will lead to a renewal of interest in Cowley's Olympique and Nemean Odes, and to a demand for the new edition which the Cambridge University Press has just issued. A worse thing might happen than that, as a stimulus to our laureates of all degrees, a prize should be decreed to the best Ode written "in imitation of the style and manner," not of Pindar, but of Cowley.

Satire was one of the few literary genres which Cowley did not attempt, whereas Marvell's irony was of the savage school of Juvenal or Swift, rather than of the more urbane Horace. The Latinity of both was on a high level. Cowley's verse was often highly charged with conceits, somewhat metaphysical, and his eulogies and panegyrics carried flattery to its full flight on far-fetched and soaring metaphoralthough he could at times be natural, simple, and full of feeling, as in his elegy on the death of his friend William Harvey, which here and there strikes a tone as deep and true as the Thyrsis of Matthew Arnold. But of Hobbes he writes:

I never yet the Living Soul could see
But in thy books and thee.

Falkland, of whom, as Bishop Sprat tells us, "he had the entire friendship—an affection contracted by

the agreement of their learning and manners"-he adulates with more pardonable hyperbole :

Learning would rather chuse

Her Bodley, or her Vatican to lose;

All things that are but writ and printed there,
In his unbounded breast engraven are.

And before Pope, he discovered that

Let Nature and let Art do what they please,
When all's done Life is an incurable Disease.

As writers in praise of Gardens and Country life, the palm will, I think, be given by all modern readers to Andrew Marvell. Genuine as is the love of both for the Country-and to Cowley the desire for retirement and repose was assuredly no pose— Cowley's voice is that of the scholar and the student, and his verse smells of the lamp and grates of the file, while Marvell's song brings the magic of the meadow, the breath of the flowers and new-mown hay, the swish of the scythe, and the lamp of the glow-worm right across the centuries, before our eyes and into our hearts-and we love Marvell's poems, while at the best we can only admire and sympathise with Cowley's verse.

The latter's elaborate set-piece on Plants we recognise at once for what it purported to be, viz. an

elaborate treatise in the Virgilian manner upon Botany and the Physic Garden; it was indeed Cowley's contribution to the Literature of Medicine. It is interesting as the forerunner of Erasmus Darwin's "Botanical Garden" 1 and Goethe's "Metamorphosis of Plants," 2 to name only two of the more famous attempts to poetise the science of Botany. We quote Cowley's own pharmaceutical metaphor: "The two little Books" (subsequently expanded into six) "are offer'd as small Pills made up of sundry Herbs, and gilt with a certain brightness of Style; he does not desire to press out their Liquor crude in a simple enumeration, but as it were in a Limbeck by the gentle Heat of Poetry to distil and extract their Spirits."

it is per

As I have said so much about this poem, haps only fair to Cowley and to the reader, to give a specimen of it; and I take his comparison of a Walnut with the Brain-pan of a man, as typical alike of the ingenuity of Cowley, of the medical tendency of the poem, and of the treatment of his

1 It is curious that Krause, when discussing the genesis and predecessors of Darwin's poem, omits all mention of Cowley's, which had strong affinity with it.

2 So admirably translated by Professor Blackie in his "Wisdom of Goethe."

theme, which looks as if he accepted the Doctrine of

Signatures:

Nor can this Head-like Nut, shap'd like the Brain
Within, be said that Form by chance to gain,
Or Caryon1 call'd by learned Greeks in vain.
For Membranes soft as Silk, her Kernel bind,
Whereof the inmost is of tendrest kind,

Like those which on the Brain 2 of Man we find;
All which are in a Seam-join'd Shell enclos'd,
Which of this Brain the Skull may be suppos'd.
This very Skull envelop'd is again

In a green Coat, his Pericranion.

Lastly, that no Objection may remain,

To thwart her near Alliance to the Brain;

She nourishes the Hair, remembring how

Herself deform'd without her leaves does show :

I ought to add that Cowley wrote the poem in Latin, and the translation of Book V., from which the above is extracted, was the work of Nahum Tate, who succeeded Shadwell as Poet-Laureate in 1690, having in 1697 published a poem on the "Art of Angling" which went into several editions, but which I do not remember Mr. Andrew Lang baiting his literary hook with.

Cowley's ashes were deemed worthy to rest in Westminster Abbey, near those of Chaucer and

1 Κάρυων

= a nut.

2 Mater pia and dura Mater.-Cowley's Note.

Spenser, and the King delivered himself of what Sprat considered his best epitaph: "that Mr. Cowley had not left a better man behind him in England." Perhaps a more fitting one were the words of his brother poet, Sir John Denham :—

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 Cloaths did wear.

In Marvell's poem, "Upon Appleton House," addressed to Lord Fairfax, in Hudibrastic metre, (too long to quote at length,) are continuous allusions to Gardens. One of the early owners, it seems, had a touch of Uncle Toby in his composition:

Who, when retired here to peace,
His warlike studies could not cease;
But laid these gardens out in sport
In the just figure of a fort;

And with five bastions it did fence
As aiming one for ev'ry sense.

See how the flow'rs as at parade
Under their colours stand displaid;
Each regiment in order grows,
That of the tulips, pinke and rose.

Tulips, in several colours barr'd,

Were then the Switzers of our Guard.1

1 Allusion to the Papal Swiss Guard, whose striped uniforms still in use were designed by Michael Angelo.

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