenni lampade musae

Sit sacer iste locus; nee quis temerarius ausit

Sacrilega turbare manu venerabile bustum.

Intacti maneant; maneant per saecula dulces

Cowleii cineres, serventque immobile saxum.

Sic vovatque

Votumque suum apud posteros sacratum esse voluit

Qui viro incomparabili posult sepulchrale marmor,

Georgius Dux Buckinghamiae.

Excessit e vita Anno Aetatis suae 49° et honorifica pompa elatus

ex Aedibus

Buckinghamianis, viris illustribus omnium ordinum exequias

celebrantibus,

sepultus est die 3° M. Augusti, Anno Domini 1667.

[Footnote 6: This volume was not published before 1633, when Cowley was

fifteeyears old. Dr. Johnson, as well as former biographers, seems to

have been misled by the portrait of Cowley being, by mistake, marked with

the age of thirteen years. R.]

[Footnote 7: He was a candidate this year at Westminster school for

election to Trinity college, but proved unsuccessful.]

[Footnote 8: In the first edition of this life, Dr. Johnson wrote, "which

was never inserted in any collection of his works;" but he altered the

expression when the Lives were collected into volumes. The satire was

added to Cowley's works by the particular direction of Dr. Johnson. N.]

[Footnote 9: Consulting the Virgilian lots, Sortes Virgilianae, is a

method of divination by the opening of Virgil, and applying to the

circumstances of the peruser the first passage in either of the two pages

that he accidentally fixes his eye on. It is said, that king Charles

the first, and lord Falkland, being in the Bodleian library, made this

experiment of their future fortunes, and met with passages equally

ominous to each.

That of the king was the following:

At bello audacis populi vexatus et armis,

Finibus extorris, complexu avulsus luli,

Auxilium imploret, videatque indigna suorum

Funera, nec, cum se sub leges pacis iniquae

Tradiderit, regno aut optata luce fruatur:

Sed cadat ante diem, mediaque inhumatus arena. Aeneid. iv. 615.

Yet let a race untam'd, and haughty foes,

His peaceful entrance with dire arms oppose,

Oppress'd with numbers in th' unequal field,

His men discourag'd and himself expell'd:

Let him for succour sue from place to place,

Torn from his subjects and his son's embrace.

First let him see his friends in battle slain,

And their untimely fate lament in vain:

And when, at length, the cruel war shall cease,

On hard conditions may he buy his peace;

Nor let him then enjoy supreme command.

But fall untimely by some hostile hand,

And lie unburied on the barren sand. DRYDEN.

Lord Falkland's:

Non haec, O Palla, dederas promissa parenti,

Cautius ut saevo velles te credere Marti.

Haud ignarus eram, quantum nova gloria in armis,

Et praedulce decus primo certamine posset.

Primitiae juvenis miserae, bellique propinqui

Dura rudimenta, et nulli exaudita deorum,

Vota precesque meae! Aeneid. xi. 152.

O Pallas, thou hast fail'd thy plighted word,

To fight with caution, not to tempt the sword;

I warn'd thee, but in vain, for well I knew

What perils youthful ardour would pursue,

That boiling blood would carry thee too far,

Young as thou wert to dangers, raw to war.

O curst essay of arms, disastrous doom,

Prelude of bloody fields and fights to come!

Hard elements of unauspicious war,

Vain vows to heaven, and unavailing care! DRYDEN

Hoffman, in his Lexicon, gives a very satisfactory account of this

practice of seeking fates in books: and says, that it was used by the

pagans, the jewish rabbins, and even the early Christians; the latter

taking the New Testament for their oracle.]

[Footnote 10: Johnson has exhibited here us little feeling for the

neglected servant of the thankless house of Stewart, as he displayed in

the cold contempt of his sixth Rambler. An unmeaning compliment from a

worthless king was Cowley's only recompense for years of faithful and

painful services. A heart loyal and affectionate, like his, may well be

excused the utterance of its pains, when wounded by those for whom it

would so cheerfully have poured forth its blood. We repeat, that Cowley's

misfortune was his devotion to a family, who invariably forgot, in their

prosperity, those who had defended them in the day of adversity. ED.]

[Footnote 11: See Campbell's Poets, iv. 75.]

[Footnote 12: By May's poem, we are here to understand a continuation

of Lucan's Pharsalia, to the death of Julius Caesar, by Thomas May, an

eminent poet and historian, who flourished in the reigns of James

and Charles the first, and of whom a life is given in the Biographia

Britannica. The merit of Cowley's Latin poems is well examined in Censura

Literatia, vol. viii. See also Warton's Preface to Milton's Juvenile

Poems. ED.]

[Footnote 13: 1663.]

[Footnote 14: Here is an error in the designation of this comedy, which

our author copied from the title page of the latter editions of Cowley's

works: the title of the play itself is without the article, "Cutter of

Coleman street," and that, because a merry sharking fellow about the

town, named Cutter, is a principal character in it.]

[Footnote 15: L'Allegro of Milton. Dr. J.]

[Footnote 16: About three hundred pounds per annum. See Campbell's Poets,

iv.]

[Footnote 17: Now in the possession of Mr. Clark, alderman of London.

Dr. J.--Mr. Clark was, in 1798, elected to the important office of

chamberlain of London; and has every year since been unanimously

reelected. N.]

[Footnote 18: For metaphysical poets, see Brydges' Restituta, vol. iv.]

[Footnote 19: It is but justice to the memory of Cowley, to quote here an

exquisite stanza which Johnson has inserted in the Idler, No. 77, where

he says; "Cowley seems to have possessed the power of writing easily

beyond any other of our poets; yet his pursuit of remote thought led him

often into harshness of expression." The stanza is to a lady elaborately

dressed:

Th' adorning thee with so much art

Is but a barb'rous skill,

'Tis like the pois'ning of a dart

Too apt before to kill. ED.]

[Footnote 20: Dodsley's Collection of Poems, vol. v. R.]

[Footnote 21: First published in quarto, 1669, under the title of Carmen

Pindaricum in Theatrum Sheldonianum in solennibus magnifici operis

encaeniis. Recitatum Julii die 9, anno 1669, a Corbetto Owen, A. B. Aed.

Chr. Alumno, authore. R.]

DENHAM

Of sir John Denham very little is known but what is related of him by

Wood, or by himself.

He was born at Dublin, 1615[22]; the only son of sir John Denham, of

Little Horsley, in Essex, then chief baron of the exchequer in Ireland,

and of Eleanor, daughter of sir Garret More, baron of Mellefont.

Two years afterwards, his father, being made one of the barons of the

exchequer in England, brought him away from his native country, and

educated him in London.

In 1631 he was sent to Oxford, where he was considered "as a dreaming

young man, given more to dice and cards than study:" and, therefore,

gave no prognosticks of his future eminence; nor was suspected to

conceal, under sluggishness and laxity, a genius born to improve the

literature of his country.

When he was, three years afterwards, removed to Lincoln's inn, he

prosecuted the common law with sufficient appearance of application;

yet did not lose his propensity to cards and dice; but was very often

plundered by gamesters.

Being severely reproved for this folly, he professed, and, perhaps,

believed, himself reclaimed; and, to testify the sincerity of his

repentance, wrote and published an Essay upon Gaming.

He seems to have divided his studies between law and poetry; for, in

1636, he translated the second book of the Aeneid. Two years after, his

father died; and then, notwithstanding his resolutions and professions,

he returned again to the vice of gaming, and lost several thousand

pounds that had been left him.

In 1641, he published the Sophy. This seems to have given him his first

hold of the publick attention; for Waller remarked, "that he broke out

like the Irish rebellion, three score thousand strong, when nobody was

aware, or in the least suspected it;" an observation which could have

had no propriety had his poetical abilities been known before.

He was after that pricked for sheriff of Surrey, and made governour

of Farnham castle for the king; but he soon resigned that charge, and

retreated to Oxford, where, in 1643, he published Cooper's Hill.

This poem had such reputation as to excite the common artifice by which

envy degrades excellence. A report was spread, that the performance was

not his own, but that he had bought it of a vicar for forty pounds. The

same attempt was made to rob Addison of his Cato, and Pope of his Essay

on Criticism.

In 1647, the distresses of the royal family required him to engage in

more dangerous employments. He was intrusted, by the queen, with a

message to the king; and, by whatever means, so far softened the

ferocity of Hugh Peters, that, by his intercession, admission was

procured. Of the king's condescension he has given an account in the

dedication of his works.

He was, afterwards, employed in carrying on the king's correspondence;

and, as he says, discharged this office with great safety to the

royalists: and, being accidentally discovered by the adverse party's

knowledge of Mr. Cowley's hand, he escaped happily both for himself and

his friends.

He was yet engaged in a greater undertaking. In April, 1648, he conveyed

James, the duke of York, from London into France, and delivered him

there to the queen and prince of Wales. This year he published his

translation of Cato Major. He now resided in France, as one of the

followers of the exiled king; and, to divert the melancholy of their

condition, was sometimes enjoined by his master to write occasional

verses; one of which amusements was probably his ode, or song, upon the

Embassy to Poland, by which he and lord Crofts procured a contribution

of ten thousand pounds from the Scotch, that wandered over the kingdom.

Poland was, at that time, very much frequented by itinerant traders,

who, in a country of very little commerce and of great extent, where

every man resided on his own estate, contributed very much to the

accommodation of life, by bringing to every man's house those little

necessaries which it was very inconvenient to want, and very troublesome

to fetch. I have formerly read, without much reflection, of the

multitude of Scotchmen that travelled with their wares in Poland; and

that their numbers were not small, the success of this negotiation gives

sufficient evidence.

About this time, what estate the war and the gamesters had left him was

sold, by order of the parliament; and when, in 1652, he returned to

England, he was entertained by the earl of Pembroke.

Of the next years of his life there is no account. At the restoration he

obtained that which many missed, the reward of his loyalty; being made

surveyor of the king's buildings, and dignified with the order of the

Bath. He seems now to have learned some attention to money; for Wood

says, that he got by this place seven thousand pounds.

After the restoration, he wrote the poem on Prudence and Justice, and,

perhaps, some of his other pieces; and as he appears, whenever any

serious question comes before him, to have been a man of piety, he

consecrated his poetical powers to religion, and made a metrical version

of the psalms of David. In this attempt he has failed; but in sacred

poetry who has succeeded?

It might be hoped that the favour of his master, and esteem of the

publick, would now make him happy. But human felicity is short and

uncertain; a second marriage brought upon him so much disquiet, as, for

a time, disordered his understanding; and Butler lampooned him for his

lunacy. I know not whether the malignant lines were then made publick,

nor what provocation incited Butler to do that which no provocation can

excuse.

His phrensy lasted not long[23]; and he seems to have regained his full

force of mind; for he wrote afterwards his excellent poem upon the death

of Cowley, whom he was not long to survive; for, on the 19th of March,

1668, he was buried by his side.

Denham is deservedly considered as one of the fathers of English poetry.

"Denham and Waller," says Prior, "improved our versification, and

Dryden perfected it." He has given specimens of various compositions,

descriptive, ludicrous, didactick, and sublime.

He appears to have had, in common with almost all mankind, the ambition

of being, upon proper occasions, _a merry fellow_, and, in common with

most of them, to have been by nature, or by early habits, debarred from

it. Nothing is less exhilarating than the ludicrousness of Denham; he

does not fail for want of efforts; he is familiar, he is gross; but he

is never merry, unless the Speech against Peace in the close Committee

be excepted. For grave burlesque, however, his imitation of Davenant

shows him to have been well qualified.

Of his more elevated occasional poems, there is, perhaps, none that does

not deserve commendation. In the verses to Fletcher, we have an image

that has since been often adopted[24]:

But whither am I stray'd? I need not raise

Trophies to thee from other men's dispraise;

Nor is thy fame on lesser ruins built,

Nor need thy juster title the foul guilt

Of eastern kings, who, to secure their reign,

Must have their brothers, sons, and kindred, slain.

After Denham, Orrery, in one of his prologues,

Poets are sultans, if they had their will;

For ev'ry author would his brother kill.

And Pope,

Should such a man, too fond to rule alone,

Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne.

But this is not the best of his little pieces: it is excelled by his

poem to Fanshaw, and his elegy on Cowley.

His praise of Fanshaw's version of Guarini contains a very sprightly and

judicious character of a good translator:

That servile path thou nobly dost decline,

Of tracing word by word and line by line.

Those are the labour'd births of slavish brains,

Not the effect of poetry but pains;

Cheap vulgar arts, whose narrowness affords

No flight for thoughts, but poorly stick at words,

A new and nobler way thou dost pursue,

To make translations and translators too,

They but preserve the ashes; thou the flame,

True to his sense, but truer to his fame.

The excellence of these lines is greater, as the truth which they

contain was not, at that time, generally known.

His poem on the death of Cowley was his last, and, among his shorter

works, his best performance: the numbers are musical, and the thoughts

are just.

Cooper's Hill is the work that confers upon him the rank and dignity of

an original author. He seems to have been, at least among us, the author

of a species of composition that may be denominated _local poetry_,

of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be

poetically described with the addition of such embellishments as may be

supplied by historical retrospection, or incidental meditation.

To trace a new scheme of poetry, has, in itself, a very high claim to

praise, and its praise is yet more, when it is apparently copied by

Garth and Pope[25]; after whose names little will be gained by an

enumeration of smaller poets, that have left scarcely a corner of the

island not dignified either by rhyme or blank verse.

Cooper's Hill, if it be maliciously inspected, will not be found without

its faults. The digressions are too long, the morality too frequent, and

the sentiments, sometimes, such as will not bear a rigorous inquiry.

The four verses, which, since Dryden has commended them, almost every

writer for a century past has imitated, are generally known:

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream

My great example, as it is my theme!

Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;

Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full.

The lines, are, in themselves, not perfect; for most of the words,

thus artfully opposed, are to be understood simply on one side of the

comparison, and metaphorically on the other; and, if there be any

language which does not express intellectual operations by material

images, into that language they cannot be translated. But so much

meaning is comprised in so few words; the particulars of resemblance are

so perspicaciously collected, and every mode of excellence separated

from its adjacent fault by so nice a line of limitation; the different

parts of the sentence are so accurately adjusted; and the flow of

the last couplet is so smooth and sweet; that the passage, however

celebrated, has not been praised above its merit. It has beauty peculiar

to itself, and must be numbered among those felicities which cannot be

produced at will by wit and labour, but must rise unexpectedly in some

hour propitious to poetry.

He appears to have been one of the first that understood the necessity

of emancipating translation from the drudgery of counting lines, and

interpreting single words. How much this servile practice obscured the

clearest, and deformed the most beautiful parts of the ancient authors,

may be discovered by a perusal of our earlier versions; some of them

are the works of men well qualified, not only by critical knowledge,

but by poetical genius, who yet, by a mistaken ambition of exactness,

degraded, at once, their originals and themselves.

Denham saw the better way, but has not pursued it with great success.

His versions of Virgil are not pleasing; but they taught Dryden to

please better. His poetical imitation of Tully on Old Age has neither

the clearness of prose, nor the sprightliness of poetry.

The "strength of Denham," which Pope so emphatically mentions, is to

be found in many lines and couplets, which convey much meaning in few

words, and exhibit the sentiment with more weight than bulk.

On the Thames.

Though with those streams he no resemblance hold,

Whose foam is amber, and their gravel gold;

His genuine and less guilty wealth t' explore,

Search not his bottom, but survey his shore.

On Strafford.

His wisdom such, at once, it did appear

Three kingdoms' wonder, and three kingdoms' fear.

While single he stood forth, and seem'd, although

Each had an army, as an equal foe;

Such was his force of eloquence to make

The hearers more concern'd than he that spake:

Each seem'd to act that part he came to see,

And none was more a looker-on than he;

So did he move our passions, some were known

To wish, for the defence, the crime their own.

Now private pity strove with public hate,

Reason with rage, and eloquence with fate.

On Cowley.

To him no author was unknown,

Yet what he wrote was all his own;

Horace's wit, and Virgil's state,

He did not steal, but emulate!

And, when he would like them appear,

Their garb, but not their clothes, did wear.

As one of Denham's principal claims to the regard of posterity arises

from his improvement of our numbers, his versification ought to

be considered. It will afford that pleasure which arises from the

observation of a man of judgment naturally right, forsaking bad copies

by degrees, and advancing towards a better practice, as he gains more

confidence in himself.

In his translation of Virgil, written when he was about twenty-one

years old, may be still found the old manner of continuing the sense

ungracefully from verse to verse:

Then all those

Who in the dark our fury did escape,

Returning, know our borrow'd arms, and shape,

And differing dialect; then their numbers swell

And grow upon us; first Choroebus fell

Before Minerva's altar; next did bleed

Just Ripheus, whom no Trojan did exceed

In virtue, yet the gods his fate decreed.

Then Hypanis and Dymas, wounded by

Their friends; nor thee, Pantheus, thy piety,

Nor consecrated mitre, from the same

Ill fate could save; my country's funeral flame

And Troy's cold ashes I attest, and call

To witness for myself, that in their fall

No foes, no death, nor danger, I declin'd,

Did, and deserv'd no less, my fate to find.

From this kind of concatenated metre he afterwards refrained, and taught

his followers the art of concluding their sense in couplets; which has,

perhaps, been with rather too much constancy pursued.

This passage exhibits one of those triplets which are not unfrequent in

this first essay, but which it is to be supposed his maturer judgment

disapproved, since, in his latter works, he has totally forborne them.

His rhymes are such as seem found without difficulty, by following the

sense; and are, for the most part, as exact, at least, as those of other

poets, though now and then the reader is shifted off with what he can

get:

O how _transform'd!_

How much unlike that Hector, who _return'd_

Clad in Achilles' spoils!

And again:

From thence a thousand lesser poets _sprung_

Like petty princes from the fall of _Rome_.

Sometimes the weight of rhyme is laid upon a word too feeble to sustain

it:

Troy confounded falls

From all her glories: if it might have stood

By any power, by this right hand it _shou'd_.

--And though my outward state misfortune _hath_

Deprest thus low, it cannot reach my faith.

--Thus, by his fraud and our own faith o'ercome,

A feigned tear destroys us, against _whom_

Tydides nor Achilles could prevail,

Nor ten years' conflict, nor a thousand sail.

He is not very careful to vary the ends of his verses; in one passage

the word _die_ rhymes three couplets in six.

Most of these petty faults are in his first productions, when 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.

[Footnote 22: In Hamilton's memoirs of count Grammont, sir John Denham

is said to have been seventy-nine, when he married Miss Brook, about the

year 1664; according to which statement he was born in 1585. But Dr.

Johnson, who has followed Wood, is right. He entered Trinity college,

Oxford, at the age of sixteen, in 1631, as appears by the following

entry, which I copied from the matriculation book.

Trin. Coll.

"1631. Nov. 18. Johannes Denham, Essex. filius J. Denham de Horsley-parva

in com. praedict. militis, annos natus 16. MALONE".]

[Footnote 23: In the ninth and tenth chapters of the Mémoires de

Grammont, in Andrew Marvell's works, and in Aubrey's letters, ii. 319,

many scandalous anecdotes respecting Denham, are reported. ED.]

[Footnote 24: It is remarkable that Johnson should not have recollected,

that this image is to be found in Bacon. Aristoteles, more otthomannorum,

regnare se haud tuto posse putabat, nisi fratres suos omnes

contrucidasset. De Augment. Scient. lib. 3.]

[Footnote 25: By Garth, in his poem on Claremont: and by Pope, in his

Windsor Forest.]

MILTON.

The life of Milton has been already written in so many forms, and with

such minute inquiry, that I might, perhaps, more properly have contented

myself with the addition of a few notes on Mr. Fenton's elegant

Abridgment, but that a new narrative was thought necessary to the

uniformity of this edition.

John Milton was, by birth, a gentleman, descended from the proprietors

of Milton, near Thame, in Oxfordshire, one of whom forfeited his estate

in the times of York and Lancaster. Which side he took I know not; his

descendant inherited no veneration for the _white rose._

His grandfather, John, was keeper of the forest of Shotover, a zealous

papist, who disinherited his son, because he had forsaken the religion

of his ancestors.

His father, John, who was the son disinherited, had recourse, for his

support, to the profession of a scrivener. He was a man eminent for his

skill in musick, many of his compositions being still to be found;

and his reputation in his profession was such, that he grew rich, and

retired to an estate. He had, probably, more than common literature,

as his son addresses him in one of his most elaborate Latin poems. He

married a gentlewoman of the name of Caston, a Welsh family, by whom he

had two sons, John, the poet, and Christopher, who studied the law, and

adhered, as the law taught him, to the king's party, for which he was

awhile persecuted, but having, by his brother's interest, obtained

permission to live in quiet, he supported himself so honourably by

chamber practice, that, soon after the accession of king James, he was

knighted, and made a judge; but, his constitution being too weak

for business, he retired before any disreputable compliances became

necessary.

He had, likewise, a daughter, Anne, whom he married with a considerable

fortune, to Edward Philips, who came from Shrewsbury, and rose in the

crown office to be secondary: by him she had two sons, John and Edward,

who were educated by the poet, and from whom is derived the only

authentick account of his domestick manners.

John, the poet, was born in his father's house, at the Spread-eagle, in

Bread street, Dec. 9, 1608, between six and seven in the morning. His

father appears to have been very solicitous about his education; for he

was instructed, at first, by private tuition, under the care of Thomas

Young, who was afterwards chaplain to the English merchants at Hamburgh,

and of whom we have reason to think well, since his scholar considered

him as worthy of an epistolary elegy.

He was then sent to St. Paul's school, under the care of Mr. Gill; and

removed, in the beginning of his sixteenth year, to Christ's college in

Cambridge, where he entered a sizar[26], Feb. 12,1624.

He was, at this time, eminently skilled in the Latin tongue; and he

himself, by annexing the dates to his first compositions, a boast of

which the learned Politian had given him an example, seems to commend

the earliness of his own proficiency to the notice of posterity. But

the products of his vernal fertility have been surpassed by many, and

particularly by his contemporary Cowley. Of the powers of the mind it is

difficult to form an estimate: many have excelled Milton in their first

essays, who never rose to works like Paradise Lost.

At fifteen, a date which he uses till he is sixteen, he translated

or versified two psalms, 114 and 136, which he thought worthy of the

publick eye; but they raise no great expectations: they would, in any

numerous school, have obtained praise, but not excited wonder.

Many of his elegies appear to have been written in his eighteenth year,

by which it appears that he had then read the Roman authors with very

nice discernment. I once heard Mr. Hampton, the translator of Polybius,

remark, what I think is true, that Milton was the first Englishman who,

after the revival of letters, wrote Latin verses with classick elegance.

If any exceptions can be made, they are very few: Haddon and Ascham, the

pride of Elizabeth's reign, however they have succeeded in prose, no

sooner attempt verse than they provoke derision. If we produced any

thing worthy of notice before the elegies of Milton, it was, perhaps,

Alabaster's Roxana[27].

Of the exercises which the rules of the university required, some

were published by him in his maturer years. They had been undoubtedly

applauded; for they were such as few can perform; yet there is reason to

suspect that he was regarded in his college with no great fondness. That

he obtained no fellowship is certain; but the unkindness with which he

was treated, was not merely negative. I am ashamed to relate what I fear

is true, that Milton was one of the last students in either university,

that suffered the publick indignity of corporal correction[28].

It was, in the violence of controversial hostility, objected to him,

that he was expelled: this he steadily denies, and it was apparently not

true; but it seems plain, from his own verses to Diodati, that he had

incurred rustication, a temporary dismission into the country, with,

perhaps, the loss of a term:

Me tenet urbs, reflua quam Thamesis alluit unda,

Meque nec invitum patria dulcis habet.

Jam nec arundiferum mihi cura revisere Camum,

Nec dudum _vetiti_ me _laris_ angit amor.

Nec duri libet usque minas perferre magistri,

Caeteraque ingenio non subeunda meo.

Si sit hoc _exilium_ patrios adiise penates,

Et vacuum curis otia grata sequi,

Non ego vel _profugi_ nomen sortemve recuso,

Laetus et _exilii_ conditione fruor.

I cannot find any meaning but this, which even kindness and reverence

can give to the term "vetiti laris," a habitation from which he is

excluded; or how _exile_ can be otherwise interpreted. He declares yet

more, that he is weary of enduring "the threats of a rigorous master,

and something else, which a temper like his cannot undergo." What was

more than threat was probably punishment. This poem, which mentions his

exile, proves, likewise, that it was not perpetual; for it concludes

with a resolution of returning some time to Cambridge. And it may be

conjectured, from the willingness with which he has perpetuated the

memory of his exile, that its cause was such as gave him no shame.

He took both the usual degrees; that of Bachelor in 1628, and that of

master in 1632; but he left the university with no kindness for its

institution, alienated either by the injudicious severity of his

governours, or his own captious perverseness. The cause cannot now be

known, but the effect appears in his writings. His scheme of education,

inscribed to Hartlib, supersedes all academical instruction, being

intended to comprise the whole time which men usually spend in

literature, from their entrance upon grammar, "till they proceed, as it

is called, masters of arts." And in his discourse on the likeliest way

to remove Hirelings out of the Church, he ingeniously proposes, that

"the profits of the lands forfeited by the act for superstitious uses

should be applied to such academies all over the land, where languages

and arts may be taught together; so that youth may be, at once, brought

up to a competency of learning and an honest trade, by which means such

of them as had the gift, being enabled to support themselves, without

tithes, by the latter, may, by the help of the former, become worthy

preachers."

One of his objections to academical education, as it was then conducted,

is, that men designed for orders in the church were permitted to act

plays, "writhing and unboning their clergy limbs to all the antick and

dishonest gestures of Trincalos[29], buffoons, and bawds, prostituting

the shame of that ministry which they had, or were near having, to the

eyes of courtiers and court ladies, their grooms and mademoiselles."

This is sufficiently peevish in a man, who, when he mentions his exile

from the college, relates, with great luxuriance, the compensation which

the pleasures of the theatre afford him. Plays were, therefore, only

criminal when they were acted by academicks.

He went to the university with a design of entering into the church,

but in time altered his mind; for he declared, that whoever became a

clergyman must "subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which, unless

he took with a conscience that could retch, he must straight perjure

himself. He thought it better to prefer a blameless silence, before the

office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing."

These expressions are, I find, applied to the subscription of the

articles; but it seems more probable that they relate to canonical

obedience. I know not any of the articles which seem to thwart his

opinions; but the thoughts of obedience, whether canonical or civil,

raised his indignation.

His unwillingness to engage in the ministry, perhaps not yet advanced to

a settled resolution of declining it, appears in a letter to one of his

friends, who had reproved his suspended and dilatory life, which he

seems to have imputed to an insatiable curiosity, and fantastick luxury

of various knowledge. To this he writes a cool and plausible answer, in

which he endeavours to persuade him, that the delay proceeds not from

the delights of desultory study, but from the desire of obtaining more

fitness for his task; and that he goes on, "not taking thought of being

late, so it gives advantage to be more fit."

When he left the university he returned to his father, then residing at

Horton, in Buckinghamshire, with whom he lived five years; in which

time he is said to have read all the Greek and Latin writers. With what

limitations this universality is to be understood, who shall inform us?

It might be supposed, that he who read so much should have done nothing

else; but Milton found time to write the Masque of Comus, which was

presented at Ludlow, then the residence of the lord president of Wales,

in 1634; and had the honour of being acted by the earl of Bridgewater's

sons and daughter. The fiction is derived from Homer's Circe[30]; but we

never can refuse to any modern the liberty of borrowing from Homer:

--"a quo ceu fonte perenni

Vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis."

His next production was Lycidas, an elegy, written in 1637, on the death

of Mr. King, the son of sir John King, secretary for Ireland in the

time of Elizabeth, James, and Charles. King was much a favourite at

Cambridge, and many of the wits joined to do honour to his memory.

Milton's acquaintance with the Italian writers may be discovered by a

mixture of longer and shorter verses, according to the rules of Tuscan

poetry, and his malignity to the church by some lines which are

interpreted as threatening its extermination.

He is supposed about this time to have written his Arcades; for, while

he lived at Horton, he used sometimes to steal from his studies a few

days, which he spent at Harefield, the house of the countess dowager of

Derby, where the Arcades made part of a dramatick entertainment.

He began now to grow weary of the country, and had some purpose of

taking chambers in the inns of court, when the death of his mother set

him at liberty to travel, for which he obtained his father's consent,

and sir Henry Wotton's directions; with the celebrated precept of

prudence, "i pensieri stretti, ed il viso sciolto;" thoughts close, and

looks loose.

In 1638 he left England, and went first to Paris; where, by the favour

of lord Scudamore, he had the opportunity of visiting Grotius, then

residing at the French court, as ambassadour from Christina of Sweden.

From Paris he hasted into Italy, of which he had, with particular

diligence, studied the language and literature; and, though he seems

to have intended a very quick perambulation of the country, staid two

months at Florence; where he found his way into the academies, and

produced his compositions with such applause, as appears to have exalted

him in his own opinion, and confirmed him in the hope, that, "by labour

and intense study, which," says he, "I take to be my portion in this

life, joined with a strong propensity of nature," he might "leave

something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it

die." It appears, in all his writings, that he had the usual concomitant

of great abilities, a lofty and steady confidence in himself, perhaps

not without some contempt of others; for scarcely any man ever wrote so

much, and praised so few. Of his praise he was very frugal; as he set

its value high, and considered his mention of a name, as a security

against the waste of time, and a certain preservative from oblivion.

At Florence he could not, indeed, complain that his merit wanted

distinction: Carlo Dati presented him with an encomiastick inscription,

in the tumid lapidary style; and Francini wrote him an ode, of which the

first stanza is only empty noise; the rest are, perhaps, too diffuse on

common topicks; but the last is natural and beautiful.

From Florence he went to Sienna, and from Sienna to Rome, where he was

again received with kindness by the learned and the great. Holstenius,

the keeper of the Vatican library, who had resided three years at

Oxford, introduced him to cardinal Barberini; and he, at a musical

entertainment, waited for him at the door, and led him by the hand into

the assembly. Here Selvaggi praised him in a distich, and Salsilli in a

tetrastick; neither of them of much value. The Italians were gainers

by this literary commerce; for the encomiums with which Milton repaid

Salsilli, though not secure against a stern grammarian, turn the balance

indisputably in Milton's favour.

Of these Italian testimonies, poor as they are, he was proud enough to

publish them before his poems; though he says, he cannot be suspected

but to have known that they were said, "non tam de se, quam supra se."

At Rome, as at Florence, he staid only two months; a time, indeed,

sufficient, if he desired only to ramble with an explainer of its

antiquities, or to view palaces and count pictures; but certainly too

short for the contemplation of learning, policy, or manners.

From Rome he passed on to Naples in company of a hermit, a companion

from whom little could be expected; yet to him Milton owed his

introduction to Manso, marquis of Villa, who had been before the patron

of Tasso. Manso was enough delighted with his accomplishments to honour

him with a sorry distich, in which he commends him for every thing but

his religion: and Milton, in return, addressed him in a Latin poem,

which must have raised an high opinion of English elegance and

literature.

His purpose was now to have visited Sicily and Greece; but, hearing of

the differences between the king and parliament, he thought it proper to

hasten home, rather than pass his life in foreign amusements, while his

countrymen were contending for their rights. He, therefore, came back to

Rome, though the merchants informed him of plots laid against him by the

jesuits, for the liberty of his conversations on religion. He had sense

enough to judge that there was no danger, and, therefore, kept on his

way, and acted as before, neither obtruding nor shunning controversy. He

had, perhaps, given some offence by visiting Galileo, then a prisoner in

the inquisition for philosophical heresy; and at Naples he was told by

Manso, that, by his declarations on religious questions, he had excluded

himself from some distinctions which he should otherwise have paid him.

But such conduct, though it did not please, was yet sufficiently safe;

and Milton staid two months more at Rome, and went on to Florence

without molestation.

From Florence he visited Lucca. He afterwards went to Venice; and,

having sent away a collection of musick and other books, travelled to

Geneva, which he, probably, considered as the metropolis of orthodoxy.

Here he reposed, as in a congenial element, and became acquainted with

John Diodati and Frederick Spanheim, two learned professors of divinity.

From Geneva he passed through France; and came home, after an absence of

a year and three months.

At his return he heard of the death of his friend Charles Diodati; a

man, whom it is reasonable to suppose, of great merit, since he was

thought, by Milton, worthy of a poem, entitled Epitaphium Damonis,

written with the common, but childish, imitation of pastoral life.

He now hired a lodging at the house of one Russet, a tailor, in St.

Bride's church-yard, and undertook the education of John and Edward

Philips, his sister's sons. Finding his rooms too little, he took a

house and garden in Aldersgate street[31], which was not then so much

out of the world as it is now; and chose his dwelling at the upper end

of a passage, that he might avoid the noise of the street. Here he

received more boys, to be boarded and instructed.

Let not our veneration for Milton forbid us to look with some degree

of merriment on great promises and small performance, on the man who

hastens home, because his countrymen are contending for their liberty,

and, when he reaches the scene of action, vapours away his patriotism in

a private boarding-school. This is the period of his life from which all

his biographers seem inclined to shrink. They are unwilling that Milton

should be degraded to a schoolmaster; but, since it cannot be denied

that he taught boys, one finds out that he taught for nothing, and

another, that his motive was only zeal for the propagation of learning

and virtue; and all tell what they do not know to be true, only to

excuse an act which no wise man will consider as in itself disgraceful.

His father was alive; his allowance was not ample; and he supplied its

deficiencies by an honest and useful employment.

It is told, that in the art of education he performed wonders; and a

formidable list is given of the authors, Greek and Latin, that were read

in Aldersgate street, by youth between ten and fifteen or sixteen years

of age. Those who tell or receive these stories should consider, that

nobody can be taught faster than he can learn. The speed of the horseman

must be limited by the power of the horse. Every man, that has ever

undertaken to instruct others, can tell what slow advances he has been

able to make, and how much patience it requires to recall vagrant

inattention, to stimulate sluggish indifference, and to rectify absurd

misapprehension.

The purpose of Milton, as it seems, was to teach something more solid

than the common literature of schools, by reading those authors that

treat of physical subjects; such as the georgick, and astronomical

treatises of the ancients. This was a scheme of improvement which seems

to have busied many literary projectors of that age. Cowley, who had

more means than Milton of knowing what was wanting to the embellishments

of life, formed the same plan of education in his imaginary college.

But the truth is, that the knowledge of external nature, and the

sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or

the frequent business of the human mind. Whether we provide for action

or conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, the first

requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong; the

next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those

examples which may be said to embody truth, and prove, by events,

the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence and justice are virtues

and excellencies of all times and of all places; we are perpetually

moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse

with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter

are voluntary, and at leisure. Physiological learning is of such rare

emergence, that one may know another half his life, without being able

to estimate his skill in hydrostaticks or astronomy; but his moral and

prudential character immediately appears.

Those authors, therefore, are to be read at schools that supply most

axioms of prudence, most principles of moral truth, and most materials

for conversation; and these purposes are best served by poets, orators,

and historians. Let me not be censured for this digression, as pedantick

or paradoxical; for, if I have Milton against me, I have Socrates on my

side. It was his labour to turn philosophy from the study of nature to

speculations upon life; but the innovators whom I oppose are turning off

attention from life to nature. They seem to think, that we are placed

here to watch the growth of plants, or the motions of the stars.

Socrates was rather of opinion, that what we had to learn was, how to do

good, and avoid evil:

'Oti toi en megaroisi kakon t agathon te tetukta']

Of institutions we may judge by their effects. From this wonder-working

academy, I do not know that there ever proceeded any man very eminent

for knowledge: its only genuine product, I believe, is a small history

of poetry, written in Latin by his nephew Philips, of which, perhaps,

none of my readers has ever heard[32].

That in his school, as in every thing else which he undertook, he

laboured with great diligence, there is no reason for doubting. One part

of his method deserves general imitation. He was careful to instruct his

scholars in religion. Every Sunday was spent upon theology; of which

he dictated a short system, gathered from the writers that were then

fashionable in the Dutch universities.

He set his pupils an example of hard study and spare diet; only now and

then he allowed himself to pass a day of festivity and indulgence with

some gay gentlemen of Gray's inn.

He now began to engage in the controversies of the times, and lent

his breath to blow the flames of contention. In 1641, he published a

treatise of Reformation, in two books, against the established church;

being willing to help the puritans, who were, he says, "inferior to the

prelates in learning."

Hall, bishop of Norwich, had published an Humble Remonstrance, in

defence of episcopacy; to which, in 1641, five ministers[33], of whose

names the first letters made the celebrated word Smectymnuus, gave their

answer. Of this answer a confutation was attempted by the learned Usher;

and to the confutation Milton published a reply, entitled, of Prelatical

Episcopacy, and whether it may be deduced from the Apostolical Times, by

virtue of those testimonies which are alleged to that purpose in some

late treatises, one whereof goes under the name of James, lord bishop of

Armagh.

I have transcribed this title to show, by his contemptuous mention of

Usher, that he had now adopted the puritanical savageness of manners.

His next work was, the Reason of Church Government urged against

Prelacy, by Mr. John Milton, 1642. In this book he discovers, not with

ostentatious exultation, but with calm confidence, his high opinion of

his own powers; and promises to undertake something, he yet knows not

what, that may be of use and honour to his country. "This," says he, "is

not to be obtained but by devout prayer to that eternal spirit that can

enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim,

with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of

whom he pleases. To this must be added, industrious and select reading,

steady observation, and insight into all seemly and generous arts and

affairs; till which in some measure be compast, I refuse not to sustain

this expectation." From a promise like this, at once fervid, pious, and

rational, might be expected the Paradise Lost.

He published, the same year, two more pamphlets, upon the same question.

To one of his antagonists, who affirms that he was "vomited out of the

university," he answers, in general terms: "The fellows of the college,

wherein I spent some years, at my parting, after I had taken two

degrees, as the manner is, signified, many times, how much better it

would content them that I should stay. As for the common approbation or

dislike of that place, as now it is, that I should esteem or disesteem

myself the more for that, too simple is the answerer, if he think to

obtain with me. Of small practice were the physician who could not

judge, by what she and her sister have of long time vomited, that the

worser stuff she strongly keeps in her stomach, but the better she is

ever kecking at, and is queasy; she vomits now out of sickness; but,

before it will be well with her, she must vomit by strong physick. The

university, in the time of her better health, and my younger judgment, I

never greatly admired, but now much less."

This is surely the language of a man who thinks that he has been

injured. He proceeds to describe the course of his conduct, and

the train of his thoughts; and, because he has been suspected of

incontinence, gives an account of his own purity: "That if I be justly

charged," says he, "with this crime, it may come upon me with tenfold

shame."

The style of his piece is rough, and such, perhaps, was that of his

antagonist. This roughness he justifies, by great examples, in a long

digression. Sometimes he tries to be humorous: "Lest I should take him

for some chaplain in hand, some squire of the body to his prelate, one

who serves not at the altar only, but at the court-cupboard, he will

bestow on us a pretty model of himself; and sets me out half a dozen

ptisical mottoes, wherever he had them, hopping short in the measure of

convulsion fits; in which labour the agony of his wit having escaped

narrowly, instead of well-sized periods, he greets us with a quantity of

thumb-ring poesies. And thus ends this section, or rather dissection,

of himself." Such is the controversial merriment of Milton; his gloomy

seriousness is yet more offensive. Such is his malignity, "that hell

grows darker at his frown." His father, after Reading was taken by

Essex, came to reside in his house; and his school increased. At

Whitsuntide, in his thirty-fifth year, he married Mary, the daughter of

Mr. Powel, a justice of the peace in Oxfordshire. He brought her to town

with him, and expected all the advantages of a conjugal life. The lady,

however, seems not much to have delighted in the pleasures of spare

diet and hard study; for, as Philips relates, "having for a month led a

philosophick life, after having been used at home to a great house, and

much company and joviality, her friends, possibly by her own desire,

made earnest suit to have her company the remaining part of the summer;

which was granted, upon a promise of her return at Michaelmas."

Milton was too busy to much miss his wife: he pursued his studies; and

now and then visited the lady Margaret Leigh, whom he has mentioned in

one of his sonnets. At last Michaelmas arrived; but the lady had no

inclination to return to the sullen gloom of her husband's habitation,

and, therefore, very willingly forgot her promise. He sent her a letter,

but had no answer: he sent more with the same success. It could be

alleged that letters miscarry; he, therefore, despatched a messenger,

being by this time too angry to go himself. His messenger was sent back

with some contempt. The family of the lady were cavaliers.

In a man whose opinion of his own merit was like Milton's, less

provocation than this might have raised violent resentment. Milton soon

determined to repudiate her for disobedience; and, being one of those

who could easily find arguments to justify inclination, published, in

1644, the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce; which was followed by the

Judgment of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce; and the next year, his

Tetrachordon, expositions upon the four chief places of scripture which

treat of marriage.

This innovation was opposed, as might be expected, by the clergy, who,

then holding their famous assembly at Westminster, procured that the

author should be called before the lords; but "that house," says Wood,

"whether approving the doctrine, or not favouring his accusers, did soon

dismiss him."

There seems not to have been much written against him, nor any thing by

any writer of eminence[34]. The antagonist that appeared, is styled by

him "a serving man turned solicitor." Howell, in his Letters, mentions

the new doctrine with contempt[35]: and it was, I suppose, thought more

worthy of derision than of confutation. He complains of this neglect

in two sonnets, of which the first is contemptible and the second not

excellent.

From this time it is observed, that he became an enemy to the

presbyterians, whom he had favoured before. He that changes his party

by his humour, is not more virtuous than he that changes it by his

interest: he loves himself rather than truth.

His wife and her relations now found that Milton was not an unresisting

sufferer of injuries; and, perceiving that he had begun to put

his doctrine in practice, by courting a young woman of great

accomplishments, the daughter of one doctor Davis, who was, however, not

ready to comply, they resolved to endeavour a reunion. He went sometimes

to the house of one Blackborough, his relation, in the lane of St.

Martin-le-grand, and at one of his usual visits was surprised to see his

wife come from another room, and implore forgiveness on her knees. He

resisted her entreaties for awhile; "but partly," says Philips, "his own

generous nature, more inclinable to reconciliation than to perseverance

in anger or revenge, and partly the strong intercession of friends on

both sides, soon brought him to an act of oblivion and a firm league of

peace." It were injurious to omit, that Milton afterwards received her

father and her brothers in his own house, when they were distressed,

with other royalists.

He published, about the same time, his Areopagitica, a speech of Mr.

John Milton, for the liberty of unlicensed printing. The danger of

such unbounded liberty, and the danger of bounding it, have produced a

problem in the science of government, which human understanding seems,

hitherto, unable to solve. If nothing may be published but what civil

authority shall have previously approved, power must always be the

standard of truth; if every dreamer of innovations may propagate his

projects, there can be no settlement; if every murmurer at government

may diffuse discontent, there can be no peace; and if every skeptick in

theology may teach his follies, there can be no religion. The remedy

against these evils is to punish the authors; for it is yet allowed

that every society may punish, though not prevent, the publication of

opinions which that society shall think pernicious; but this punishment,

though it may crush the author, promotes the book; and it seems not more

reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers

may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors

unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.

But whatever were his engagements, civil or domestick, poetry was never

long out of his thoughts. About this time (1645) a collection of his

Latin and English poems appeared, in which the Allegro and Penseroso,

with some others, were first published.

He had taken a large house in Barbican, for the reception of scholars;

but the numerous relations of his wife, to whom he generously granted

refuge for awhile, occupied his rooms. In time, however, they went away;

"and the house again," says Philips, "now looked like a house of the

muses only, though the accession of scholars was not great. Possibly

his having proceeded so far in the education of youth may have been the

occasion of his adversaries calling him pedagogue and schoolmaster;

whereas, it is well known he never set up for a publick school, to

teach all the young fry of a parish; but only was willing to impart his

learning and knowledge to his relations, and the sons of gentlemen who

were his intimate friends, and that neither his writings, nor his way of

teaching, ever savoured in the least of pedantry."

Thus laboriously does his nephew extenuate what cannot be denied, and

what might be confessed without disgrace. Milton was not a man who could

become mean by a mean employment. This, however, his warmest friends

seem not to have found; they, therefore, shift and palliate. He did

not sell literature to all comers, at an open shop; he was a chamber

milliner, and measured his commodities only to his friends.

Philips, evidently impatient of viewing him in this state of

degradation, tells us that it was not long continued; and, to raise his

character again, has a mind to invest him with military splendour: "He

is much mistaken," he says, "if there was not, about this time, a design

of making him an adjutant-general in sir William Waller's army. But the

new modelling of the army proved an obstruction to the design." An

event cannot be set at a much greater distance than by having been only

"designed about some time," if a man "be not much mistaken." Milton

shall be a pedagogue no longer; for, if Philips be not much mistaken,

somebody at some time designed him for a soldier.

About the time that the army was new-modelled, (1645,) he removed to

a smaller house in Holborn, which opened backward into Lincoln's inn

fields. He is not known to have published any thing afterwards, till

the king's death, when, finding his murderers condemned by the

presbyterians, he wrote a treatise to justify it, and "to compose the

minds of the people."

He made some Remarks on the Articles of Peace between Ormond and the

Irish Rebels. While he contented himself to write, he, perhaps, did only

what his conscience dictated; and if he did not very vigilantly watch

the influence of his own passions, and the gradual prevalence of

opinions, first willingly admitted, and then habitually indulged; if

objections, by being overlooked, were forgotten, and desire superinduced

conviction; he yet shared only the common weakness of mankind, and might

be no less sincere than his opponents. But, as faction seldom leaves a

man honest, however it might find him, Milton is suspected of having

interpolated the book called Icon Basilike, which the council of state,

to whom he was now made Latin secretary, employed him to censure, by

inserting a prayer taken from Sidney's Arcadia, and imputing it to the

king; whom he charges, in his Iconoclastes, with the use of this prayer,

as with a heavy crime, in the indecent language with which prosperity

had emboldened the advocates for rebellion to insult all that is

venerable or great: "Who would have imagined so little fear in him of

the true all-seeing deity, as, immediately before his death, to pop into

the hands of the grave bishop that attended him, as a special relique of

his saintly exercises, a prayer, stolen word for word, from the mouth of

a heathen woman, praying to a heathen god?"

The papers which the king gave to Dr. Juxon, on the scaffold, the

regicides took away, so that they were, at least, the publishers of this

prayer; and Dr. Birch, who had examined the question with great care,

was inclined to think them the forgers. The use of it, by adaptation,

was innocent; and they who could so noisily censure it, with a

little extension of their malice, could contrive what they wanted to

accuse[36].

King Charles the second, being now sheltered in Holland, employed

Salmasius, professor of polite learning at Leyden, to write a defence of

his father and of monarchy; and, to excite his industry, gave him, as

was reported, a hundred Jacobuses. Salmasius was a man of skill in

languages, knowledge of antiquity, and sagacity of emendatory criticism,

almost exceeding all hope of human attainment; and having, by excessive

praises, been confirmed in great confidence of himself, though he

probably had not much considered the principles of society, or the

rights of government, undertook the employment without distrust of his

own qualifications; and, as his expedition in writing was wonderful, in

1649, published Defensio Regis.

To this Milton was required to write a sufficient answer; which he

performed (1651) in such a manner, that Hobbes declared himself unable

to decide whose language was best, or whose arguments were worst. In my

opinion, Milton's periods are smoother, neater, and more pointed; but he

delights himself with teasing his adversary, as much as with confuting

him. He makes a foolish allusion of Salmasius, whose doctrine he

considers as servile and unmanly, to the stream of Salmacis, which,

whoever entered, left half his virility behind him. Salmasius was a

Frenchman, and was unhappily married to a scold: "Tu es Gallus," says

Milton, "et, ut aiunt, minium gallinaceus." But his supreme pleasure is

to tax his adversary, so renowned for criticism, with vitious Latin. He

opens his book with telling that he has used _persona_, which, according

to Milton, signifies only a _mask_, in a sense not known to the Romans,

by applying it as we apply _person_. But, as Nemesis is always on the

watch, it is memorable that he has enforced the charge of a solecism by

an expression in itself grossly solecistical, when, for one of those

supposed blunders, he says, as Ker, and, I think, some one before him,

has remarked, "propino te grammatistis tuis _vapulandum_[37]." From

_vapulo_, which has a passive sense, _vapulandus_ can never be derived.

No man forgets his original trade: the rights of nations, and of kings,

sink into questions of grammar, if grammarians discuss them.

Milton, when he undertook this answer, was weak of body and dim of

sight; but his will was forward, and what was wanting of health was

supplied by zeal. He was rewarded with a thousand pounds, and his book

was much read; for paradox, recommended by spirit and elegance, easily

gains attention; and he, who told every man that he was equal to his

king, could hardly want an audience.

That the performance of Salmasius was not dispersed with equal rapidity,

or read with equal eagerness, is very credible. He taught only the stale

doctrine of authority, and the unpleasing duty of submission; and he had

been so long not only the monarch, but the tyrant, of literature, that

almost all mankind were delighted to find him defied and insulted by a

new name, not yet considered as any one's rival. If Christina, as is

said, commended the Defence of the People, her purpose must be to

torment Salmasius, who was then at court; for neither her civil station,

nor her natural character, could dispose her to favour the doctrine, who

was by birth a queen, and by temper despotick.

That Salmasius was, from the appearance of Milton's book, treated with

neglect, there is not much proof; but to a man, so long accustomed to

admiration, a little praise of his antagonist would be sufficiently

offensive, and might incline him to leave Sweden, from which, however,

he was dismissed, not with any mark of contempt, but with a train of

attendance scarcely less than regal.

He prepared a reply, which, left as it was imperfect, was published by

his son in the year of the restoration. In the beginning, being probably

most in pain for his Latinity, he endeavours to defend his use of the

word _persona_; but, if I remember right, he misses a better authority

than any that he has found, that of Juvenal in his fourth satire:

Quid agas, cum dira et foedior omni

Crimine _persona_ est?

As Salmasius reproached Milton with losing his eyes in the quarrel,

Milton delighted himself with the belief that he had shortened

Salmasius's life, and both, perhaps, with more malignity than reason.

Salmasius died at the spa, Sept. 3, 1653; and, as controvertists are

commonly said to be killed by their last dispute, Milton was flattered

with the credit of destroying him.

Cromwell had now dismissed the parliament by the authority of which he

had destroyed monarchy, and commenced monarch himself, under the title

of protector, but with kingly, and more than kingly, power. That his

authority was lawful, never was pretended: he himself founded his right

only in necessity; but Milton, having now tasted the honey of publick

employment, would not return to hunger and philosophy, but, continuing

to exercise his office, under a manifest usurpation, betrayed to his

power that liberty which he had defended. Nothing can be more just than

that rebellion should end in slavery; that he, who had justified the

murder of his king, for some acts which seemed to him unlawful, should

now sell his services, and his flatteries, to a tyrant, of whom it was

evident that he could do nothing lawful.

He had now been blind for some years; but his vigour of intellect

was such, that he was not disabled to discharge his office of Latin

secretary, or continue his controversies. His mind was too eager to be

diverted, and too strong to be subdued.

About this time his first wife died in childbed, having left him three

daughters. As he probably did not much love her, he did not long

continue the appearance of lamenting her; but, after a short time,

married Catharine, the daughter of one captain Woodcock, of Hackney; a

woman, doubtless, educated in opinions like his own. She died, within a

year, of childbirth, or some distemper that followed it; and her husband

honoured her memory with a poor sonnet.

The first reply to Milton's Defensio Populi was published in 1651,

called Apologia pro Rege et Populo Anglicano, contra Johannis

Polypragmatici, alias Miltoni, Defensionem destructivam Regis et Populi.

Of this the author was not known; but Milton and his nephew, Philips,

under whose name he published an answer, so much corrected by him that

it might be called his own, imputed it to Bramhal; and, knowing him no

friend to regicides, thought themselves at liberty to treat him as if

they had known what they only suspected.

Next year appeared Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum. Of this the author

was Peter du Moulin, who was afterwards prebendary of Canterbury; but

Morus, or More, a French minister, having the care of its publication,

was treated as the writer by Milton in his Defensio Secunda, and

overwhelmed by such violence of invective, that he began to shrink under

the tempest, and gave his persecutors the means of knowing the true

author. Du Moulin was now in great danger; but Milton's pride operated

against his malignity; and both he and his friends were more willing

that Du Moulin should escape than that he should be convicted of

mistake.

In this second defence he shows that his eloquence is not merely

satirical; the rudeness of his invective is equalled by the grossness

of his flattery. "Deserimur, Cromuelle, tu solus superes, ad te summa

nostrarum rerum rediit, in te solo consistit, insuperabili tuae virtuti

cedimus cuncti, nemine vel obloquente, nisi qui aequales inaequalis ipse

honores sibi quaerit, aut digniori concessos invidet, aut non intelligit

nihil esse in societate hominum magis vel Deo gratum, vel rationi

consentaneum, esse in civitate nihil aequius, nihil utilius, quam potiri

rerum dignissimum. Eum te agnoscunt omnes, Cromuelle, ea tu civis

maximus et gloriosissimus[38], dux publici consilii, exercituum

fortissimorum imperator, pater patriae gessisti. Sic tu spontanea

bonorum omnium, et animitus missa voce salutaris."

Caesar, when he assumed the perpetual dictatorship, had not more servile

or more elegant flattery. A translation may show its servility; but

its elegance is less attainable. Having exposed the unskilfulness or

selfishness of the former government, "We were left," says Milton,

"to ourselves: the whole national interest fell into your hands, and

subsists only in your abilities. To your virtue, overpowering and

resistless, every man gives way, except some who, without equal

qualifications, aspire to equal honours, who envy the distinctions of

merit, greater than their own, or who have yet to learn, that, in the

coalition of human society, nothing is more pleasing to God, or more

agreeable to reason, than that the highest mind should have the

sovereign power. Such, sir, are you by general confession; such are the

things achieved by you, the greatest and most glorious of our countrymen,

the director of our publick councils, the leader of unconquered armies,

the father of your country; for by that title does every good man hail

you with sincere and voluntary praise."

Next year, having defended all that wanted defence, he found leisure to

defend himself. He undertook his own vindication against More, whom he

declares, in his title, to be justly called the author of the Regii

Sanguinis Clamor. In this there is no want of vehemence or eloquence,

nor does he forget his wonted wit: "Morus est? an Momus? an uterque idem

est?" He then remembers that Morus is Latin for a mulberry-tree, and

hints at the known transformation:

"Poma alba ferebat

Quae post nigra tulit Morus."

With this piece ended his controversies; and he, from this time, gave

himself up to his private studies and his civil employment.

As secretary to the protector, he is supposed to have written the

declaration of the reasons for a war with Spain. His agency was

considered as of great importance; for, when a treaty with Sweden was

artfully suspended, the delay was publickly imputed to Mr. Milton's

indisposition; and the Swedish agent was provoked to express his wonder,

that only one man in England could write Latin, and that man blind.

Being now forty-seven years old, and seeing himself disencumbered

from external interruptions, he seems to have recollected his former

purposes, and to have resumed three great works, which he had planned

for his future employment; an epick poem, the history of his country,

and a dictionary of the Latin tongue.

To collect a dictionary, seems a work of all others least practicable

in a state of blindness, because it depends upon perpetual and minute

inspection and collation. Nor would Milton probably have begun it, after

he had lost his eyes; but, having had it always before him, he continued

it, says Philips, "almost to his dying-day; but the papers were so

discomposed and deficient, that they could not be fitted for the press."

The compilers of the Latin dictionary, printed at Cambridge, had the use

of those collections in three folios; but what was their fate afterwards

is not known[39].

To compile a history from various authors, when they can only be

consulted by other eyes, is not easy, nor possible, but with more

skilful and attentive help than can be commonly obtained; and it was

probably the difficulty of consulting and comparing that stopped

Milton's narrative at the conquest; a period at which affairs were not

yet very intricate, nor authors very numerous.

For the subject of his epick poem, after much deliberation, long

choosing, and beginning late, he fixed upon Paradise Lost; a design so

comprehensive, that it could be justified only by success. He had once

designed to celebrate king Arthur, as he hints in his verses to Mansus;

but "Arthur was reserved," says Fenton, "to another destiny[40]."

It appears, by some sketches of poetical projects left in manuscript,

and to be seen in a library[41] at Cambridge, that he had digested his

thoughts on this subject into one of those wild dramas which were

anciently called Mysteries[42]; and Philips had seen what he terms part

of a tragedy, beginning with the first ten lines of Satan's address to

the sun. These mysteries consist of allegorical persons; such as

Justice, Mercy, Faith. Of the tragedy or mystery of Paradise Lost,

there are two plans:

The Persons.

Michael.

Chorus of Angels.

Heavenly Love.

Lucifer.

Adam, }

Eve, } with the Serpent.

Conscience.

Death.

Labour, }

Sickness, }

Discontent, } Mutes.

Ignorance, }

with others; }

Faith.

Hope.

Charity.

The Persons.

Moses.

Divine Justice, Wisdom, Heavenly Love.

The Evening Star, Hesperus.

Chorus of Angels.

Lucifer.

Adam.

Eve.

Conscience.

Labour, }

Sickness, }

Discontent, } Mutes.

Ignorance, }

Fear, }

Death, }

Faith.

Hope.

Charity.

PARADISE LOST.

The Persons.

Moses [Greek: prologizei], recounting how he assumed his true body; that

it corrupts not, because it is with God in the mount: declares the like

of Enoch and Elijah; besides the purity of the place, that certain pure

winds, dews, and clouds, preserve it from corruption; whence exhorts to

the sight of God; tells they cannot see Adam in the state of innocence,

by reason of their sin.

Justice, } debating what should become of man, if he fall.

Mercy, }

Wisdom, }

Chorus of angels singing a hymn of the creation.

ACT II.

Heavenly Love.

Evening Star.

Chorus sings the marriage song, and describes Paradise.