Lecture the Twenty-Chird.

ABRAHAM COWLEY-THOMAS STANLEY-THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLEKATHERINE PHILIPS-CHARLES COTTON-JOHN DRYDEN.

WE

E are now in the midst of the poets of the Commonwealth, and of the Restoration. Authors were still a select class, and literature, the delight of the learned and the ingenious, had not yet become food for the multitude. The chivalrous and romantic spirit which prevailed in the age of Elizabeth, had even, before her death, begun to yield to more sober and practical views of human life and society; and a spirit of inquiry was fast spreading among the people. The long period of peace under James the First, and the progress of commerce, gave scope to domestic improvement, and fostered the reasoning faculties, rather than the imagination. The reign of Charles the First, a prince of taste and accomplishments, partially revived the style of the Elizabethan era, but its lustre extended little beyond the court and the nobility. During the civil war, and the protectorate, poetry and the drama were buried under the strife and anxiety of contending factions. Cromwell, with a just and generous spirit, boasted that he would make the name of an Englishman, as great as ever that of a Roman had been; and he realized the fulfillment of this declaration in Blake's naval triumphs, and the unquestioned supremacy of England abroad; but neither the time nor the inclination of the Protector allowed him to be a patron of literature. Charles the Second was, by natural powers, birth, and education, better fitted for such a task; but he had imbibed a false taste, which, added to his indolent and sensual disposition, was as injurious to art and literature as to the public morals. Poetry now declined, and was degraded from a high and noble art, to a mere courtly amusement, a pander to immorality. Happily, to this general truth, there were a few brilliant exceptions; and among these, Cowley, after Milton, is, perhaps, the most conspicuous.

ABRAHAM COWLEY, was born in the city of London in 1618, and was the posthumous son of a respectable grocer. His mother, through the influence. of some powerful friends, procured admission for him as a king's scholar into Westminster school; and in his eighteenth year he was elected a member

of Trinity College, Cambridge. Cowley' lisped in numbers; and in 1633, before he had attained the sixteenth year of his age, and while yet at Westminster, he published a volume of poems under the appropriate title of Poetical Blossoms. According to his own statement, a copy of Spenser's poems used to lie in his mother's parlor, with the reading of which he was so much delighted, that to its influence he attributes his first poetical impulses. The intensity of his youthful ambition may be seen from the two first lines in his miscellanies

What shall I do to be forever known,
And make the age to come mine own?

In 1643, Cowley, having previously taken his master's degree, was ejected from Cambridge for being a royalist; upon which he entered St. John's College, Oxford, and there prosecuted his studies, until his affection for the royal family induced him to enter into the service of the king. Here he became intimately acquainted with Lord Falkland and many other eminent men, whom the fortune of the war had drawn together. During the heat of the civil strife, he was settled in the family of the Earl of St. Albans; and when the queen mother was forced to retire, for safety, into France, he attended her thither, and remained in that country twelve years, the whole of which were passed, either in bearing a share in the distresses of the royal family, or in exertions to promote their interest. He was sent on various embassies, and deciphered the correspondence of Charles and his queen, which, for years, occupied his exclusive time.

At length, the Restoration came, with all its hopes and fears. England anticipated happy days, and loyalty ample reward for its devotion to the royal cause; but both were sadly disappointed. Cowley expected to be made master of the Savoy, or to receive some other appointment equally advantageous; but his claims were entirely disregarded. In his youth he had written an Ode to Brutus, which was now remembered to his disadvantage; and a dramatic production, The Cutter of Coleman Street, which he brought out soon after the Restoration, and in which the jollity and debauchery of the cavaliers are painted in strong colors, was misrepresented, or misconstrued, at court. This disappointment Cowley felt so keenly, that he at once resolved to retire into the country. He had only just passed his fortieth year, but the most important part of his life had been spent in incessant labor, amid dangers and suspense. 'He always professed,' says his biographer Sprat, that he went off the world as it was man's, into the same world as it was nature's, and as it was God's. The whole compass of the creation, and all the wonderful effects of the divine wisdom, were the constant prospect of his senses and his thoughts. And, indeed, he entered with great advantage on the studies of nature, even as the first great men of antiquity did, who were generally both poets and philosophers.'

Though disappointed, Cowley was not, however, altogether neglected ; for he obtained, through the influence of Lord St. Albans, and the Duke ɔf

Buckingham, the lease of some lands belonging to the queen, worth about three hundred pounds per annum-a decent pension, at least, for his retirement. He finally settled at Chertsey, on the banks of the Thames, where his house may still be seen. Here he cultivated his fields, his garden, and his plants; he wrote of solitude and obscurity, of the perils of greatness, and the happiness of liberty. He renewed his acquaintance with the beloved poets of antiquity, whom, in ease and elegance, and in commemorating the charms of a country life, he sometimes rivalled; and here also he composed his fine prose discourses, so full of gentle thoughts, and well-digested knowledge, heightened by a delightful bonhommie and communicativeness worthy of even a Horace or a Montaigne. Cowley was not, however, happy in his retirement. Solitude, that had so long wooed him to her arms, was a phantom that vanished in his embrace. He had, it is true, attained the long-wished-for object of his studious youth and busy manhood-the woods and the fields at length inclosed the 'melancholy Cowley' in their shades; but happiness was still distant. He had quitted the 'monster London;' he had gone out from Sodom, but had not found the little Zoar of his dreams. The place of his retreat was ill selected, and the change of situation materially affected his health. The people of the country, he soon found, were no better, or more innocent, than those of the town. He could not collect his rents, and the grass of his meadows was nightly eaten up by cattle let into them by his neighbors. From this harassing situation this amiable and accomplished man of genius was at length released by his death, which occurred on the twenty-eighth of July, 1667. His remains were interred, with great pomp, in the poet's corner in Westminster Abbey, and the king, when he received intelligence of the bereavement which the nation had sustained, graciously remarked that, 'Cowley had not left a better man behind him.'

The poems of Cowley are Miscellanies, The Mistress, or Love Verses, Pindaric Odes, and the Davideis, a heroic poem of the Troubles of David. The peculiar character of his genius is happily expressed by Pope in the following lines:—

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

Forget his epic, nay Pindaric art,

But still I love the language of his heart.

Cowley's 'Love Poems' are generally fantastic and sickly, and it is evident that heart had no share in them; but his 'Anacreontics' are easy, lively, and full of spirit. They are redolent of joy and youth, and of images of natural and poetic beauty, that touch the feeling as well as the fancy. His 'Pindaric Odes,' though deformed by metaphysical conceits, though they do not roll the full flood of Pindar's unnavigable song, though we admit that even the art of Gray was higher, yet contain some noble lines and illus trations. The 'Davideis' is, as a whole, a tedious and unfinished poem, but

the extract which follows, containing an account of the Creation, is full of eloquence and poetry, and shows how well Cowley was capable of writing in the heroic couplet:

THE CREATION.

They sung how God spoke-out the World's vast ball,
From nothing; and from nowhere call'd forth all.

No Nature yet, or place for 't to possess,

But an unbottom'd gulf of emptiness;

Full of himself, th' Almighty sate, his own

Palace, and without solitude alone.

But he was goodness whole, and all things will'd;
Which ere they were, his active word fulfill'd :
And their astonished heads o' th' sudden rear'd;
An unshaped kind of something first appear'd,
Confessing its new being, and undrest,

As if it stepp'd in haste before the rest;
Yet, buried in this matter's darksome womb,
Lay the rich seeds of every thing to come;

From hence the cheerful flame leap'd up so high,
Close at its heels the nimble air did fly;

Dull Earth with his own weight did downwards pierce
To the fix'd navel of the Universe,

And was quite lost in waters; till God said

To the proud Sea, Shrink in your insolent head;
See how the gaping Earth has made you place!'
That durst not murmur, but shrunk in apace:
Since when, his bounds are set; at which in vain
He foams and rages, and turns back again.
With richer stuff he bade Heaven's fabric shine,
And from him a quick spring of light divine
Swell'd up the Sun, from whence his cherishing flame
Fills the whole world, like him from whom it came.
He smooth'd the rough-cast Moon's imperfect mould,
And comb'd her beamy locks with sacred gold:
'Be thou,' said he, 'Queen of the mournful night!'
And as he spake, she rose, clad o'er in light,
With thousand Stars attending in her train,
With her they rise, with her they set again.

Then Herbs peep'd forth, now Trees admiring stood,
And smelling flowers painted the infant wood;
Then flocks of Birds through the glad air did flee,
Joyful, and safe before Man's luxury,
Singing their Maker in their untaught lays:

Nay the mute Fish witness no less his praise;

For those he made, and clothed with silver scales,

From Minnows to those living islands, Whales,
Beasts, too, were his command; what could he more?

Yes, Man he could, the bond of all before;

In him he all things with strange order hurl❜d,

In him that full abridgment of the World!