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The principal artifice by which The Mistress is filled with 120 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 habitable3. 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 121 consists of thoughts true in one sense of the expression, and false in the other. Addison's representation is sufficiently indulgent 5: 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.

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The unnumbered beauties of thy
verse with blame;

Thy fault is only wit in its excess,
But wit like thine in any shape will

please.' Eng. Poets, xxx. 35.

The Italians, even in their epic poetry, are full of it. . . . We find a great deal of it in Ovid, and scarce anything else in Martial.' Spectator, No. 62.

In the first edition of The Lives after 'Italy' followed:-"Thus Sannazaro.' The quotation is from his Epigrammata,i.64-Ad Vesbiam. In Johnson's first edition Vesbia [formed from Vesbius, contracted collateral form of Vesuvius] is correctly printed

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'Aspice quam variis distringar, Lesbia, [Vesbia] curis,
Uror, et heu! nostro manat ab igne liquor;

Sum Nilus, sumque Ætna simul; restringite flammas [flammam]
O lacrimæ, 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 works will sufficiently evince2.

Cowley's Mistress has no power of seduction 3; she 'plays round the head, but comes not at [to] 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 talk, 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 the first line. The last line in the
original runs:-‘O lacrimae, lacrimas,'
&c.

Howell (Letters, Aug. 12, 1621)
quotes Sannazaro's 'famous hexastic'
on Venice, 'for every one verse of
which he had given him by St. Mark
a hundred zecchins, which amounts
to about £300.' See also post,
A. PHILIPS, 16; John. Misc. i. 366.

'The pious Mr. Edmund Elys, of Exeter College, Oxford, taking umbrage at some passages in it [Sprat's Life of Cowley], published, An Exclamation to all those that love the Lord Jesus in sincerity against an Apology, written by an ingenious person, for Mr. Abraham Cowley's lascivious and profane verses. Biog. Brit. p. 3816. Elys removed from Exeter College to Balliol. Athenae Oxon. iv. 470.

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' 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 125 and Nemexan Ode is by himself sufficiently explained. His endeavour was not to shew '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 126 original in elegance, and the conclusion below it in strength. The connection 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 pre- 127 served. The following pretty lines are not such as his 'deep mouth 3' 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 [dost] delight,
My verse, great [O] Rhea's son, which is

Lofty as that, and smooth as this*.'

In the Nemeaan Ode the reader must, in mere justice to 128 Pindar, observe that whatever is said of 'the original new moon, her tender forehead and her horns",' is superadded by his para

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129

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phrast, who has many other plays of words and fancy unsuitable to the original, as

The table, [which is] free for every 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 2.' 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 [givers]
Is [Are] envied even by the receiver [receivers];
'Tis now the cheap and frugal_fashion

Rather to hide than own [pay] the obligation:
Nay, 'tis much worse than so;

It now an artifice does grow

Wrongs and injuries [outrages] to do,

Lest men should think we owe 3.'

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:

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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 [measures] dance;

While [Whilst] 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*.'

132 After such enthusiasm who will not lament to find the poet conclude with lines like these!

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· Eng. Poets, viii. 123.

21b. viii. 119. O. 2. 165.]

[Pindar had written aůdáσoμai évópriov dóyov åλabeî vów,
3 Ib. viii. 120.
4 Ib. viii. 129.

'But stop, [Stop, 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 183 metaphysical race, is that of pursuing his thoughts to their 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 ridiculous2. ✓ 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 intituled 134 The Muse, who goes to 'take the air' in an intellectual chariot, to which he harnesses Fancy and Judgement, Wit and Eloquence, Memory and Invention: how he distinguished Wit from Fancy,v 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 postilion 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 liveries3?

Every mind is now disgusted with this cumber of magnificence; 135

yet I cannot refuse myself the four next lines:

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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.'

Eng. Poets, viii. 130. [Johnson might have said with more exactness conclude with a stanza containing lines like these, for out of thirteen lines he does not quote six in entirety,

nor do these follow each other con-
secutively.]

2

Johnson had said much the same

in The Rambler, No. 36.

3

Eng. Poets, viii. 131.

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