moral energies. They tend rather to lower the moral tone, to throw the mind into a despondency; -a mournfully pleasing state, perhaps, but undoubtedly enervating. From the point of view of the poet, the above would be admirable if it were weeded of the coarse expression about the squinancy; from the point of view of the moral preacher,' it is not only useless, but positively harmful.

ABRAHAM COWLEY, 1618-1667.

Cowley holds perhaps a higher rank among prose writers than among poets. His Essays, written for the most part after the Restoration, mark an advance in the art of prose composition. The construction of the sentences is often stumbling and awkward, but the diction shows an increasing command over the language. No previous writer, not even Fuller, is so felicitous as Cowley in the combination of words. His prose has none of the extravagance of his poetry. "No author," says Johnson, "ever kept his verse and his prose at a greater distance from each other. His thoughts are natural, and his style has a smooth and placid equability, which has never yet obtained its due commendation. Nothing is far sought or hard-laboured; but all is easy without feebleness, and familiar without grossness."

Perhaps part of the explanation of this is, that for ten years he conducted the correspondence of the exiled royal family-a kind of experience likely to purify his language both from bookish terms and from poetical ornaments. Whatever be the reason, his combinations and turns of expression are remarkably modern; here and there short passages might be quoted that we should not be surprised to find in 'Blackwood' or in the 'Saturday Review.'

He was born in London, the son of a grocer ("his parents citizens of a virtuous life and sufficient estate"), and educated at Westminister school and at Trinity College, Cambridge. At the age of fifteen he had published a volume of poems; and while yet an undergraduate, he wrote two or three comedies, and the greater part of his 'Davideis.' When he had been seven years at Cambridge, and had proceeded to the degree of M.A., he was, in 1643, at the age of twenty-five, ejected from that university by the Puritan visitors, and took refuge in Oxford. "About the time when Oxford was surrendered to the Parliament, he followed the Queen to Paris, where he became secretary to the Lord Jermyn, afterwards Earl of St Albans, and was employed in such correspondence as the royal cause required, and particularly in cipher1 Throughout the above we have used the word preacher as a preacher of moral conduct. It is not implied that moral preaching is the sole function of the pulpit. Another function is to console the wretched under their load of miserAs a preacher of consolation our author is perhaps unrivalled.

ies.

ing and deciphering the letters that passed between the King and Queen-an employment of the highest confidence and honour. So wide was the province of his intelligence, that for several years it filled all his days and two or three nights in the week." In 1656 he returned to England, was arrested, liberated on bail, studied medicine, and took out a degree in 1657. He remained in London till Cromwell's death, suspected of being in secret communication with the exiled family. At the Restoration he was rewarded with a free lease of certain lands, yielding a rental of £300, and went to reside at Chertsea.

He found country life very different from his Arcadian ideal; but that he was positively unhappy in his solitude, we have no reason to believe. The letter to Dr Sprat that Johnson produces with a malicious chuckle, "for the consideration of all that may hereafter pant for solitude," is really a humorous caricature of his sufferings, evidently written in high spirits.

His prose remains are few; he considered "a little tomb of marble a better monument than a vast heap of stones and rubbish." Two prefaces, a short "Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy," a "Discourse by way of Vision, concerning the Government of Oliver Cromwell," and eleven Essays, are the sum-total, and they are contained in a small volume.

We get no fair idea of Cowley's intellectual powers from reading merely his prose. There we are struck only by his singular ease in choosing apt words, and by the freshness and spirit of the combinations. In his poetry he is more "extravagant and Pindarical;" the predominating veins of sentiment are the same as we find in the Essays and the Discourse on Cromwell, but he gives a fuller licence to his ingenuity. Describing the style of the "metaphysical poets," Johnson says "The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises:" and among the metaphysical poets he considers Cowley to be "undoubtedly the best." implies no mean powers of intellect; yet we should not think of placing such a light horseman among the intellectual giants. He is entitled to the palm of fantastic breadth, swiftness, and subtlety of wit; and this was probably all the distinction that he coveted.

This

Indeed the soft easy nature of the man indisposed him to severe labour, whether of body or of mind. "Whatever was his subject, he seems to have been carried by a kind of destiny to the light and the familiar, or to conceits which require still more ignoble epithets." Even in his emotions he was easy and averse to excitement. He was not of an overflowing sociability, like Thomas Fuller; his ideal was to enjoy the company of a few friends in

some

gentle cool retreat from all the immoderate heat in which the frantic world does burn and sweat." He never married; and his poems express no depth of affection: the only genuine pathos in his writings flows from his luxurious love of solitude and repose. Neither his prose nor his poetry gives evidence of strong antipathies: we shall quote some sharp invective, but it is not personal, -it is directed against abstractions. He loved to contemplate, in a soft indolent attitude, the spectacle of great power; royalist as he was, he could not refrain from admiring Cromwell. At the same time he would not, like Carlyle, have put himself to the trouble of searching the world for heroes; only when a hero comes across his path, he is not impervious to astonishment. Even in his admiration of Cromwell there is no depth of feeling; the rich and elevated language of the Discourse on that hero is dashed with touches of humour. He has none of Taylor's fresh delight in natural things: as Johnson says, he does not present pictures to the mind; he "gives inferences instead of images, and shows not what may be supposed to have been seen, but what thoughts the sight might have suggested."

In his younger days he wrote what he calls "a shrewd prophecy against himself:"-"

"Thou neither great at court, nor in the war,

Nor at the exchange shalt be, nor at the wrangling bar."

The prophecy was shrewd enough; such a born epicurean was not likely to succeed in any mode of active life. As a royal secretary he probably discharged his duty sufficiently well, having the material furnished him, and experiencing none of the worry of contriving; but that he was not a particularly zealous and active servant is probably shown by the comparatively slender reward settled upon him at the Restoration. Of his natural indolence we have a very pretty evidence in his Essays. When he retired to the country, he says there was nothing he coveted so much as a small house and a large garden, where he might work and study nature; yet he confesses, "I stick still in the inn of a hired house and garden, among weeds and rubbish, and without that pleasantest work of human industry, the improvement of something which we call (not very properly, but yet we call) our own."

1

Cowley being neither a man of action, nor a moralist, nor a critic, nor an original student of science, his opinions are not of consequence; in his humorous railing at ambition and advocacy of retirement, he is moved entirely by constitutional sentiment. The popularity of his Essays is a great tribute to the intrinsic power of style, of manner as opposed to matter. It also indicates that 1 His "Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy" is merely a plan of a college and school, and contains nothing remarkable.

style can operate to most advantage when neither reader nor writer is impeded by difficulties in the matter.

ELEMENTS OF STYLE.

Vocabulary. In his prose writings, the extent of his vocabulary is shown rather by skilful choice of words than by Shakspearian profusion. When we turn to his poetry, we see that his command of words, though great, is rather inferior for a writer of such reputation. The exertion of procuring variety would seem to have been too much for his easy temperament; and his range of emotion being so limited, he did not accumulate great stores of language except in the region of the light and familiar.

We have already said that his diction is noticeably less archaic than the diction of any preceding writer.

Sentences. In his lighter compositions the sentence-structure is easy and careless, and has no marked rhythm. But in his serious writings the rhythm is more even. The preface to his poems published in 1656, and the Discourse on Cromwell, are written with a more even measure than any compositions prior to this date.

In Cowley we first notice very markedly the habit of adding to the simple statement an obverse or inverse statement, for the purpose of filling out the cadence. Thus, as an example of the obverse filling out:

"The Church of Rome, with all her arrogance, and her wide pretences of certainty in all truths, and exemption from all errors, does not clap on this enchanted armour of infallibility upon all her particular subjects, nor is offended at the reproof of her greatest doctors."

As an example of the inverse filling out :

"A cowardly ranting soldier, an ignorant charlatanical doctor, a foolish cheating lawyer, a silly pedantical scholar, have always been, and still are, the principal subjects of all comedies, without any scandal given to those honourable professions, or even taken by their severest professors."

These are not perhaps the best examples that might be selected, but they illustrate what is meant; other cases will appear in subsequent quotations.

While in Cowley we see the first extensive use of balanced yet idiomatic periods, and the first habitual practice of the chief arts of rhythmical balance, we must observe that measured structure and point are employed by him much more sparingly than by their great cultivator, Samuel Johnson. His rhythm is more varied, in this respect approaching nearer to the modern standard. Apart from an occasional weakness in the syntax, and a certain archaism in the phrase and in the thought, the following reads not unlike a good article in the 'Saturday Review: ' 1—

1 From the Preface to 'The Cutter of Coleman Street.'

T

"As for all other objections, which have been or may be made against the invention or elocution, or anything else which comes under the critical jurisdiction; let it stand or fall as it can answer for itself, for I do not lay the great stress of my reputation upon a structure of this nature, much less upon the slight reparations only of an old and unfashionable building. There is no writer but may fail sometimes in point of wit; and it is no less frequent for the auditors to fail in point of judgment. I perceive plainly, by daily experience, that Fortune is mistress of the theatre, as Tully says it is of all popular assemblies. No man can tell sometimes from whence the invisible winds rise that move them. There are a multitude of people, who are truly and only spectators at a play, without any use of their understanding; and these carry it sometimes by the strength of their numbers. There are others who use their understandings too much; who think it a sign of weakness and stupidity to let anything pass by them unattacked, and that the honour of their judgments (as some brutals imagine of their courage) consists in quarrelling with everything. We are therefore wonderful wise men, and have a fine business of it, we who spend our time in poetry : I do sometimes laugh, and am often angry with myself when I think on it; and if I had a son inclined by nature to the same folly, I believe I should bind him from it by the strictest conjurations of a paternal blessing. For what can be more ridiculous, than to labour to give men delight, whilst they labour, on their part, more earnestly to take offence? To expose one's self voluntarily and frankly to all the dangers of that narrow passage to unprofitable fame, which is defended by rude multitudes of the ignorant, and by armed troops of the malicious? If we do ill, many discover it, and all despise us; if we do well, but few men find it out, and fewer entertain it kindly. If we commit errors, there is no pardon; if we could do wonders, there would be but little thanks, and that, too, extorted from unwilling givers."

The Paragraph structure, in the lighter essays, where there are no natural divisions in the subject-matter, is loose and rambling. In the Prefaces, when he has distinct topics to handle, such as different books of poetry, he naturally places them in separate paragraphs; but when there is no such marked guide, he is not more orderly than the looser sort of his predecessors, and often mixes up several subjects in the same paragraph. In the 'Cromwell,' the natural pauses in the flow of his declamation suggest paragraph breaks, and the sense of oratorical effect prevents rambling.

Figures of Speech.-Fantastic similitudes are almost the essence of Cowley's poetry; in his prose he is less exuberant. His prose, indeed, is less ornate than any fine writing of the century, prior, at least, to his own date; the similitudes are not quite so numerous, and they are not far-fetched, but seem to come easily to hand. Examples will be seen in the quotations that follow. In the Essays, which are familiar productions, he admits more embellishment than in the Prefaces or the Discourse; in the serious compositions, he gives his care to elaborate the plain statement of striking circumstances.

In declamatory passages he makes abundant use of the figures