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.

P. 117, No. cv. -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 seems in neither shape to yield 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 so little satisfied with the result, that, were this book to print again, I should recur to the earlier reading, which, however unsatisfactory, should not be disturbed, unless for such an emendation as carries conviction with it,

P. 120, No. cvi.-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.' This may have been so, 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 zs; and oftentimes a man is more than he does; leaves an impression of greatness on those who come in actual contact with him which 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 Mr. Hallam's 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, containing so accurate and so masterly a sketch of the past history of natural philosophy, we may well hesitate about jumping to the conclusion that his contemporaries were altogether wrong, rating him so highly as they did. 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.'

How

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:

'Thus Harvey sought for truth in Truth's own book,

The creatures; which by God Himself was writ,

And wisely thought 'twas fit

Not to read comments only upon it,

But on the original itself to look.

Methinks in art's great circle others stand,

Locked up together, hand in hand,

Every one leads as he is led,

The same bare path they tread,

And dance like fairies a fantastic round,

But neither change their motion nor their ground.'

The same thought reappears, and again remarkably expressed, although under quite different images, in his Ode to Mr. Hobbs. These are a few lines:

'We break up tombs with sacrilegious hands,

Old rubbish we remove.

To walk in ruins like vain ghosts we love,

And with fond divining wands

We search among the dead

For treasure buried,

Whilst still the liberal earth does hold

So many virgin mines of undiscovered gold.'

Dryden in some remarkable lines addressed to Dr. Charleton expresses the same sense of the freedom with which Bacon had set free the study of nature, and the bondage from which he had delivered it :

'The longest tyranny that ever swayed,

Was that wherein our ancestors betrayed
Their freeborn reason to the Stagirite,
And made his torch their universal light.
So truth, while only one supplied the State,
Grew scarce and dear, and yet sophisticate;
Still it was bought, like emp'ric wares or charms,
Hard words, sealed up with Aristotle's arms.'

1. 164-182: It ought not to be forgotten that this poem appeared first prefixed to Sprat's History of the Royal Society of London, London, 1667. Though not published till the year 1667, the year of Cowley's death, the book had in great part been printed, as Sprat informs us, two years before, which exactly agrees with Cowley's statement here. The position which the poem thus occupied should be kept in mind, otherwise the encomium on Sprat's History might seem dragged in with no sufficient motive, and merely out of motives of private friendship. It may be added that the praise is not at all so exaggerated as those who know Addison's tuneful prelate' only by his verse might suppose. The book has considerable merits, and Johnson speaks of it as in his day still keeping its place, and being read with pleasure. I only observed when it was too late to profit by the observation, that after 1. 143, three lines occur, on this the first publication of the poem, which, by a strange heedlessness, have dropt out of all subsequent editions. They are as follows:

'She with much stranger art than his that put
All the fliads in a nut,

The numerous work of life does into atoms shut.'

P. 129, No. cix.—This chorus, or fragment of a chorus, from the Thyestes of Seneca, beginning

Me dulcis saturet quies,
D D

and ending with these remarkable lines,

Illi mors gravis incubat,
Qui notus nimis omnibus
Ignotus moritur sibi,

seems to have had much attraction for moralists and poets in the seventeenth century. Beside this paraphrase of it by Sir Matthew Hale, prefixed to one of his Contemplations, there is a translation by Cowley, and a third, the best of all, by Marvell, of which these are the concluding lines:

'Who exposed to others' eyes,

Into his own heart never pries,
Death's to him a strange surprise.'

P. 130, No. cx.-I have detached these two stanzas from a longer poem of which they constitute the only valuable portion. George Wither (a most profuse pourer forth of English rhyme' Phillips calls him) was indeed so intolerable a proser in verse, so overlaid his good with indifferent or bad, that one may easily forget how real a gift he possessed, and sometimes showed that he possessed.

P. 131, No. cxii.-When Phillips, writing in 1675, styles Quarles the darling of our plebeian judgments,' he intimates the circle in which his popularity was highest, and helps us to understand the extreme contempt into which he afterwards fell, so that he who had a little earlier been hailed as

'that sweet seraph of our nation, Quarles,'

became a byeword for all that was absurdest and worst in poetry. The reacquaintance which I have made with him, while looking for some specimen of his verse worthy to be cited here, has shown me that his admirers, though they may have admired a good deal too much, had far better right than his despisers.-1. 25: To vie' is to put down a certain sum upon a card; to revie' is to cover this with a larger, by which the challenger becomes in turn the challenged.

P. 132, No. cxiii.-Milton's lines on Shakespeare cannot properly be counted an epitaph. But setting those aside, as not fairly coming into competition, this is, in my judgment, the finest and most affecting epitaph in the English language. Of Pope's there is not one which deserves to be compared with it. His are of art, artful, which this is no less, but this also of nature and natural. With all this it has grievous shortcomings. Death and eternity raise other issues concerning the departed besides those which are dealt with here. This epitaph contains two fine allusions to Virgil's Eneid, with which Dryden was of necessity so familiar. The first, that of 1. 7-10 to book v. l. 327–338. At the games with which

Eneas celebrates his father's funeral, Nisus and his younger friend Euryalus are among the competitors in the foot-race; Nisus, who is winning, slips, and Euryalus arrives the first at the goal, and carries off the prize. In the four concluding lines there is a beautiful allusion to the well-known passage, book vi. 1. 860-886, in which the poet deplores the early death of that young Marcellus, with which so many fair expectations of the imperial family and of the Roman people perished.

P. 133, No. cxiv.-Elizabeth, wife of Henry Hastings, fifth Earl of Huntingdon, is the lady commemorated in this fine epitaph, 'by him who says what he saw '—for this is the attestation to the truth of all that it asserts, which Lord Falkland, mindful of the ordinary untruthfulness of epitaphs, thinks it good to subscribe.

P. 136, No. cxix. --The writer of these lines commanded a vessel sent out in 1631 by some Bristol merchants for the discovery of the North-West passage. Frozen up in the ice, he passed a winter of frightful suffering on those inhospitable shores; many of his company sinking beneath the hardships of the time. The simple and noble manner in which these sufferings were borne he has himself left on record (Harris's Voyages, vol. i. pp. 600-606); how too, when at length the day of deliverance dawned, and the last evening which they should spend on that cruel coast had arrived-but he shall speak his own words:-' and now the sun was set, and the boat came ashore for us, whereupon after evening prayer we assembled and went up to take a last view of our dead; where leaning upon my arm on one of their tombs I uttered these lines; which, though perhaps they may procure laughter in the wiser sort, they yet moved my young and tender-hearted companions at that time to some compassion. To me they seem to have the pathos, better than any other, of truth.

P. 137, No. cxxi.-A few lines from this exquisite monody have found their way, but even these rarely, into some modern selections. The whole poem, inexpressibly tender and beautiful as it is, is included in Headley's Select Beauties, 1810, but in no other that I know. Henry King, afterwards Bishop of Chichester, married Anne, the eldest daughter of Robert Berkeley; she probably died in 1624, and, as we learn from the poem itself (see vv. 28, 29), in or about her twenty-fourth year. It would be interesting to know whether this was the lady, all hope to whose hand he at one time supposed he must for ever renounce, and did renounce in those other lines, hardly less beautiful, which he has called The Surrender, and which will be found at p. 65 of this volume. Henry King's Poems have been carefully edited by the Rev. T. Hannah, London, 1843.

P. 141, No. cxxiii.--A rough rugged piece of verse, as indeed