INTRODUCTION xlv 



will lead to a renewal of interest in Cowley's Olym-. 

 pique and Neraean Odes, and to a demand for the 

 new edition which the Cambridge University Press 

 has just issued. A worse thing might happen than 

 that, as a stimulus to our laureates of all degrees, a 

 prize should be decreed to the best Ode written " in 

 imitation of the style and manner," not of Pindar, 

 but of Cowley. 



Satire was one of the few literary genres which 

 Cowley did not attempt, whereas Marvell's irony 

 was of the savage school of Juvenal or Swift, rather 

 than of the more urbane Horace. The Latinity of 

 both was on a high level. Cowley's verse was often 

 highly charged with conceits, somewhat metaphysical, 

 and his eulogies and panegyrics carried flattery to its 

 full flight on far-fetched and soaring metaphor 

 although he could at times be natural, simple, and full 

 of feeling, as in his elegy on the death of his friend 

 William Harvey, which here and there strikes a tone 

 as deep and true as the Thyrsis of Matthew Arnold. 



But of Hobbes he writes : 



I never yet the Living Soul could see 

 But in thy books and thee. 



Falkland, of whom, as Bishop Sprat tells us, "he 

 had the entire friendship an affection contracted by 



