Volume II Part 5 (1/2)

Time was, when I, a pilgrim of the seas, When I 'midst noise of camps, and courts disease, Purloin'd some hours to charm rude cares with verse, Which flame of faithful shepherd did rehea.r.s.e.

But now restrain'd from sea, from camp, from court, And by a tempest blown into a port; I raise my thoughts to muse on higher things, And eccho arms, and loves of Queens and Kings.

Which Queens (despising crowns and Hymen's band) Would neither men obey, nor men command: Great pleasure from rough seas to see the sh.o.r.e Or from firm land to hear the billows roar.

We are told that he composed several other things remaining still in ma.n.u.script, which he had not leisure to compleat; even some of the printed pieces have not all the finis.h.i.+ng so ingenious an author could have bestowed upon them; for as the writer of his Life observes, 'being, for his loyalty and zeal to his Majesty's service, tossed from place to place, and from country to country, during the unsettled times of our anarchy, some of his Ma.n.u.scripts falling into unskilful hands, were printed and published without his knowledge, and before he could give them the last finis.h.i.+ng strokes.' But that was not the case with his Translation of the Pastor Fido, which was published by himself, and applauded by some of the best judges, particularly Sir John Denham, who after censuring servile translators, thus goes on,

A new and n.o.bler way thou dost pursue To make translations and translators too.

They but preserve the ashes, these the flame, True to his sense, but truer to his fame.

Footnotes: 1. Short Account of Sir Richard Fanshaw, prefixed to his Letters.

2. Wood, Fast. ed. 1721, vol. ii. col. 43, 41.

3. Wood, ubi supra.

ABRAHAM COWLEY

Was the son of a Grocer, and born in London, in Fleet-street, near the end of Chancery Lane, in the year 1618. His mother, by the interest of her friends, procured him to be admitted a King's scholar in Westminster school[1]; his early inclination to poetry was occasioned by reading accidentally Spencer's Fairy Queen, which, as he himself gives an account, 'used to lye in his mother's parlour, he knew not by what accident, for she read no books but those of devotion; the knights, giants, and monsters filled his imagination; he read the whole over before he was 12 years old, and was made a poet, as immediately as a child is made an eunuch.'

In the 16th year of his age, being still at Westminster school, he published a collection of poems, under the t.i.tle of Poetical Blossoms, in which there are many things that bespeak a ripened genius, and a wit, rather manly than puerile. Mr. Cowley himself has given us a specimen in the latter end of an ode written when he was but 13 years of age. 'The beginning of it, says he, is boyish, but of this part which I here set down, if a very little were corrected, I should not be much ashamed of it.' It is indeed so much superior to what might be expected from one of his years, that we shall satisfy the reader's curiosity by inserting it here.

IX.

This only grant me, that my means may lye, Too low for envy, for contempt too high: Some honour I would have; Not from great deeds, but good alone, The unknown are better than ill known, Rumour can ope the grave: Acquaintance I would have, but when 't depends Not on the number, but the choice of friends.

X.

Books should, not business, entertain the light And sleep, as undisturbed as death, the night: My house a cottage, more Than palace, and should fitting be For all my use, no luxury: My garden painted o'er With nature's hand, not art, and pleasures yield, Horace might envy in his Sabine Field.

XI.

Thus would I double my life's fading s.p.a.ce, For he that runs it well, twice runs his race; And in this true delight, These unbought sports, that happy state, I could not fear; nor wish my fate; But boldly say, each night, To-morrow let my sun his beams display, Or in clouds hide them: I have lived to-day.

It is remarkable of Mr. Cowley, as he himself tells us, that he had this defect in his memory, that his teachers could never bring him to retain the ordinary rules of grammar, the want of which, however, he abundantly supplied by an intimate acquaintance with the books themselves, from whence those rules had been drawn. In 1636 he was removed to Trinity College in Cambridge, being elected a scholar of that house[2]. His exercises of all kinds were highly applauded, with this peculiar praise, that they were fit, not only for the obscurity of an academical life, but to have made their appearance on the true theatre of the world; and there he laid the designs, and formed the plans of most of the masculine, and excellent attempts he afterwards happily finished. In 1638 he published his Love's Riddle, written at the time of his being a scholar in Westminster school, and dedicated by a copy of verses to Sir Kenelm Digby. He also wrote a Latin Comedy ent.i.tled Naufragium Joculare, or the Merry s.h.i.+pwreck. The first occasion of his entering into business, was, an elegy he wrote on the death of Mr. William Harvey, which introduced him to the acquaintance of Mr. John Harvey, the brother of his deceased friend, from whom he received many offices of kindness through the whole course of his life[3]. In 1643, being then master of arts, he was, among many others, ejected his college, and the university; whereupon, retiring to Oxford, he settled in St. John's College, and that same year, under the name of a scholar of Oxford, published a satire ent.i.tled the Puritan and the Papist. His zeal in the Royal cause, engaged him in the service of the King, and he was present in many of his Majesty's journies and expeditions; by this means he gained an acquaintance and familiarity with the personages of the court and of the gown, and particularly had the entire friends.h.i.+p of my lord Falkland, one of the princ.i.p.al secretaries of state.

During the heat of the civil war, he was settled in the family of the earl of St. Alban's, and accompanied the Queen Mother, when she was obliged to retire into France. He was absent from his native country, says Wood, about ten years, during which time, he laboured in the affairs of the Royal Family, and bore part of the distresses inflicted upon the ill.u.s.trious Exiles: for this purpose he took several dangerous journies into Jersey, Scotland, Flanders, Holland, and elsewhere, and was the princ.i.p.al instrument in maintaining a correspondence between the King and his Royal Consort, whose letters he cyphered and decyphered with his own hand.

His poem called the Mistress was published at London 1647, of which he himself says, ”That it was composed when he was very young. Poets (says he) are scarce thought free men of their company, without paying some duties and obliging themselves to be true to love. Sooner or later they must all pa.s.s through that trial, like some Mahometan monks, who are bound by their order once at least in their life, to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. But we must not always make a judgment of their manners from their writings of this kind, as the Romanists uncharitably do of Beza for a few lascivious sonnets composed by him in his youth. It is not in this sense that poetry is said to be a kind of painting: It is not the picture of the poet, but of things, and persons imagined by him. He may be in his practice and disposition a philosopher, and yet sometimes speak with the softness of an amorous Sappho. I would not be misunderstood, as if I affected so much gravity as to be ashamed to be thought really in love. On the contrary, I cannot have a good opinion of any man who is not at least capable of being so.”

What opinion Dr. Sprat had of Mr. Cowley's Mistress, appears by the following pa.s.sage extracted from his Life of Cowley. ”If there needed any excuse to be made that his love-verses took up so great a share in his works, it may be alledged that they were composed when he was very young; but it is a vain thing to make any kind of apology for that sort of writing. If devout or virtuous men will superciliously forbid the minds of the young to adorn those subjects about which they are most conversant, they would put them out of all capacity of performing graver matters, when they come to them: for the exercise of all men's wit must be always proper for their age, and never too much above it, and by practice and use in lighter arguments, they grow up at last to excell in the most weighty. I am not therefore ashamed to commend Mr.

Cowley's Mistress. I only except one or two expressions, which I wish I could have prevailed with those that had the right of the other edition to have left out; but of all the rest, I dare boldly p.r.o.nounce, that never yet was written so much on a subject so delicate, that can less offend the severest rules of morality. The whole pa.s.sion of love is intimately described by all its mighty train of hopes, joys and disquiets. Besides this amorous tenderness, I know not how in every copy there is something of more useful knowledge gracefully insinuated; and every where there is something feigned to inform the minds of wise men, as well as to move the hearts of young men or women.”

Our author's comedy, named the Guardian, he afterwards altered, and published under the t.i.tle of the Cutter of Coleman-Street. Langbaine says, notwithstanding Mr. Cowley's modest opinion of this play, it was acted not only at Cambridge, but several times afterwards privately, during the prohibition of the stage, and after the King's return publickly at Dublin; and always with applause. It was this probably that put the author upon revising it; after which he permitted it to appear publickly on the stage under a new t.i.tle, at his royal highness the Duke of York's theatre. It met with opposition at first from some who envied the author's unshaken loyalty; but afterwards it was acted with general applause, and was esteemed by the critics an excellent comedy.

In the year 1656 it was judged proper by those on whom Mr. Cowley depended, that he should come over into England, and under pretence of privacy and retirement, give notice of the situation of affairs in this nation. Upon his return he published a new edition of all his poems, consisting of four parts, viz.

1. Miscellanies.

2. The Mistress; or several copies of love-verses.

3. Pindarique Odes, written in imitation of the stile and manner of Pindar.

4. Davedeis, a sacred poem of the troubles of David in four books.