that he should begin a quarrel with them." They quarrelled with him, and he felt it, that much is certain; he wrote a poem called the "Complaint," wherein he calls himself the melancholy Cowley, and this, with the usual fortune of complaints, seems to have excited more contempt than pity. Certain loyalist poets twitted him with this in doggerel verse, which shows plainly enough the suspicion whereon Cowley's misfortunes are to be laid. The verses are on the choice of a Laureate :

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;
With verses unjustly in praise of Sam Tuke,2
Or printed his pitiful melancholy.

Authors generally receive their worst wounds from those of their own craft; and Cowley, no doubt, felt these bitterly. No wonder, then, that, as Johnson sneeringly says, and throughout the Dr. has a strong bias against the poet, "his vehement desire of retirement now came again upon him." Johnson even finds fault with Anthony Wood (calling him the morose Wood) for the mild reproval expressed in this true sentence, "Not finding that preferment conferred upon him

2 Sir Samuel Tuke was the original whence Butler caricatured Hudibras; but here one is tempted to think that the name stands for "Noll Cromwell."

which he expected," while others for their money carried away most places, he retired discontented into Surrey."

It is well to chronicle that, by the interest of two noblemen, the poor poet, nearly, we may infer, reduced to beggary, obtained a lease of the queen's lands, which afforded him an income; and first at Barnelms, and afterwards at Chertsey, he wrought amongst his farmmen. "Here," asks Johnson, was he contented ?" Well, not quite so, nor was it likely. "I can get no money," wrote Cowley to Dr. Sprat, "from my tenants, and my meadows are 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 else than hanging." As the crime could hardly lead to the hanging of others, we must sadly infer here that Cowley hints at suicide-a sad enough result of neglect, even if only jocosely foreshadowed. But he did not long suffer from these perturbations; for, having overheated himself by labouring amongst his workmen, "he was taken," says his first gentle biographer, "with a defluxion and a stoppage in his throat, which at first he neglected, but which in a fortnight proved fatal to him. Long kept in perturbation, worn out by disappoint

ment:

"On long hopes, the court's thin diet, fed."

Cowley died at the Porch House, Chertsey, in the

3 And which he had earned, and was most ungratefully denied to him.-ED.

forty-ninth year of his age, and his last request to his literary executor was to excise from his works any word or expression that might seem to give "the least offence to religion or to good manners."

When he died all England awoke to his worth; he was buried as we have related; the king pronounced his pretty eulogium, paying back long services with a short sentence; and the Duke of Buckingham was at the expense of his tomb.

Of his poetry we will here say little; the fashion of it has quite gone by; and Johnson has an acute sentence which suggests the reason. "If," he writes, “the father of criticism has rightly denominated poetry TÉXVN μμŋTıkǹ, animitative art, these writers will, without great wrong, lose their name of poets; for they cannot be said to have imitated anything; they neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect." So it was that, even in Pope's time, Cowley had ceased to be read as a poet.

Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet,
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit:

Forgot his epic, nay, Pindaric art,

But still I love the language of his heart.

His "poetry" is full of gross conceits almost as exaggerated as those in our modern burlesque rhyme; thus, of the stone with which Cain slew his brother, he writes:

I saw him fling the stone, as if he meant,
At once his murther and his monument.

And of the sword taken from Goliath, he says:—

A sword so great, that it was only fit

To cut off his great head that came with it.

But we need not linger over these. Cowley was a fair scholar, a ripe, thoughtful man; and the faults of his Muse arose from the fashion of the times. He was, in fact, not strong enough as a poet to lift himself beyond them.

66

His prose is a far different thing,-clear, manly, tender, and nervous. "No author," says Dr. 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 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."

As a poet his greatest praise is that he could now and then write the heroic couplet so well, that Milton read him and condescended to imitate him; as a prose writer, he stands as one of the earliest, purest, and most manly of our essayists; who has offered to the thoughtful reader of this, as well as of his own age, pages of consolation, learned amusement, and philosophic advice, which the world will not willingly let die.

HE liberty of a people consists in being governed by laws which they have made themselves, under whatsoever form it be of government: the liberty of a private man, in being master of his own time and actions, as far as may consist with the laws of God, and of his countrey. Of this latter, only, we are here to discourse, and to enquire

1 Cowley, although a royalist, has almost a wider notion of liberty than Milton the Republican, also a Cambridge scholar, at least if we judge from the fragment of Euripides which Milton translated and printed as embodying his own opinion:

This is true liberty, when free-born men,
Having to advise the public, may speak free;
Which he who can and will deserves high praise.

In free speech and its results is Milton's conception of political liberty; in living under laws which men have made themselves, Cowley's. The author wrote this essay in retirement, after suffering the ingratitude of Charles II. and being refused the Mastership of the Savoy.

B