till the general deliverance:" 18 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 encomiastic, 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 physic, 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 7 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 heroic numbers.

At the same time were produced, from the same university, 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, 19 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 superior to both), the advantage seems

19

18 'Redemption' is Sprat's word, but this was too strong a word for Johnson. Supplementum Lucani,' 1640. A continuation in Latin verse of Lucan's Pharsalia to the death of Julius Cæsar.

1618-1667.

MODERN LATIN POETRY.

13

to lie on the side of Cowley. 20 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.21

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 I. and II., 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 [8th Dec. 1661] under the title of Cutter of Coleman-street.' 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.'

" 22

20 The Latin poetry of Delicia Poetarum Scotorum would have done honour to any nation: at least till the publication of May's Supplement, the English had very little to oppose.-JOHNSON: Journey to the Western Islands.

Dr. Johnson, unjustly I think, prefers the Latin poetry of May and Cowley to that of Milton, and thinks May to be the first of the three. May is certainly a sonorous versifier, and was sufficiently accomplished in poetical declamation for the continuation of Lucan's Pharsalia. But May is scarcely an author in point.-T. WARTON: Preface to Milton's Minor Poems, p. xviii., 2nd edit.

21 But what are these conceptions? Metaphysical conceits, all the unnatural extravagances of his English poetry, such as will not bear to be clothed in the Latin language, much less are capable of admitting any degree of pure Latinity. -T. WARTON: Preface to Milton's Minor Poems, p. xviii., 2nd ed.

22 1661, December 16. After dinner to the Opera [the Duke's House, or D'Avenant's Theatre], where there was a new play (Cutter of Coleman-street)

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.23

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 laureat; 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:

made in the year 1658, with reflections much upon the late times; and it being the first time, the pay was doubled, and so to save money my wife and I went into the gallery, and there sat and saw very well; and a very good play it is; it seems of Cowley's making.-PEPYS.

23 This comedy being acted so perfectly well and exact, it was performed a whole week with a full audience. Note. This play was not a little injurious to the Cavalier indigent officers, especially the characters of Cutter and Worm. -DOWNES' Roscius Anglicanus, 12mo., 1708, p. 25.

1618-1667.

RETIREMENT AND SOLITUDE.

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."

15

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 had made it innocent to him, yet nothing could make it quiet. Those were the reasons that moved him to forego all public employments, and 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 of a moderate revenue below the malice and flatteries of fortune."

25

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.' 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.26

24 On Colonel Tuke's tragedy, 'The Adventures of Five Hours.' 'L'Allegro' of Milton.-JOHNSON.

25

26 When Cowley grew sick of the court, he took a house first at Battersea, then at Barnes, and then at Chertsey, always farther and farther from town. In

By the lover 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,27 which I recommend to the consideration of all that may hereafter pant for solitude.

"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. Anne'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." 28

the latter part of his life he showed a sort of aversion for women, and would leave the room when they came in: 'twas probably from a disappointment in love. He was much in love with his Leonora, who is mentioned at the end of that good ballad of his on his different mistresses. She was married to Dean Sprat's brother; and Cowley never was in love with anybody after.POPE: Spence by Singer, p. 286.

27 Appendix to Life of Cromwell,' p. 81.

28 I thought when I went first to dwell in the country, that without doubt I should have met there with the simplicity of the old poetical age; I thought to have found no inhabitants there but such as the shepherds of Sir Philip Sidney in Arcadia, or of Monsieur d'Urfé upon the banks of Lignon; and

K