TO A.D. 1684.] BOILEAU'S ART POÊTIQUE. RoscomMON. 669 Bossu (born 1631, died 168) published in 1675 a treatise on the Epic, which became the critical authority upon that subject. René Rapin (born 1621, died 1687), who wrote, in four books, a Latin poem "Of Gardens," was so much esteemed that Dryden said he was 66 sufficient, were all other critics lost, to teach anew the rules of writing." The Earl of Roscommon, who died in 1684, was bred in the same school, followed its fashions, and wrote about writing. He translated into verse Horace's Art of Poetry, translated into verse Virgil's sixth Eclogue, one or two Odes of Horace, and a passage from Guarini's "Pastor Fido." Of his original writing the most important piece is an Essay on Translated Verse, carefully polished in the manner of Boileau, sensible, and often very happy in expression. Himself, in a corrupt time, a poet of "unspotted lays," he was true to his doctrine that "Immodest words admit of no defence; For want of decency is want of sense." When he tells the translator that he must thoroughly understand what he is translating, he says. "While in your thoughts you find the least debate, You may confound, but never can translate. You still will this through all disguises show, For none explain more clearly than they know." He pities from his soul unhappy men compelled by want to prostitute the pen; but warns the rich : And let no man mistake every stir to write verse for a sign of power: "Beware what spirit rages in your breast; With all its great faults, the court of the Restoration must be credited with a good society of men of high rank who made it a point of fashion to cultivate their minds, acquire, according to the new standard of France, a fine critical taste, write verse themselves as Lord Mulgrave wrote, "Without his song no fop is to be found,”-receive sweet incense of praise from poorer writers, and give in return for it a kindly patronage. John Sheffield (b. 1649, d. 1721) became by his father's death Earl of Mulgrave, at the age of nine. At seventeen he was in the fleet against the Dutch, and he served afterwards also in fleet and army. He was made Duke of Buckinghamshire in ? "As all is dulness where the Fancy's bad; Fancy is but the Feather of the Pen; Reason is that substantial, useful part, Which gains the Head; while t'other wins the Heart." Lord Mulgrave placed Shakespeare and Fletcher at the head of modern drama; but wrote some years afterwards two tragedies, Julius Cæsar and Marcus Brutus, in which he set his own taste above Shakespeare's. Profoundly ignorant of the real unity of plan in Shakespeare's "Julius Cæsar," and of the place of tyrannicide at the heart of the drama, the polite patron and cultivator of literature in the new manner of France saw that Shakespeare could not be saved by the dramatic gospel of Corneille, and reconstructed his "Julius Cæsar," with the unities respected: “This play begins the day before Cæsar's death, and ends an hour after it." His rebuilding threw out material enough for another play, the tragedy of "Marcus Brutus." Here "the play begins the day before the battle of Philippi, and ends with it; but Lord Mulgrave regretted the inevitable change scene from Athens to Philippi, whereby, he said, he "Commits one crime that needs an Act of Grace, Comparison of Shakespeare in his habit as he lived, with Shakespeare as dignified with a Louis Quatorze wig by Lord Mulgrave, illustrates very well the weak side of the French influence on English literature. The polite lord even corrected Antony's speech over Cæsar's body. Shakespeare made him say: "The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones." Bones Vulgar and unpleasant. His lordship polished this TO A.D. 1685.J LORD MULGRAVE. ABRAHAM COWLEY. 671 into "The good is often buried in their graves." Each play has a closing thought to mark the adapter's want of sympathy with Brutus. Indeed, Lord Mulgrave had written an ode in depreciation of Brutus as reply to Cowley's in his praise. 24. Abraham Cowley (ch. viii. § 48; ix. § 22) published in 1662 two books in Latin verse Of Plants, which sang of herbs in the manner of the elegies by Ovid and Tibullus. Four other books were added: two upon flowers in the various measures of Catullus and Horace; and two upon trees, in the manner of Virgil's "Georgics." The last book is patriotic and political. The British oak, in an assembly of the trees, enlarges upon the king's troubles and the beginning of the Dutch War. This work, Plantarum, Libri VI., was first published complete with Cowley's other Latin poems, in 1678. Cowley, after the Restoration, was neglected by the court, and owed his means of retirement to the good-will of Lord St. Albans, whom he had served as secretary, and the Duke of Buckingham. His Cutter of Coleman Street, which was his juvenile play of The Guardian in an altered form, was censured as a satire upon the king's party. He was also guilty of an ode in which Brutus was honoured, and it is said that a request to the king for some recognition of his faithful service to the royal family in its adversity was met by Charles II. with the answer, "Mr. Cowley's pardon is his reward." Cowley translated two of Pindar's odes, the Second Olympic and the Third Nemean, turned into a Pindaric ode the thirty-fourth chapter of Isaiah, and wrote odes of his own in the same manner. He had a lively fancy and a generous mind, capable of real elevation of thought, although for high flight as a poet his wings were too much clogged with ornament. He died in July, 1667, the year of the publication of that Annus Mirabilis in which the writing even of Dryden still had traces of the later Euphuism. But the Pindaric ode, as an imitation from the ancients, became one of the recognised forms of verse under the new influence. Neither Cowley nor any other of these new writers of Pindarics came near to Ben Jonson, whose noble "Pindaric Ode on the Death of Sir H. Morison" was true to the ancient model. But now, i a poet, bound by rule, and condemned to the heroic couplet as the safe classical measure, wished for a little liberty to be wilful in metre and audacious in thought, he could still be polite and classical by taking out his freedom under shadow of the name of a Pindaric ode. Cowley said, in his "Ode to Brutus." "From thy strict rule some think that thou didst swerve (Mistaken honest men) in Cæsar's blood; What mercy could the tyrant's life deserve From him who killed himself rather than serve !" Lord Mulgrave, in his argumentative Pindaric" Ode on Brutus," in reply to Cowley, followed the poet's ode all through with his antagonism. When quoting one passage he could not keep his polite taste from "improving" it, and thus called attention in a note to the fact that he had done so: "In repeating these four verses of Mr. Cowley, I have done an unusual thing; for notwithstanding that he is my adversary in the argument, and a very famous one too, I could not endure to let so fine a thought remain as ill-expressed in this ode as it is in his; which anybody may find by comparing them together. But I would not be understood as if I pretended to correct Mr. Cowley, tho' expression was not his best talent: For, as I have mended these few verses of his, I doubt not but he could have done as much for a great many of mine." Cowley remained true to his opinions on the great conflict before the Restoration, but he had nothing in common with this intellectual foppery, or with the course of life at the court of Charles II. He passed, therefore, his last seven or eight years by the Thames, “in calm of mind, all passion spent," away from the stir of London, first at Barn Elms, where he had a dangerous fever, and then at Chertsey. The wise thoughtfulness of these last years is shown by Cowley's Essays in Verse and Prose. Although he was a man who found much pleasure in solitude, and is said often to have left the room when a woman entered, he animated these essays with the love of liberty in a social form. Solitude meant liberty to think. "The first Minister of State," said Cowley, "has not so much business in public as the wise man has in private." The private station, not in bonds to poverty nor under the restraints of artificial form, was his ideal of a freeman's life, "with so much knowledge and love of piety and philosophy (that is, the study of God's laws and of his creatures) as may afford him matter enough never to be idle, though without business; and never to be melancholy, though without sin or vanity." And again, "If life should a well-ordered poem be Who joins true profit with the best delight), A. D. 1685.] COWLEY'S ESSAYS. Samuel BUTLER. The matter shall be grave, the numbers loose and free; It shall not keep one settled pace of time, In the same tune it shall not chime, Nor shall each day just to its neighbour rhime. A thousand liberties it shall dispense, And yet shall manage all without offence Or to the sweetness of the sound, or greatness of the sense.” 673 One source of the charm of Cowley's Essays is that they came straight from the heart, and that there is this unity of thought in their variety of treatment. Whatever his theme-Liberty, or Solitude, or Obscurity, or Greatness, or Avarice, or the Danger of an Honest Man in Much Company, or the Shortness of Life and the Uncertainty of Riches, or Nature in the Fields and in the Garden, or if he was only giving verse translation of Claudian's "Old Man of Verona," Horace's "Country Mouse,' or those lines from the second book of Virgil's "Georgics" which begin "O fortunatos nimium," or Martial's "Vis fieri Liber?"-the theme is always one,-Peace in the form of life which gives the highest Freedom to fit use of a full mind. 25. In excuse for the king's indifference to Cowley, it may be said that as there was no possible accord in the vibration of the two minds, one could get no tone out of the other. Why, then, did Charles also neglect Samuel Butler, who aided the court party with lively jest against the Puritans, and was in much need of friendly patronage? Charles shone in shallow mimicry of earnest men, and could put all his mind into the telling of an idle story; he enjoyed ridicule of his adversaries, and he therefore found much to enjoy in "Hudibras." But it was the work of a man who laboured and read, and who liked work. His Majesty liked sauntering through life. He preferred the company of Killigrew (§ 2) and men whose jests were idle; but even then he was apt to forget their faces if they were a week out of his sight, and Butler was too proud to stand in the throng of the court suitors. Samuel Butler was born in February, 1612, at Strensham, Worcestershire, the fifth of seven children of a small farmer, who had sent him to the college school at Worcester. He began life as clerk to a justice of the peace, Mr. Jefferies, of Earl's Croombe, and he then amused himself with music and painting. Probably at this time he compiled in law French a complete syllabus of "Coke upon Littleton;" there also existed in Butler's handwriting a French Dictionary, compiled and transcribed by him. Afterwards Butler came into the service of the Earl of Kent, at Wrest, in Bedfordshire. He W |