ALEXANDER V. BLAKE, PUBLISHER. THOMAS, COWPERTHWAIT, & CO., PHILADELPHIA. 1840. Du Halde's History of China Memoirs of the Court of Augustus, by Thomas 590 591 592 . 513 Four Letters from Sir I. Newton to Dr. Bentley 595 517 Preface to "An Essay on Milton's use and imi- tation of the Moderns in his Paradise Lost" 519 Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope The General History of Polybius, translated by Miscellanies on Moral and Religious Subjects, Historical and Critical Enquiry into Dr. Tytler's Preface to the Gentleman's Magazine, 1738 .544 Slanes Castle. The Buller of Buchan 584 585 LIVES OF THE ENGLISH POETS COWLEY. time, that his teachers never could bring it to retain the ordinary rules of grammar." THE Life of COWLEY, notwithstanding the penury of English biography, has been written by Dr. Sprat, an author whose pregnancy of imagin- This is an instance of the natural desire of man ation and elegance of language have deservedly set him high in the ranks of literature; but his to propagate a wonder. It is surely very difficult to tell any thing as it was heard, when Sprat zeal of friendship, or ambition of eloquence, has could not refrain from amplifying a commodious produced a funeral oration rather than a history: incident, though the book to which he prefixhe has given the character, not the life, of Cow-ed his narrative contained his confutation. A ley; for he writes with so little detail, that scarcely memory admitting some things, and rejecting any thing is distinctly known, but all is shown confused and enlarged through the mist of panegyric. others, an intellectual digestion that concocted the pulp of learning, but refused the husks, had the appearance of an instinctive elegance, of a particular provision made by Nature for literary politeness. But in the author's own honest relation, the marvel vanishes: he was, he says, such "an enemy to all constraint, that his master never could prevail on him to learn the rules without book." He does not tell that he could not learn the rules; but that, being able to perform his exercises without them, and being an enemy to constraint," he spared himself the labour. ABRAHAM COWLEY was born in the year one thousand six hundred and eighteen. His father was a grocer, whose condition Dr. Sprat conceals under the general appellation of a citizen; and, what would probably not have been less carefully suppressed, the omission of his name in the register of St. Dunstan's parish gives reason to suspect that his father was a sectary. Whoever he was, he died before the birth of his son, and consequently left him to the care of his mother; whom Wood represents as struggling earnestly to procure him a literary education, and who, as she lived to the age of eighty, had her solicitude re- have given such early proofs, not only of powers warded by seeing her son eminent, and, I hope, by of language, but of comprehension of things, as seeing him fortunate, and partaking his prosperity. to more tardy minds seem scarcely credible. But We know, now, at least, from Sprat's account, that he always acknowledged her care, and justly paid the dues of filial gratitude. Among the English poets, Cowley, Milton, and Pope, might be said "to lisp in numbers," and of the learned puerilities of Cowley there is no In the window of his mother's apartment lay Spenser's Fairy Queen; in which he very early took delight to read, till, by feeling the charms of verse, he became, as he relates, irrecoverabl a poet. Such are the accidents which, sometimes remembered, and perhaps sometimes forgotten, produce that particular designation of mind, and published till he had been some time at Campropensity for some certain science or employ- bridge. This comedy is of the pastoral kind, ment, which is commonly called genius. The which requires no acquaintance with the living true genius is a mind of large general powers, world, and therefore the time at which it was accidentally determined to some particular direc- composed adds little to the wonders of Cowley's tion. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great painter of minority. the present age, had the first fondness for his art excited by the perusal of Richardson's treatise. biographers, have been misled the By his mother's solicitation he was admitted * This volume was not published before 1633, when into Westminster School, where he was soon dis- Cowley was fifteen years old. Dr. Johnson, as well as tinguished. He was wont, says Sprat, to relate, portrait of Cowley being by mistake marked with the "That he had this defect in his memory at that, age of thirteen years.-R. |