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APPENDIX B (PAGE 13)

'Cowley's taste was false and unclassical. In his six books on plants he imitates Martial rather than Virgil, and has given us more epigrams than descriptions. He had a most happy manner of imitating the easy manner of Horace's epistles.' J. WARTON, Pope's Works, ii. 268.

'May is certainly a sonorous dactylist. His skill is in parody. . . . Milton's Latin poems may be justly considered as legitimate classical compositions. Cowley's Latinity presents a mode of diction half Latin and half English. Milton was a more perfect scholar.' T. Warton, Milton's Poems, 1791, Preface, pp. 17-21.

'Casimir's style and diction are really classical; while Cowley, who resembles Casimir in many respects, completely barbarizes his Latinity, and even his metre, by the heterogeneous nature of his thoughts.' COLERIDGE, Biog. Lit. ii. 295.

'There is no Latin verse of Cowley worth preservation. May, indeed, is an admirable imitator of Lucan; so good a one that, if in Lucan you find little poetry, in May you find none. But his verses sound well on the anvil.' LANDOR, Imag. Conv. iv. 291. 'Small as is the portion of glory which accrues to Milton from his Latin poetry, there are single sentences in it, ay, single images, worth all that our island had produced before.' Ib. p. 299. See COWLEY, 137; post, MILTON, 8, 10.

APPENDIX C (PAGE 14)

The title of the play is Cutter of Coleman Street. Cutter is described as 'a merry sharking Fellow about the Town, pretending to have been a Colonel in the King's Army.' To win a rich wife 'o' the Fifth Monarchy Faith' he talks in the following fashion :-'I am to return [after death] upon a Purple Dromedary, which signifies Magistracy, with an Axe in my Hand that is call'd Reformation, and I am to strike with that Axe upon the Gate of Westminster-Hall, and cry Down Babylon, and the Building call'd Westminster-Hall is to run away, and cast itself into the River, and then Major-General Harrison is to come in green Sleeves from the North upon a Sky-colour'd Mule, which signifies heavenly Instruction.' Cowley's Works, 1707, ii. 802, 851. In the Epilogue mention is made of 'The Fifth Monarch's Court in Coleman Street.' Neal, in his History of the Puritans, 1822, iv. 278, mentions 'the little conventicle in Coleman Street, where Venner warmed his admirers with passionate expectations of a fifth universal monarchy, under the personal reign of King Jesus upon earth.'

'Dec. 16, 1661. After dinner to the Opera, where there was a new play (Cutter of Coleman Street) made in the year 1658, with reflections much upon the late times; and it being the first time, the pay was doubled.... A very good play it is-it seems of Cowley's making.' PEPYS, Diary, i. 305.

Cowley had a share in the Duke of York's Theatre, where the play was acted. Cunningham, Lives of the Poets, i. 63. 'It was revived about 1730 at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields.' Biog. Dram. ii. 148.

APPENDIX D (PAGE 16)

Cowley, speaking of his desire to be 'master of a small house and large garden,' and of his 'abandoning all ambitions and hopes in this world,' continues :-'I am gone out from Sodom, but I am not yet arrived at my little Zoar. O let me escape thither (is it not a little one?), and my soul shall live [Genesis xix. 20]. Eng. Poets, ix. 68.

In The Wish he writes:

'Ah yet, ere I descend to th' grave,

May I a small house and large garden have,
And a few friends, and many books, both true,

Both wise, and both delightful too!'-b. viii. 29.

Johnson's authority for Cowley's lease of the Queen's lands is Wood, Fasti Oxon. ii. 210. Aubrey tells how 'George, duke of Bucks, came to the earl of St. Albans, and told him he would buy such a lease in Chertsey, belonging to the queen mother. Said the earle to him, "that is beneath your grace to take a lease." "That is all one," qd he, "I desire to have the favour to buy it for my money." He bought it, and then freely bestowed it on his beloved Cowley.' Brief Lives,

i. 190.

Cowley writes in his Essay Of Greatness:-'When you have pared away all the vanity, what solid and natural contentment does there remain which may not be had with £500 a year?' Eng. Poets, ix. 84.

'He who would... discover his acquaintance with splendour and magnificence may talk, like Cowley, of... the paucity of nature's wants, and the inconveniencies of superfluity, and at last, like him, limit his desires to £500 a year.' JOHNSON, The Rambler, No. 202. In Cowley's time £500 a year would perhaps be equal to £2,000 a year

now.

See Eng. Poets, ix. 129, for Cowley's Epitaphium vivi Auctoris, and Addison's Works, vi. 536, for Addison's translation.

APPENDIX E (PAGE 19)

Wordsworth writes of 'that class of curious thinkers whom Johnson has strangely styled metaphysical poets.' Wordsworth's Works, ed. 1859, vi. 365. 'The designation,' says Southey, 'is not fortunate, but so much respect is due to Johnson that it would be unbecoming to substitute, even if it were easy to propose, one which might be unexceptionable.' Southey's Cowper, ii. 127. In what sense did Johnson use the term? In his Dictionary he defines metaphysical, 1. versed in metaphysicks; relating to metaphysicks; 2. In Shakespeare it means supernatural or preternatural. Metaphysicks he defines, 'Ontology; the doctrine of the general affections of substances existing.' These definitions do not help us much. We are more helped by his saying that 'he hated to hear people whine about metaphysical distresses, when there was so much want and hunger in the world.' H. More's Memoirs, i. 249. Swift, replying in his youth to a charge that he was forming an imprudent attachment with a girl, wrote:-'If you knew how metaphysical I am

that way you would little fear I should venture on one who has given so much occasion to tongues.' Swift's Works, xv. 241. 'Those,' wrote South, 'who neither do good turns, nor give good looks, nor speak good words, have a love strangely subtile and metaphysical.' Sermons, ed. 1823, ii. 304. Metaphysical in these passages means not so much supernatural or preternatural as unnatural, unreal, fantastic. These poets, says Johnson, 'neither copied nature nor life.' COWLEY, 52. Dr. Warton speaks of 'Johnson's dissertation on Cowley and his fantastic style,' and of 'his discussion on false and unnatural thoughts.' Warton's Pope's Works, i. 267.

See

Johnson may have borrowed the word from Dryden, who wrote:'Donne affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy,' &c. Dryden's Works, xiii. 6. If we could be sure that Johnson had seen Spence's Anecdotes before he finished the Life of Cowley (in July, 1778. John. Letters, ii. 68), he might have borrowed the word from Pope, who said :Cowley, as well as Davenant, borrowed his metaphysical style from Donne.' Spence's Anec. p. 173.

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Cowley, after mentioning 'metaphysic, physic, morality, mathematics, logic, rhetoric,' continues:-'which are all, I grant, good and useful faculties (except only metaphysic, which I do not know whether it be any thing or no).' Eng. Poets, ix. 44.

Warburton applies metaphysical to the machinery (post, MILTON, 222) of an epic. He says of The Rape of the Lock:-'As the civil part is intentionally debased by the choice of an insignificant action, so should the metaphysical by the use of some very extravagant system.' Warburton's Pope, i. 169. Burke calls Don Quixote 'the metaphysic Knight of the sorrowful countenance.' Works, 1808, v. 36.

"The "metaphysical poets" (writes Sir Leslie Stephen) are courtier pedants. They represent the intrusion into poetry of the love of dialectical subtlety encouraged by the still prevalent system of scholastic disputation.' Dict. Nat. Biog. xii. 382.

In the first edition of the Lives, after the words 'the works of Cowley,' followed, 'the last of the race.' Gray, classifying the English poets, writes: A third Italian school, full of conceit, began in Queen Elizabeth's reign, continued under James and Charles I by Donne, Crashaw, Cleveland; carried to its height by Cowley, and ending perhaps in Sprat.' Mitford's Gray, Preface, p. 112. For Sprat's imitation of Cowley see post, SPRAT, 22.

APPENDIX F (PAGE 19)

'True wit is nature to advantage dress'd;

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.'

Essay on Criticism, 1. 297.

"That, Sir," cried Dr. Johnson, "is a definition both false and foolish. Let wit be dressed how it will, it will equally be wit, and neither the more nor the less for any advantage dress can give it.' Mme. d'Arblay's Diary, ii. 164.

Pope follows Boileau, of whom Addison writes :-'Give me leave to mention what he has so very well enlarged upon in the preface to his works, that wit and fine writing doth not consist so much in advancing things that are new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable turn.' Spectator, No. 253.

'Un bon mot n'est bon mot qu'en ce qu'il dit une chose que chacun pensait, et qu'il la dit d'une manière vive, fine et nouvelle.' BOILEAU, Euvres, 1747, i. Preface, p. 61.

South, in 1660, said:-'Wit in divinity is nothing else but sacred truths suitably expressed.' Sermons, iii. 33.

Dryden, in 1675, defined wit as 'a propriety of thoughts and words, or, in other terms, thoughts and words elegantly adapted to the subject.' Works, v. 124. See also ib. vii. 228.

Addison, in The Spectator, No. 62, says of this definition :-'If this be a true definition of wit I am apt to think that Euclid was the greatest wit that ever set pen to paper. . . . If it be a true one, I am sure Mr. Dryden was not only a better poet but a greater wit than Mr. Cowley.' Johnson, in his Dictionary, defines wit as 'sentiments produced by quickness of fancy.' Peter Cunningham examines the question in N. & Q. 3 S. v. 30.

APPENDIX G (PAGE 22)

Giovanni Battista Marini, or Marino, was born in 1569 and died in 1625.

Pope wrote of Crashaw :-'He formed himself upon Petrarch, or rather upon Marino. His thoughts... are oftentimes far-fetched, and too often strained and stiffened to make them appear the greater.' Pope's Works (Elwin and Courthope), vi. 117.

'The seductive faults, the dulcia vitia of Cowley, Marini, or Darwin, might reasonably be thought capable of corrupting the public judgment for half a century.' COLERIDGE, Biog. Lit. 1847, i. 72.

'No one has ever denied genius to Marino, who corrupted not merely the taste of Italy, but that of all Europe, for nearly a century.' BYRON, Works, 1854, ix. 79.

'Johnson has mistaken the character of Marino. Marino abounds in puerile conceits; but they are not far-fetched, like those of Donne or Cowley; they generally lie on the surface, and often consist of nothing more than a mere play upon words; so that, if to be a punster is to be a metaphysician, Marino is a poetical Heraclitus.' CARY, English Poets, 1846, p. 86.

In Pope's Works (Elwin and Courthope), v. 52, is an interesting criticism by Mr. Courthope of Johnson's account of the rise of the metaphysical poets, and an explanation of the extraordinary outburst of the witty or "metaphysical" writing between the middle of the sixteenth and the middle of the seventeenth centuries.'

DENHAM

F Sir JOHN DENHAM very little is known but what

1OF

is related of him by Wood' or by himself?.

2 He was born at Dublin in 1615, the only son of Sir John Denham, of Little Horsely in Essex, then chief baron of the Exchequer in Ireland3, and of Eleanor, daughter of Sir Garret Moore, baron of Mellefont".

3 Two years afterwards his father, being made one of the barons of the Exchequer in England 5, brought him away from his native country, and educated him in London.

4 In 1631 he was sent to Oxford, where he was considered 'as a dreaming young man, given more to dice and cards than study'; and therefore gave no prognosticks of his future eminence, nor was suspected to conceal under sluggishness and laxity a genius born to improve the literature of his country?.

5

When he was three years afterwards removed to Lincoln's Inn he prosecuted the common law with sufficient appearance

8

Ath. Oxon. iii. 823. 'His eie was a kind of light goose-gray, not big, but it had a strange piercingness, not as to shining and glory, but (like a Momus) when he conversed with you he look't into your very thoughts.' AUBREY, Brief Lives, i. 220.

2 In the dedication of his poems to Charles II. Eng. Poets, ix. 155.

3 [In 1609 he was made Chief Baron, and in 1612 Chief Justice of the King's Bench in Ireland. Foss's Judges, 1870, p. 215. Little Horkesley is the correct name of the place.]

4 [Sir Gerald or Garret Moore, Kt., first Baron Mellefont (Co. Louth) and Viscount Moore of Drogheda. Cokayne's Complete Peerage.]

5 For Bacon's speech to him on his appointment see Bacon's Works, 1803, iv. 504. He lived long enough to give judgement in Hampden's favour in the Ship-Money Case.

Gardiner's Hist. of Eng. iii. 81; viii. 279.,

To Trinity College. He entered on Nov. 18, 1631. Aubrey's Brief Lives, i. 217; N. & Q. 4 S. x. 250.

7 'Being looked upon as a slow and dreaming young man by his seniors and contemporaries, and given more to cards and dice than his study, they could never then in the least imagine that he could ever enrich the world with his fancy, or issue of his brain, as he afterwards did.' Athenae Oxon. iii. 823.

'He was the dreamingst young fellow.... When he had played away all his money he would play away his father's wrought rich gold cappes.' AUBREY, Brief Lives, i. 217.

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8 He was admitted into the Society of that Inn on April 26, in the seventh year of the reign of King Charles [1631].' N. & Q. 4 S. x.

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