nised, was lodged in the family of Lord St. Albans, and employed in conducting a cypher correspondence between Charles I. and the Queen. This life of activity and intrigue was uncongenial to his temperament. To use his own words: Now, though I was here engaged in ways most contrary to the original design of my life, that is into much company, and no small business, and into a daily sight of greatness, both militant and triumphant (for that was the state then of the English and French Courts), yet all this was so far from altering my opinion, that it only added confirmation of reason to that which was before but natural inclination. I saw plainly all the point of that kind of life, the nearer I came to it; and that beauty which I did not fall in love with, when for aught I knew it was real, was not likely to bewitch or entice me, when I saw that it was adulterate. I met with several great persons whom I liked very well, but could not perceive that any part of their greatness was to be liked or desired, no more than I should be glad or content to be in a storm, though I saw many ships which rid safely and bravely in it. A storm would not agree with my stomach, if it did with my courage; though I was in a crowd of as good company as could be found anywhere, though I was in business of great and honourable trust, though I ate at the best table, and enjoyed the best conveniences for present subsistence that ought to be desired by a man of my condition in banishment and public distresses; yet I could not abstain from renewing my old school-boy's wish in a copy of verses to the same effect— Well then; I now do plainly see The busy world and I shall ne'er agree.1 Nevertheless, he continued active in the service of the royal family, until Charles II. separated his place of residence from that of the Queen-mother, when the work of conveying and deciphering intelligence passed into other hands, and it was thought best that Cowley should come into England to act from thence as correspondent with the Royalists abroad. In the meantime he had, in 1647, published his Mistress. On his arrival in England, being mistaken for another agent of the King, he was arrested, and was kept in prison for some time, but was 1 Discourses by way of Essays in Verse and Prose, “Of Myself.” at last released on bail of £1000, given for him by Dr. Scarborough, to whom he has addressed one of his poems. He had had time to observe the weak state of the Royalist cause, and in a volume of his collected poems, published in 1656, he took the opportunity of inserting a few sentences, which gave an undertaking for his quiet behaviour. This was afterwards brought up against him as a mark of disloyalty, though it was no more of a concession than was made by so staunch a loyalist as Cleveland to obtain his liberty from Cromwell. After his return to England he devoted himself to the pursuit of physical science. He studied medicine, and received from the University of Oxford the degree of M.D. Having also made himself a skilful botanist, he composed in Kent a Latin poem, in six books, written in various metres, on the subject of plants. When the King was restored in 1660, Cowley naturally expected to receive some reward for his loyalty. He wrote a long Ode on His Majesty's Restoration and Return, and recast his comedy, The Guardian, under the title of The Cutter of Coleman Street, in such a form as to make the satire on the Puritan régime more pointed. It is uncertain whether the play was successful. Dryden is said to have told Dennis that it failed, much to Cowley's chagrin; but this report, which only reached Spence third-hand through Pope, is contradicted by an entry in Pepys' Diary under date of 16th December 1661, after the play had been running for a week: "I went into the gallery and there saw very well; and a very good play it is." Pepys' verdict, indeed, can hardly be approved, for The Cutter of Coleman Street is a play with an absurd and improbable plot, and for this, as well as for its characters and incidents, it is largely indebted to Ben Jonson's Silent Woman, Every Man in his Humour, and Bartholomew Fair. Party spirit, however, may have Neither the play nor the helped to carry it through. 1 These began: "In the next place I have cast away all such pieces as I wrote during the time of the late troubles, with any relation to the difficulties which caused them, etc." VOL. III ode prevailed to obtain for the poet the Mastership of the Savoy, for which he made a request in 1663: the place was given to Thomas Killigrew, and Cowley's disappointment is ridiculed in some contemporary verses, written in imitation of Suckling's Session of the Poets :Savoy-missing Cowley came into Court, Making apologies for his bad play; Every one gave him so good a report, That Apollo gave heed to all he could say: These reasons for failure are of course not the real ones, He was sufficiently furnished for his retreat. And immediately he gave over all pursuit of honour and riches, in a time when, if any ambitious or covetous thoughts had remained in his mind, he might justly expect to have them readily satisfied. Though he had frequent invitations to return into business, yet he never gave ear to any persuasions of profit or preferment. His visits to the City and Court were very few his stays in town were only as a passenger, not as an inhabitant. The places that he chose for the seat of his declining life were two or three villages on the banks of the Thames. During this recess his mind was rather exercised on what was to come than on what was past; he suffered no more business nor cares of life to come near him. Some few friends and books, a cheerful heart, and innocent conscience, were his constant companions. His poetry, indeed, he took with him, but he made that an anchorite as well as himself: he only dedicated it to the service of his Maker, to describe the great images of religion and virtue wherewith his mind abounded. And he employed his music to no other use than as David did towards Saul, by singing the praises of God and Nature to drive the evil spirit out of men's minds. Cowley died 28th July 1667, at the Porch House, Chertsey, and on 3rd August was buried in Westminster Abbey, where a monument was afterwards erected to him by the Duke of Buckingham. Pope, in some admirable and pointed lines, expresses the estimate formed of the poetry of Cowley in the eighteenth century: Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet, His moral pleases, not his pointed wit: Forgot his epic, nay Pindaric, art; Yet still I love the language of his heart.1 A sentence in Johnson's Life of Cowley, as terse and pungent as Pope's couplets, accounts for this decline of a great poet in critical esteem : Cowley, like other poets who have written with narrow views, and, instead of tracing intellectual pleasures in the mind of man, paid their court to temporary prejudices, has been at one time too much praised, and too much neglected at another. "Paying court to temporary prejudices" is perhaps scarcely a just appreciation of one whose genius always prompted him to retire from society; nor does "prejudice" of any kind seem to be the right word to characterise a time in which some of the leading spirits were Falkland, Chillingworth, and John Hales of Eton, and which found pleasure in such books as The Anatomy of Melancholy and Sir Thomas Browne's Vulgar Errors. The truth rather is that, in the first half of the seventeenth century, men's judgments as to the principles of conduct were suspended between the rival claims of civil and religious authority, of the Roman and Anglican Churches, of scholastic tradition and experimental science; and the imagination, sharpened by dialectic, but eager for liberty, gladly escaped from the perplexities of active life into the sphere of metaphysical fancies and abstractions. In a society so disposed Cowley had all the gifts 1 Epistle to Augustus, 75-78. required to make him shine as a representative poet. He possessed a fine fancy, a vigorous understanding, and the same quick receptiveness that enabled Crashaw to sympathise with the ideas of earlier poets, and to imitate their modes of expression. From the very first it can be seen that his imagination was inspired rather by poetical form than poetical matter. As he tells us himself, he fell in love with the medley of classic and romantic images presented to him in the Faery Queen, and he at once endeavoured to combine this method of versified narrative with the conceits of Ovid made familiar to him by his school-boy studies. That a child of ten years old should have been able to invent, and fluently express, a conceit so subtle as that contained in the following stanzas from Pyramus and Thisbe, shows a faculty of poetical imitation which is marvellous : Then through his breast thrusting his sword, life hies With which the unstainèd berries stained were At last fair Thisbe left the den, for fear From white to black, she knew not certainly As he began in his art, so he proceeded. In later days he cultivated the Provençal style in The Mistress; the style of Anacreon, in his Anacreontics; that of Pindar, in his Pindarics; those of Virgil at once and Marino, in his Davideis; and in all these varieties he displays a masterly skill in adapting the metrical form which he employs for the moment to the matter in hand. But at the same time it is clear that what sets his imagination in motion is his sense of the value and significance of the form, not the inherent life of the subject-matter; so that the interest felt in his work by the reader is excited less by the |