lor's professed treatises on practical ethics. In the 'Holy Dying' we never tire of admiring the wide-ranging scholarship and the dazzling accumulation of instances, imagery, and circumstances; but the application is almost lost in the general blaze.

The truth is, that in these professedly practical treatises our author handles the subject more as a poet than as a moral preacher.

In the representation of misery, the end of the moral preacher is not only different from the end of the poet, but positively antagonistic. The preacher's vocation is to rouse our activities, to excite strenuous endeavour; the vocation of the poet is to gratify our feelings, rather to make us weep over misery than to make us anxious for the relief of actual sufferers.

Now the effect of Taylor's representation of misery is poetical rather than practical. Dilating on the vanity and shortness of man's life, he represents "the thousand thousands of accidents in this world, and every contingency to every man and every creature." The reader asks whether this is not practical? whether it is not the most powerful means of urging us to improve our time? True, it might be so applied; but the application is not made by Taylor. He pictures the contingencies of the human lot in such a way as to put us into a brooding melancholy. He presents an array of unavoidable fatal possibilities - disease, shipwreck, unforeseen accident; and by presenting them as unavoidable, at once quenches every motive to action. The effect upon readers that should give themselves up to the spirit of the preacher would be despair and horror, were it not that he mingles the dismal catalogue with expressions of pity, moves our tender feelings by painting the sorrow of friends over the unfortunate dead, and dwells upon the consolation of another and a better world. To be sure, he professes to "reduce these considerations (of universal fatality) "to practice;" but the section that undertakes to do so is, in fact, another tale of possible misfortunes, the same scene of change and sorrow a little more dressed up in circumstances. He has formal heads of practical rules and considerations; but how far these exhortations are from being stimulating and practical, and what exquisite touches of poetry they contain, may be seen in the following example :—

"2

"2. Let no man extend his thoughts, or let is hopes wander towards future and far-distant events and accidental contingencies. This day is mine and yours, but ye know not what shall be on the morrow; and every morning creeps out of a dark cloud, leaving behind it an ignorance and silence deep as midnight, and undiscerned as are the phantasms that make a crysome child to smile; so that we cannot discern what comes hereafter, unless we had a light from heaven brighter than the vision of an angel, even

the spirit of prophecy. Without revelation we cannot tell whether we shall eat to-morrow, or whether a squinancy shall choke us: and it is written in the unrevealed folds of divine predestination, that many who are this day alive shall to-morrow be laid upon the cold earth, and the women shall weep over their shroud, and dress them for their funeral."

Such passages are certainly not the considerations that brace the moral energies. They tend rather to lower the moral tone, to throw the mind into a despondency;-a mournfully pleasing state, perhaps, but undoubtedly enervating. From the point of view of the poet, the above would be admirable if it were weeded of the coarse expression about the squinancy; from the point of view of the moral preacher,' it is not only useless, but positively harmful.

ABRAHAM COWLEY, 1618-1667.

Cowley holds perhaps a higher rank among prose writers than among poets. His Essays, written for the most part after the Restoration, mark an advance in the art of prose composition. The construction of the sentences is often stumbling and awkward, but the diction shows an increasing command over the language. No previous writer, not even Fuller, is so felicitous as Cowley in the combination of words. His prose has none of the extravagance of his poetry. "No author," says Johnson, "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 farsought or hard-laboured; but all is easy without feebleness, and familiar without grossness."

Perhaps part of the explanation of this is, that for ten years he conducted the correspondence of the exiled royal family-a kind of experience likely to purify his language both from bookish terms and from poetical ornaments. Whatever be the reason, his combinations and turns of expression are remarkably modern; here and there short passages might be quoted that we should not be surprised to find in 'Blackwood' or in the 'Saturday Review.'

He was born in London, the son of a grocer ("his parents citizens of a virtuous life and sufficient estate"), and educated at Westminster school and at Trinity College, Cambridge. At the age of fifteen he had published a volume of poems; and while yet an undergraduate, he wrote two or three comedies, and the greater part of his 'Davideis.' When he had been seven years at Cam

1 Throughout the above we have used the word preacher as a preacher of moral conduct. It is not implied that moral preaching is the sole function of the pulpit. Another function is to console the wretched under their load of miser As a preacher of consolation our author is perhaps unrivalled.

les.

T

bridge, and had proceeded to the degree of M.A., he was, in 1643, at the age of twenty-five, ejected from that university by the Puritan visitors, and took refuge in Oxford. "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 Albans, 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 the province of his intelligence, that for several years it filled all his days and two or three nights in the week." In 1656 he returned to England, was arrested, liberated on bail, studied medicine, and took out a degree in 1657. He remained in London till Cromwell's death, suspected of being in secret communication with the exiled family. At the Restoration he was rewarded with a free lease of certain lands, yielding a rental of £300, and went to reside at Chertsea.

He found country life very different from his Arcadian ideal; but that he was positively unhappy in his solitude, we have no reason to believe. The letter to Dr Sprat that Johnson produces with a malicious chuckle, "for the consideration of all that may hereafter pant for solitude," is really a humorous caricature of his sufferings, evidently written in high spirits.

His prose remains are few; he considered "a little tomb of marble a better monument than a vast heap of stones and rubbish." Two prefaces, a short "Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy," a "Discourse by way of Vision, concerning the Government of Oliver Cromwell," and eleven Essays, are the sum-total, and they are contained in a small volume.

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We get no fair idea of Cowley's intellectual powers from reading merely his prose. There we are struck only by his singular ease in choosing apt words, and by the freshness and spirit of the combinations. In his poetry he is more extravagant and Pindarical"; the predominating veins of sentiment are the same as we find in the Essays and the Discourse on Cromwell, but he gives a fuller licence to his ingenuity. Describing the style of the "metaphysical poets," Jolinson says "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: " and among the metaphysical poets he considers Cowley to be "undoubtedly the best." This implies no mean powers of intellect; yet we should not think of placing such a light horseman among the intellectual giants. He is entitled to the palm of fantastic breadth, swiftness, and subtlety of wit; and this was probably all the distinction that he coveted.

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Indeed the soft easy nature of the man indisposed him to severe labour, whether of body or of mind. "Whatever was his subject, he 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." Even in his emotions he was easy and averse to excitement. He was not of an overflowing sociability, like Thomas Fuller; his ideal was to enjoy the company of a few friends in some gentle cool retreat from all the immoderate heat in which the frantic world does burn and sweat." He never married; and his poems express no depth of affection: the only genuine pathos in his writings flows from his luxurious love of solitude and repose. Neither his prose nor his poetry gives evidence of strong antipathies: we shall quote some sharp invective, but it is not personal, -it is directed against abstractions. He loved to contemplate, in a soft indolent attitude, the spectacle of great power; royalist as he was, he could not refrain from admiring Cromwell. At the same time he would not, like Carlyle, have put himself to the trouble of searching the world for heroes; only when a hero comes across his path, he is not impervious to astonishment. Even in his admiration of Cromwell there is no depth of feeling; the rich and elevated language of the Discourse on that hero is dashed with touches of humour. He has none of Taylor's fresh delight in natural things: as Johnson says, he does not present pictures to the mind; he "gives inferences instead of images, and shows not what may be supposed to have been seen, but what thoughts the sight might have suggested."

In his younger days he wrote what he calls " against himself

:

"Thou neither great at court, nor in the war,

a shrewd prophecy

Nor at the exchange shalt be, nor at the wrangling bar."

The prophecy was shrewd enough; such a born epicurean was not likely to succeed in any mode of active life. As a royal secretary he probably discharged his duty sufficiently well, having the material furnished him, and experiencing none of the worry of contriving; but that he was not a particularly zealous and active servant is probably shown by the comparatively slender reward settled upon him at the Restoration. Of his natural indolence we have a very pretty evidence in his Essays. When he retired to the country, he says there was nothing he coveted so much as a small house and a large garden, where he might work and study nature; yet he confesses, "I stick still in the inn of a hired house and garden, among weeds and rubbish, and without that pleasantest work of human industry, the improvement of something which we call (not very properly, but yet we call) our own."

Cowley being neither a man of action, nor a moralist, nor a

critic, nor an original student of science,1 his opinions are not of consequence; in his humorous railing at ambition and advocacy of retirement, he is moved entirely by constitutional sentiment. The popularity of his Essays is a great tribute to the intrinsic power of style,-of manner as opposed to matter. It also indicates that style can operate to most advantage when neither reader nor writer is impeded by difficulties in the matter.

ELEMENTS OF STYLE.

Vocabulary. In his prose writings, the extent of his vocabulary is shown rather by skilful choice of words than by Shakspearian profusion. When we turn to his poetry, we see that his command of words, though great, is rather inferior for a writer of such reputation. The exertion of procuring variety would seem to have been too much for his easy temperament; and his range of emotion being so limited, he did not accumulate great stores of language except in the region of the light and familiar.

We have already said that his diction is noticeably less archaic than the diction of any preceding writer.

Sentences. In his lighter compositions the sentence-structure is easy and careless, and has no marked rhythm. But in his serious writings the rhythm is more even. The preface to his poems published in 1656, and the Discourse on Cromwell, are written with a more even measure than any compositions prior to this date.

In Cowley we first notice very markedly the habit of adding to the simple statement an obverse or inverse statement, for the purpose of filling out the cadence. Thus, as an example of the obverse filling out :

'The Church of Rome, with all her arrogance, and her wide pretences of certainty in all truths, and exemption from all errors, does not clap on this enchanted armour of infallibility upon all her particular subjects, nor is offended at the reproof of her greatest doctors.”

As an example of the inverse filling out :

"A cowardly ranting soldier, an ignorant charlatanical doctor, a foolisn cheating lawyer, a silly pedantical scholar, have always been, and still are, the principal subjects of all comedies, without any scandal given to those honourable professions, or even taken by their severest professors."

These are not perhaps the best examples that might be selected, but they illustrate what is meant; other cases will appear in subsequent quotations.

While in Cowley we see the first extensive use of balanced yet idiomatic periods, and the first habitual practice of the chief arts

1 His "Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy" is merely a lan of a college and school, and contains nothing remarkable.