people exist. HUNT, LEIGH, 1858, The Town, p. 116.

His imagination is tinsel, or mere surface gilding, compared to Donne's solid gold; his wit little better than wordcatching, to the profound meditative. quaintness of the elder poet; and of passion, with which all Donne's finest lines are tremulous, Cowley has none. Considerable grace and dignity occasionally distinguish his Pindaric Odes (which, however, are Pindaric only in name); and he has shown much elegant playfulness of style and fancy in his translations from and imitations of Anacreon, and in some other verses written in the same manner. As for what he intends for love verses, some of them are pretty enough frostwork; but the only sort of love there is in them is the love of point and sparkle.CRAIK, GEORGE L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature and of the English Language, vol. II, p. 99.

Cowley's "Essays" are delightful reading. Nor shall I forgive his biographer for destroying the letters of a man of whom King Charles said at his interment in Westminster Abbey, "Mr. Cowley has not left a better in England." The friend and correspondent of the most distinguished poets, statesmen, and gentlemen of his day, his letters must have been most interesting and important, and but for the unsettled temper of affairs, would doubtless have been added to our polite literature. ALCOTT, A. BRONSON, 1869-72, Concord Days, p. 62.

On this boundary line of a closing and a dawning literature a poet appeared, one of the most fanciful and illustrious of his time, Abraham Cowley, a precocious child, a reader and a versifier like Pope, having known passions less than books, busied himself less about things than about words. Literary exhaustion has seldom been more manifest. He possesses all the capacity to say whatever pleases him, but he has just nothing to say. The substance has vanished, leaving in its place a hollow shadow. In vain he tries the epic, the Pindaric strophe, all kinds of stanzas, odes, little lines, long lines; in vain he calls to his assistance botanical and philosophical similes, all the erudition of the university, all the relics of antiquity, all the ideas of new science: we yawn as we read him. Except in a few descriptive

verses, two or three graceful tendernesses, . he feels nothing, he speaks only; he is a poet of the brain. His collection of amorous pieces is but a vehicle for a scientific test, and serves to show that he has read the authors, that he knows his geography, that he is well versed in anatomy, that he has a dash of medicine and astronomy, that he has at his service references and allusions enough to break the head of his readers. -TAINE, H. A., 1871, History of English Literature, tr. Van Laun, vol. 1, bk. ii, ch. i, p. 204.

Cowley is one of the poets of remote and brilliant turns of thought, and elaborated literary distinction. One does not love his poetry; but one can admire it often -if only one would read it.-ROSSETTI, WILLIAM MICHAEL, 1872-78, ed., Humorous Poems, p. 132.

Cowley is defective through a redundancy of wit.-SMITH, GEORGE BARNETT, 1875, Poets and Novelists, English Fugitive Poets, p. 374.

Except for a few students like Lamb and Sir Egerton Brydges, Cowley's verse is in this century unread and unreadable. Not even the antiquarian curiosity of an age which reprints Brathwaite and Crowne has yet availed to present him in a new edition. The reasons of this extraordinary decline in a poetical reputation are not difficult to find; Dryden absorbed all that was best in Cowley, and superseded him for the readers of the eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century, which reads Dryden little, naturally reads Cowley less. ley less. Yet criticism has to justify great names. There must be something in a man who was regarded by his age, and that an age which boasted of having outgrown all illusions, as the most profound and ingenious of its writers.WARD, THOMAS HUMPHRY, 1880, English Poets, vol. II, p. 235.

What a change from the musical songs of Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Ben Jonson, or from the dainty love-lyrics of Cowley's contemporary, Robert Herrick, to these painful and mechanical efforts! The student who wishes to see how a poetic judgment may be perverted-for Cowley unquestionably was a poet-should read the passages given in Dr. Johnson's masterly criticism, which is the more interesting inasmuch as it shows that the intellectual vice of Cowley was not peculiar

to that poet. Earlier writers had been infected by it, later versemen were not wholly free from it. These quiddities and once fashionable follies proved Cow'ey's death-warrant as a poet, for although some of his verses have a vital force and beauty, the great body of his poetry is as dead as that of Sir Richard Blackmore, or the once popular Cleveland.-DENNIS, JOHN, 1883, Heroes of Literature, p. 112.

The period of English poetry which lies between the decline of Ben Jonson and the rise of Dryden was ruled with undisputed sway by a man whose works are now as little read as those of any fifth-rate Elizabethan dramatist. During the whole life time of Milton, the fame of that glorious poet was obscured and dwarfed by the exaggerated reputation of this writer, and so general and so unshaken was the belief in the lyrist of the day, that a Royalist gentleman of Cambridge or an exiled courtier at Paris in the year 1650 would have laughed in your face, had you suggested chat time could ever wither the deathless laurels of Mr. Cowley, or untune the harmonies of his majestic numbers. Yet in a very short space this work of destruction was most thoroughly done. The generation of Dryden admired his genius passionately, but not without criticism. The generation of Pope praised him coldly, but without reading him, and within fifty years of his own decease this nonpariel of

the Restoration fell into total disfavour and oblivion. With the revival of naturalistic poetry, the lyrists and dramatists of the reign of Charles I. came once more into favour. Crashaw, Quarles, Lovelace, martyrs, pietists, and rakes, all the true children of the Muses, whatever their mode or matter, were restored and reprinted. GOSSE, EDMUND, 1883, Seventeenth-Century Studies, p. 171.

Cowley was still mentioned with high respect during the eighteenth century, and was the first poet in the collection to which Johnson contributed prefaces. Johnson's life in that collection was famous for its criticism of the "metaphysical" poets, the hint of which is given in Dryden's "Essay on Satire." It assigns It assigns the obvious cause for the decline of Cowley's fame. The "metaphysical poets" are courtier pedants. They represent the intrusion into poetry of the love of dialectical subtlety encouraged by the still

prevalent system of scholastic disputation. In Cowley's poems, as in Donne's, there are many examples of the technical language of the schools, and the habit of thought is perceptible throughout. In the next generation the method became obsolete and then offensive. Cowley can only be said to survive in the few pieces where he condescends to be unaffected, and especially in the prose of his essays, which are among the earliest examples in the language of simple and graceful prose, with some charming poetry interspersed. STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1887, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XII, p. 382.

But cleverness and sense, both of which he has to a very high degree, when wanting good taste and that indescribable something which eternally severs poetry from verse, have long since placed him amongst those writers who are rarely read, but never read without profit.-PALGRAVE, FRANCIS T., 1889, The Treasury of Sacred Song, note, p. 347.

A constitutional sentiment for ease permeates all his prose works. His poems are labored and more prosy than his prose. -EMERY, FRED PARKER, 1891, Notes on English Literature, p. 43.

A rhetorician rather than a poet, without passion, without imagination, but rich sensibly took its colour from the temper in fancy and rich in thought, his style insensibly took its colour from the temper of his genius.-COLLINS, JOHN CHURTON, 1895, Essays and Studies, p. 16.

In Abraham Cowley we are presented with a striking example of original genius. breaking through the restraints of the traditional methods of his time.-MASTERMAN, J. HOWARD B., 1897, The Age of Milton, p. 129.

His somewhat voluminous poems contain many passages that are well worth perusal.-PAINTER, F. V. N., 1899, A History of English Literature, p. 166.

He introduced the form known as the irregular or Pindaric ode, based on a misconception of the meter of the Greek poet, which Cowley did not perceive to consist of groups of three stanzas of definite forms. Cowley's epic "The Davideis" is unfinished, and his verse has not life enough to be of interest to any but special students. of the period. JOHNSON, CHARLES F., 1900, Outline History of English and American Literature, p. 200.

Engraving by J. Mollison.

JEREMY TAYLOR

ISAAC BARROW

From the Original Picture by Isaac Whood at Trinity College, Cambridge. Engraving by B. Holl.