a few poems in that volume [the works of Cotton] replete with every excellence of thought, image, and passion which we expect or desire in the poetry of the milder Muse, and yet so worded that the reader sees no reason either in the selection or the order of the words why he may not have said the very same in an appropriate conversation, and cannot conceive how indeed he could have expressed such thoughts otherwise, without loss or injury to his meaning.' I will add that this poem is drawn out to too great a length for its own interests, or for my limited space; and several stanzas toward the close have been omitted.

P. 98, No. xci.-Johnson has justly praised the unequalled fertility of invention' displayed in this poem, and in its pendant, Against Hope. To estimate all the wonder of them, they should be read each in the light of the other. In some lines of wretched criticism, which Addison has called An Account of the greatest English Poets, there is one exception to the shallowness or falseness of most of his judgments about them, namely in his estimate of Cowley, which is much higher than that of the present day, though not too high; wherein too he has well seized his merits and defects, both of which this poem exemplifies. These are the first six lines:

'Great Cowley then (a mighty genius) wrote,
O'errun with wit, and lavish of his thought;

His turns too closely on the reader press,

He more had pleased us, had he pleased us less;
One glittering thought no sooner strikes our eyes
With silent wonder but new wonders rise.'

P. 99, No. xciii.-It is evident that in this and in the following Prologue Dryden is on his good behaviour; he has indeed so much respect for his audience that in all the eighty-five lines which compose them he has not one profane, and, still more remarkable, not one indecent allusion. Neither are the compliments which he pays his hearers, as is too often the case, fulsome and from their exaggeration offensive, but such as became him to pay and them to receive, while they are all eminently appropriate to the time and place. Though no very accurate scholar, he is yet quite scholar enough to talk with scholars on no very unequal footing; while the most eminent of those who heard him must have felt that in strength and opulence of thought, and in power of clothing this thought in appropriate forms, he immeasurably surpassed them all.

P. 102, No. xcv.-Barten Holyday, Archdeacon of Oxford, and translator of Juvenal, published in 1661 his Survey of the World. which contains a thousand independent distiches, of which these are a favourable sample. Nearly all which I have quoted have more or less point-to my mind the distinction between the two chief historians of Greece has never been more happily drawn-and a few

have poetry as well. Yet for all this the devout prayer of the author in his concluding distich,

"Father of gifts, who to the dust didst give

Life, say to these my meditations, Live,'

6

has not been, and will scarcely now be, fulfilled. Holyday is mentioned more than once by Dryden in the prefatory remarks to his translations from Juvenal, as one whose interpretation and illustrations of Juvenal are as excellent, as the verse of his translation and his English are lame and pitiful.'

P. 105, No. xcix. 1. 15: In a manuscript copy of the poem there follows here an additional stanza :

'You rubies that do gems adorn,

And sapphires with your azure hue,
Like to the skies or blushing morn,

How pale's your brightness in our view,
When diamonds are mixed with you.'

P. 106, No. c.-This is nothing more than a broad-sheet ballad published in 1641, the year of Strafford's execution, with the title Verses lately written by Thomas Earl of Strafford. Two copies, of different issues, but of the same date, and identical in text, exist in the British Museum, while in The Topographer, vol. ii. p. 234, there is printed another, and in some respects an improved, text. The fall of the great statesman from his pride of place has here kindled one with perhaps but ordinary gifts for ordinary occasions to a truly poetical treatment of his theme; as to a certain extent it has roused another, whose less original ballad in the same year and on the same theme, bearing the title, The Ultimum Vale or Last Farewell of Thomas Earl of Strafford, yields as its second stanza these nervous lines:

'Farewell, you fading honours which do blind
By your false mists the sharpest-sighted mind ;
And having raised him to his height of cares,
Tumble him headlong down the slippery stairs;
How shall I praise or prize your glorious ills,
Which are but poison hid in golden pills?'

P. 109, No. cii.-Phillips has well summed up the merits of Lovelace—' an approved soldier, gentleman, and lover.' He might have added 'poet,' if he had written much like this.

P. 110, No. ciii.-These spirited lines were found written in an old hand in a copy of Lovelace's Lucasta, 1679.' So at least Motherwell in his Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern (1827), p. 159, assures us. Since the publication of the first edition of this volume my attention has been called to the fact that it is included in an edition of Motherwell's own poems (Edinburgh, 1832). The fact is certainly

D D

perplexing; as it is impossible to think of him laying claim to verses which were not his own; while yet, with all his real merits, he never showed elsewhere a poetical faculty equal to the composition of this poem.

P. III, No. civ.-Davenant is scarcely known except by his strong-thoughted, but heavy, poem of Gondibert; and very little known, I should suppose, by that. But this poem and another, No. cxi., show that in another vein, that of graceful half play, half earnest, few have surpassed him.

P. 113, No. cv. 1. 43-48: Cicero (De Nat. Deor. iii, 28, and elsewhere) refers to the remarkable story of Jason, tyrant of Pheræ, whom one, meaning to stab, did in fact only open for him a dan gerous abscess in his body.-1. 59: adamant' is here used in the sense of loadstone; as in the Midsummer Night's Dream, ii. 1 :

'You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant,
And yet you draw not iron.'

P. 114, No. cvi.—I have dealt somewhat boldly with this poem, of its twenty-four triplets omitting all but ten, these ten seeming to me to constitute a fine poem, which the entire twenty-four altogether fail to do. Few will agree with Horace Walpole that the poetry is most uncouth and inharmonious;' so far from this, it has a very solemn and majestic flow. Nor do I doubt that these lines are what they profess to be, the composition of King Charles; their authenticity is stamped on every line. We are indebted to Burnet for their preservation. He gives them in his Memoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton, saying, 'A very worthy gentleman who had the honour of waiting on him then [at Carisbrook Castle], and was much trusted by him, copied them out from the original, who avoucheth them to be a true copy.'-1. 2: A word has evidently dropped out here, which is manifestly needed by the metre, and, as it seems to me, also by the sense. I have enclosed within brackets the earthly' with which I have ventured to supply the want.

P. 115, No. cvii.-Marvell showed how well he understood what he was giving to the world in this ode, one of the least known but among the grandest which the English language possesses, when he called it Horatian.' In its whole treatment it reminds us of the highest to which the greatest Latin Artist in lyrical poetry did, when at his best, attain. To one unacquainted with Horace, this ode, not perhaps so perfect as his are in form, and with occasional obscurities of expression which Horace would not have left, will give a truer notion of the kind of greatness which he achieved than, so far as I know, could from any other poem in the language be obtained. We can fix very accurately the time of its composition, namely, after

Cromwell's return from the campaign in Ireland, after, too, he had been designated for the expedition to Scotland, but while as yet the laureate wreath' of Dunbar Field was unwon,—the summer therefore of the year 1650. A little later the assurances of Cromwell's moderation could scarcely have been uttered. To understand this poem as at all it deserves to be understood, the reader must be fairly acquainted with the chief persons and events of our great Civil War; and the more familiar he is with these, the greater his admiration will be. It is worth while to compare it with Milton's panegyric of Cromwell at the close of his second Defensio Populi Anglicani.-1. 53-64 Lines which in the noble justice they do to a fallen enemy, and to the courage with which he met the worst extremities of fortune, are worthy to stand side by side with that immortal passage in which Horace celebrates the heroic fashion with which Cleopatra accepted the same (Carm. i. 37, 21–32).—1. 67–72: At the digging of the foundations of the Capitol at Rome a human head is reported to have been found, which was at once accepted as an augury that Rome should be the head of the world, and gave a name to the temple (Capitolium from caput) which was being reared: (Livy, i. 55).

P. 119, No. cviii.—I have taken the liberty of omitting nine out of the twenty-six stanzas of which this fine hymn is composed; I believe that it has gained much by the omission. The sense that a poor stanza is not merely no gain, but a serious injury, to a poem, was not Cowley's; still less that willingness to sacrifice parts to the effect of the whole, which induced Gray to leave out a stanza, in itself as exquisite as any which remain, from his Elegy; which led Milton to omit from the Spirit's Prologue in Comus sixteen glorious lines which may still be seen in his original MSS. at Cambridge, and have been often reprinted in the notes to later editions of his Poems.-1. 45-56: Johnson has said, urging the immense improvement in the mechanism of English verse which we owe to Dryden and the little which had been done before him, if Cowley had sometimes a finished line, he had it by chance.' Let Dryden have all the honour which is justly his due, but not at the expense of others. There are doubtless a few weak and poor lines in this poem even as now presented, but what a multitude of others, these twelve for example, without a single exception, of perfect grace and beauty, and as satisfying to the ear as to the mind.-1. 68: This line is certainly perplexing. In all the earlier editions of Cowley which I have examined it runs thus,

'Of colours mingled, Light, a thick and standing lake.'

In the modern, so far as they have come under my eye, it is printed, 'Of colours mingled light a thick and standing lake.'

The line in neither shape yields any tolerable sense-not in the first, with 'Light' regarded as a vocative, which, for the line so pointed, seems the only possible construction; nor yet in the second, which only acquires some sort of meaning when colours' is treated as a genitive plural. I have marked it as such, but am little satisfied with the result.

P. 122, No. cx.-Hallam has said that 'Cowley upon the whole has had a reputation more above his deserts than any English poet,' adding, however, that 'some who wrote better had not so fine a genius.' Hallam's verdict may be true; but a man's contemporaries have some opportunities of judging which subsequent generations are without. They judge him not only by what he does, but by what he is; and oftentimes a man is more than he does; leaves an impression of greatness on those who come in actual contact with him, such as is only inadequately justified by aught which he leaves behind him, while yet in one sense it is most true. Many a man's embodiment of himself in his writings is below himself; some men's, strange to say, is above them, or at all events represents most transient moments of their lives. But I should be disposed to question this assertion, judging Cowley merely by what he has left behind him. With a poem like this before us, so full of thought, so full of imagination, being in fact nothing less than the first book of the Novum Organum transfigured into poetry, we may well pause before jumping to the conclusion that his contemporaries were altogether wrong, when they rated him so highly as they did. How they did esteem him lines like these of Denham, the fragment of a larger poem, not without a worth of their own, will show :

'Old mother Wit and Nature gave
Shakespeare and Fletcher all they have;
In Spenser and in Jonson Art

Of slower Nature got the start;

But both in him so equal are,

None knows which bears the happiest share.

To him no author was unknown,

Yet what he wrote was all his own,

He melted not the ancient gold,

Nor with Ben Jonson did make bold

To plunder all the Roman stores

Of poets and of orators.

Horace's wit and Virgil's state

He did not steal but emulate!

And when he would like them appear,

Their garb, but not their clothes, did wear.'

1. 19-40 Compare with these the lines, inferior indeed, but themselves remarkable, and showing how strongly Cowley felt on this matter, which occur in his Ode to Dr. Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood: