COWLB Y. 



309 



From a sufferer he became a writer and an actor in the 

 royal cause, followed the queen to Paris, became secre- 

 tary to the Earl of St Albans, then Lord Jenny n, perform- 

 ed some confidential jemmies in the cause, and devoted 

 his days, and frequently nights, in decyphering the cor- 

 respondence of the king and queen. When his services 

 were no longer necessary at Paris, he was, in 1656, 

 sent back to England, according to Sprat, that, under 

 pretence of privacy, lie might take occasion of giving 

 notice of the posture of things in this nation. This ac- 

 count, if true, places Cowley under the equivocal deno- 

 mination of a spy in his native country. It was espio- 

 nage, however, in a cause which he had embraced from 

 principle, and there is no evidence that he practised it 

 with arts of simulation degrading to his character. On 

 his return, he was seized by the messengers of govern- 

 ment in their search for another person, was put in pri- 

 son, and not released till he found bail to the amount of 

 jglOOO. His pursuits in England were sufficiently pa- 

 cific; he published an edition of his poems, took the 

 degree of a physician, and became a member of the 

 newly instituted Philosophical Society. He seems not 

 to have attempted the practice of physic; but having 

 entered on botany as a preparatory study, he composed 

 in Latin several books of botanical poetry. 



At the dissolution of government, which followed the 

 death of Oliver, he returned to France, where he re- 

 sumed his former station, and staid till the restoration. 

 Expecting from that event to be recompensed for his 

 long fidelity and services, by the mastership of the Sa- 

 voy, which had been promised to him successively by 

 the two Charles's, he experienced great mortification 

 from the neglect of the court. To increase his chagrin, 

 his comedy entitled Cutter of Coleman Street * which 

 being falsely supposed a satire on the royal party, was 

 severely received on the stage. In the dejection of 

 mind occasioned by those events, he published his 

 Complaint, in which he styles himself the melancholy 

 Cowley. At length, through the interest of the Duke 

 of Buckingham and the Earl of St Albans, he obtained 

 a lease of a farm at Chertsey, held under the queen, 

 by which his income was raised to about ^300 per an- 

 num. A country retirement had been, from early 

 youth, a real or imaginary object of Iris wishes, and 

 had been a frequent theme of his prose as well as his 

 verse. He retired first to Barn-elms, on the banks of 

 the Thames ; but this not agreeing with his health, he 

 removed to Chertsey. Here he did not live long to expe- 

 rience either the enjoyments or discomforts of rustica- 

 tion. According to Sprat, the disorder which carried 

 him off, was an affection of the lungs, contracted by 

 staying too late in the fields among his labourers. But 

 Mr Warton, on the authority of Spence, informs us, that 

 Cowley paid a visit on foot, in company with the same 

 Dr Sprat, to a gentleman in the neighbourhood of 

 Chertsey, which they prolonged in free conviviality till 

 midnight, and that missing their way on their return, 

 they were obliged to pass the night under a hedge, 

 which gave the poet a severe cold and fever, that ter- 

 minated in death. He died on the 28th of July 1667, 

 in the 49th year of his age, and was interred in West- 

 minster Abbey, near the remains of Spenser and 

 Chaucer. 



Cowley is confessedly the best English poet in that 

 class which has now prescriptively acquired the title 

 of metaphysical. Their popularity in Europe may be 

 traced to the fountain head of Italian poetry in Pe- 



trarch ; but their characteristic perversities in bringing Cowley, 

 together remote analogies, and prolonging similitudes ■>— -y— 

 between material and mental objects, and substituting 

 extravagant conceits for the genuine language of poetry 

 and passion, are all found in equal perfection of ab- 

 surdity among the ancestors of the Petrarchan school, 

 namely, the troubadours or provincial poets, to the study 

 of whom Petrarch was certainly addicted. This cha- 

 racter of the troubadours, however, applies only to the 

 later and more degenerate class of troubadours. In the 

 earlier part of the middle ages, allegory was the fa- 

 vourite strain of European poetry, imbibed from the 

 predilection of the learned for Boethius. When the 

 provincial bards found allegory inconvenient for their 

 sirvettes or shorter effusions, they substituted protract- 

 ed metaphor in the place of allegory, and supplied the 

 fathers of Italian verse with those specimens of over- 

 laboured figures which load and deform the tissue of Pe- 

 trarch's and Marino's muse. In like manner, the meta- 

 physical or conceitedly metaphorical school succeeded 

 in England te the allegorical school of Sackville and 

 Spenser. Donne, Drayton, Crawshaw, and Cowley, 

 were the most ingenious poets of this dynasty, whose 

 reputation suffered indeed in some degree from the rival- 

 ship of Denham and Waller, in a smoother, terser, more 

 regular, and more majestic walk of poetry, but whose 

 decline was only accomplished by the slowly rising re- 

 putation of Milton, and the more immediate popularity 

 of Dryden. It is not our design to characterise more 

 particularly any of the metaphysical school excepting 

 Cowley. His defects, though strictly referable to that 

 school, are intermingled with beauties of the most ori- 

 ginal unquestionable stamp. True it is, as the profli- 

 gate Rochester said, his style not being of God, (we 

 ought to substitute the word nature,) could not stand. 

 But though no poet goes more extravagantly out of na<- 

 ture, there is none who occasionally lights on more 

 naive and natural expressions. Like a true metaphy- 

 sical poet, he is for ever drawing upon his learning for; 

 the remote images which his fancy combines; but while 

 he is racking his head for some far-fetched idea, he 

 anon seems to start a thought from the very centre and 

 core of his heart and feelings. As an instance of this, 

 we may dip at hazard into his pages, and select his 

 little poem on Friendship in Absence as an instance. 

 After a string of forced and quaint ideas, in which he 

 tells his friend, 



" By every wind that comes this way, 

 Send me at least a sigh or two, 



Such and so many I'll repay, 

 As shall themselves make winds to get to you ;" 



who would expect from such a prelude so beautiful and: 

 appropriate a thought as the concluding stanza. 



" And when no art affords me help or ease, 

 I seek with verse my griefs t' appease; 



Just as a bird that flies about, 

 And beats itself against the cage ; 



Finding at last no passage out, 

 It sits and sings, and so o'ercomes its rage." 



The style of Cowley, keeping his matter distinct 

 from his ideas, is easy, even to carelessness. Donne and 

 Crashaw, among the poets of this school, were harsh 

 and laborious in their structure of style ; but Cowley 

 rambled into what he called the Pindaric manner, 

 which, though the remotest in the world from Pindar, 



• The title of the play was without the article the, and is called " Cutter of Coleman Street," because a merry sharking fellovr 

 about town is the principal character in it. 



