the power of his enemy may, without any violation of his integrity, regain his liberty, or preserve his life, by a promise of neutrality: for the stipulation gives the enemy nothing which he had not before; the neutrality of a captive may be always secured by his imprisonment or death. He that is at the disposal of another may not promise to aid him in any injurious act, because no power can compel active obedience. He may engage to do nothing, but not to do ill. There is reason to think that Cowley promised little. It 28 does not appear that his compliance gained him confidence enough to be trusted without security, for the bond of his bail was never cancelled; nor that it made him think himself secure, for at that dissolution of government, which followed the death of Oliver, he returned into France, where he resumed his former station, and staid till the Restoration'. 'He continued,' says his biographer, 'under these bonds till 29 the general deliverance'; it is therefore to be supposed that he did not go to France, and act again for the King, without the help Gre consent of his bondsman: that he did not shew his loyalty at the 'f. hazard of his friend, but by his friend's permission. Of the verses on Oliver's death, in which Wood's narrative 30 seems to imply something encomiastick, there has been no appearance. There is a discourse concerning his government, indeed, with verses intermixed, but such as certainly gained its author no friends among the abettors of usurpation 3. A doctor of physick, however, he was made at Oxford, in 31 December 1657; and in the commencement of the Royal Society, of which an account has been published by Dr. Birch, he appears ''Till near the time of the King's return.' Hurd's Cowley, i. 12. Sprat wrote, 'till the general redemption.' 3 in Cowley's Discourse by Way of Vision concerning the Government of Oliver Cromwell is a copy of verses written, he says, 'on the funeral day of the late man who made himself to be called Protector.' Eng. Poets, viii. 325, 7. In the same Discourse there are three other poems on Cromwell. Ib. pp. 338, 372, 375. Milton's 'Cromwell, our chief of men,' was bespattered by Cowley with such abuse as the following:- They say he invented (O Antichrist! Пovηpóv and & Toρós!) to sell St. Paul's to Hume quotes this Discourse. Hist. 4 busy among the experimental philosophers with the title of Doctor Cowley'. 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 2. 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 in the fifth and sixth, the uses of trees in heroick numbers. At the same time were produced from the same university the two great Poets, Cowley and Milton 3, 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*. 'He was elected on March 6, 1660-1. Birch's Hist.of the Royal Soc. ed. 1756, i. 17. I do not find him entered as taking any part in the proceedings. He is not in the list of Fellows drawn up on May 20, 1663. lb. p. 239. In his Proposition for the Advance- Johnson in 1756 reviewed Birch's 2 Hurd's Cowley, i. 34. Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall, iii. 249, after quoting from Claudian the description of the old man's trees, 'his old contemporary trees,' adds in 3 They were not contemporaries. Milton entered the University in 1624, and graduated as M.A. in 1632 (post, MILTON, 14 m.); Cowley entered in 1636. Ante, COWLEY, 8, and Appendix A. Post, COWLEY, 197. The Latin poetry of Deliciae Poetarum Scotorum would have done honour to any nation; at least, till the publication of May's Supplement, the English had very little to oppose.' JOHNSON, Works, ix. 23. Thomas May published in 1640 Supplementum Lucani. He translated also Lucan and his own Supplementum into English verse. his character see Life of Clarendon, i. 39 and Marvell's Tom May's Death. On his tomb in Westminster Abbey For If the Latin performances of Cowley and Milton be com- 34 pared, for May I hold to be superior to both, the advantage Mo 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, 35 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 delayed3. 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".' Cowley got neglect of The neglect of the court was not his only mortification: 36 having, by such alteration as he thought proper, fitted his old he was described as a man 'quem Anglicana Respublica habuit vindicem,' and as dying 'A° Libertatis MDCLO' Humanae Restitutae {110 At the Restoration his body was See Appendix B. Eng. Poets, vii. 228. It was out on May 31, 1660, two days after Restoration Day. Waller anticipated him by a day. Masson's Milton, vi. 12, 13; post, Waller, 68. 3 In the Preface to Cutter of Coleman Street, first acted in 1661, he says:-'This I do affirm, that from all which I have written I never received the least benefit; but, on the contrary, have felt sometimes the effects of malice and misfortune.' Hurd's Cowley, i. 105. 'He was by the most generous endeavours of the Earl of St. Albans designed to be master of the Savoy ; which, though granted to his merit by both the Charles's 1 and 2, yet by certain persons, enemies to the Muses, he lost that place.' Wood, Fasti Oxon. ii. 210. [According to a statement of Cowley's case (Cal. State Papers According to Hurd the master- Thou didst with faith and labour serve, And didst (if faith and labour can) Though she contracted was to thee Hurd's Cowley, i. 187. Whose verse shall live for ever to Th' ungrateful world that left such Oldham's Works, 1703, p. 420. Comedy of The Guardian for the stage, he produced it to the publick 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. 37 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.' 38 ཝ་ ་ 39 40 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 2. reason; For the rejection of this play it is difficult now to find the 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 chuse the time of their restoration [restitution] to begin a quarrel with them 3.' 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 5. This met with the usual fortune of complaints, and seems to have excited more contempt than pity. These unlucky incidents are brought, maliciously enough, 41 That Apollo gave heed to all he could say ; His vehement desire of retirement now came again upon 42 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 3.' 'He was now,' says the courtly Sprat, 'weary of the vexations 43 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 [forego all public employments and 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 [of] a moderate revenue below the malice and flatteries of fortune. So differently are things seen and so differently are they 44 shown; but actions are visible, though motives are secret. Cowley Th' uncomfortable shade Of the black yew's unlucky green, Mixt with the mourning willow's careful grey, Where reverend Cam cuts out his In A Session of the Poets, Suckling's Fragmenta Aurea, ed. 1648, P. 7. 2 On Colonel Tuke's Tragi-Comedy of the Adventures of Five Hours, Eng. Poets, vii. 254. Pepys, on Jan. 3 Fasti Oxon. ii. 210. Hurd's Cowley, i. 16. |