concerning his government, indeed, with verses intermixed, but such as certainly gained its author no friends among the abettors of usurpation. A doctor of physic, however, he was made at Oxford in December 1657; and in the commencement of the Royal Society, of which an account has been given by Dr Birch, he appears busy among the experimental philosophers with the title of Dr Cowley. There is no reason for supposing that he ever attempted practice: but his preparatory studies have contributed something to the honour of his country. Considering botany as necessary to a physician, he retired into Kent to gather plants; and as the predominance of a favourite study affects all subordinate operations of the intellect, botany in the mind of Cowley turned into poetry. He composed, in Latin, several books on plants, of which the first and second display the qualities of herbs, in elegiac verse; the third and fourth, the beauties of flowers, in various measures; and the fifth and sixth, the uses of trees, in heroic numbers. At the same time were produced, from the same university, the two great poets, Cowley and Milton, of dissimilar genius, of opposite principles, but concurring in the cultivation of Latin poetry; in which the English, till their works and May's poem appeared, seemed unable to contest the palm with any other of the lettered nations. If the Latin performances of Cowley and Milton be compared (for May I hold to be superior to both), the advantage seems to lie on the side of Cowley. Milton is generally content to express the thoughts of the ancients in their language; Cowley, without much loss of purity or elegance, accommodates the diction of Rome to his own conceptions. At the restoration, after all the diligence of his long service, and with consciousness not only of the merit of fidelity, but of the dignity of great abilities, he naturally expected ample preferments; and, that he might not be forgotten by his own fault, wrote a song of triumph. But this was a time of such general hope, that great numbers were inevitably disappointed; and Cowley found his reward very tediously delayed. He had been promised by both Charles the First and Second, the mastership of the Savoy; but he lost it," says Wood, "by certain persons, enemies to the muses." 66 The neglect of the court was not his only mortification; having by such alteration as he thought proper, fitted his old comedy of " the Guardian" for the stage, he produced it under the title of "The Cutter of Coleman-street." It was treated on the stage with great severity, and was afterwards censured as a satire on the king's party. Mr Dryden, who went with Mr Sprat to the first exhibition, related to Mr Dennis, " that, when they told Cowley how little favour had been shewn him, he received the news of his ill success, not with so much firmness as might have been expected from so great a man." What firmness they expected, or what weakness Cowley discovered, cannot be known. He that misses his end will never be as much pleased as he that attains it, even when he can impute no part of his failure to himself; and when the end is to please the multitude, no man perhaps has a right, in things admitting of gradation and comparison, to throw the whole blame upon his judges, and totally to exclude diffidence and shame, by a haughty consciousness of his own excellence. For the rejection of this play it is difficult now to find the reason: it certainly has, in a very great degree, the power of fixing attention and exciting merriment. From the charge of disaffection he exculpates himself in his preface, by observing how unlikely it is, that, having followed the royal family through all their distresses," he should choose the time of their restoration to begin a quarrel with them." It appears, however, from the theatrical register of Downes the prompter, to have been popularly considered as a satire on the royalists. That he might shorten this tedious suspense, he published his pretensions and his discontent, in an ode called "The Complaint;" in which he styles himself the melancholy Cowley. This met with the usual fortune of complaints, and seems to have excited more contempt than pity. These unlucky incidents are brought, maliciously enough, together in some stanzas, written about that time on the choice of a laureat; a mode of satire, by which, since it was first introduced by Suckling, perhaps every generation of poets has been teazed. Savoy-missing Cowley came into the court, That Apollo gave heed to all he could say: Nor would he have had, 'tis thought, a rebuke, Unless he had done some notable folly: His vehement desire of retirement now came again upon him. "Not finding," says the morose Wood, "that preferment conferred upon him which he expected, while others for their money carried away most places, he retired discontented into Surrey." 66 "He was now," says the courtly Sprat, weary of the vexations and formalities of an active condition. He had been perplexed with a long compliance to foreign manners. He was satiated with the arts of a court; which sort of life, though his virtue made it innocent to him, yet nothing could make it quiet. Those were the reasons that moved him to follow the violent inclination of his own mind, which, in the greatest throng of his former business, had still called upon him, and represented to him the true delights of solitary studies, of temperate pleasures, and a moderate revenue below the malice and flatteries of fortune." So differently are things seen! and so differently are they shewn! But actions are visible, though motives are secret. Cowley certainly retired; first to Barn-elms, and afterwards to Chertsey, in Surrey. He seems, however, to have lost part of his dread of the hum of men*. He thought himself now safe enough from intrusion, without the defence of mountains and oceans; and, instead of seeking shelter in * L'Allegro of Milton. America, wisely went only so far from the bustle of life as that he might easily find his way back, when solitude should grow tedious. His retreat was at first but slenderly accommodated; yet he soon obtained, by the interest of the Earl of St Alban's, and the Duke of Buckingham, such a lease of the queen's lands as afforded him an ample in come. By the lovers of virtue and of wit it will be solicitously asked, if he now was happy. Let them peruse one of the letters accidentally preserved by Peck, which I recommend to the consideration of all that may hereafter pant for solitude. "To DR THOMAS SPRAT. 66 Chertsey, May 21, 1665. "The first night that I came hither I caught so great a cold with a defluxion of rheum, as made me keep my chamber ten days. And, two after, had such a bruise on my ribs with a fall, that I am yet unable to move or turn myself in my bed. This is my personal fortune here to begin with. And, besides, I can get no money from my tenants, and have my meadows eaten up every night by cattle put in by my neighbours. What this signifies, or may come to in time, God knows; if it be ominous, it can end in nothing less than hanging. Another misfortune has been, and stranger than all the rest, that you have broke your word with me, and failed to come, even though you told Mr Bois that you would. This is what they call monstri |