“I can’t choose (now I am upon the fatal subject) but make one observation or two more upon the various rencontres and adventures I met withall, in presenting my books to those who were likely to accept of them for their own information, or for that of helping a poor scholar, or for their own vanity or ostentation.
“Some parsons would hollow to raise the whole house and posse of the domestics to raise a poor crown; at last all that flutter ends in sending Jack or Tom out to change a guinea, 35 and then ’tis reckoned over half-a-dozen times before the fatal crown can be picked out, which must be taken as it is given, with all the parade of almsgiving, and so to be received with all the active and passive ceremonial of mendication and alms-receiving—as if the books, printing and paper, were worth nothing at all, and as if it were the greatest charity for them to touch them or let them be in the house; ‘For I shall never read them,’ says one of the five-shilling-piece chaps; ‘I have no time to look in them,’ says another; ‘’Tis so much money lost,’ says a grave dean; ‘My eyes being so bad,’ said a bishop, ‘that I can scarce read at all.’ ‘What do you want with me?’ said another; ‘Sir, I presented you the other day with my Athenæ Britannicæ, being the last part published.’ ‘I don’t want books, take them again; I don’t understand what they mean.’ ‘The title is very plain,’ said I, ‘and they are writ mostly in English.’ ‘I’ll give you a crown for both the volumes.’ ‘They stand me, sir, in more than that, and ’tis for a bare subsistence I present or sell them; how shall I live?’ ‘I care not a farthing for that; live or die, ’tis all one to me.’ ‘Damn my master!’ said Jack, ‘’twas but last night he was commending your books and your learning to the skies; and now he would not care if you were starving before his eyes; nay, he often makes game at your clothes, though he thinks you the greatest scholar in England.’ ”
Such was the life of a learned mendicant author! The scenes which are here exhibited appear to have disordered an intellect which had never been firm; in vain our author attempted to adapt his talents to all orders of men, still “To the crazy ship all winds are contrary.”
COWLEY.
OF HIS MELANCHOLY.
The mind of Cowley was beautiful, but a querulous tenderness in his nature breathes not only through his works, but influenced his habits and his views of human affairs. His temper and his genius would have opened to us, had not the strange decision of Sprat and Clifford withdrawn that full correspondence of his heart which he had carried on many years. These letters were suppressed because, as Bishop Sprat acknowledges, “in this kind of prose Mr. 36 Cowley was excellent! They had a domestical plainness, and a peculiar kind of familiarity.” And then the florid writer runs off, that, “in letters, where the souls of men should appear undressed, in that negligent habit they may be fit to be seen by one or two in a chamber, but not to go abroad into the streets.” A false criticism: which not only has proved to be so since their time by Mason’s “Memoirs of Gray,” but which these friends of Cowley might have themselves perceived, if they had recollected that the Letters of Cicero to Atticus form the most delightful chronicles of the heart—and the most authentic memorials of the man. Peck obtained one letter of Cowley’s, preserved by Johnson, and it exhibits a remarkable picture of the miseries of his poetical solitude. It is, perhaps, not too late to inquire whether this correspondence was destroyed as well as suppressed? Would Sprat and Clifford have burned what they have told us they so much admired?[27]
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Fortunately for our literary sympathy, the fatal error of these fastidious critics has been in some degree repaired by the admirable genius himself whom they have injured. When Cowley retreated from society, he determined to draw up an apology for his conduct, and to have dedicated it to his patron, Lord St. Albans. His death interrupted the entire design; but his Essays, which Pope so finely calls “the language of his heart,” are evidently parts of these precious Confessions. All of Cowley’s tenderest and undisguised feelings have therefore not perished. These Essays now form a species of composition in our language, a mixture of prose and verse—the man with the poet—the self-painter has sat to himself, and, with the utmost simplicity, has copied out the image of his soul.
Why has this poet twice called himself the melancholy Cowley? He employed no poetical cheville[28] for the metre of a verse which his own feelings inspired.
Cowley, at the beginning of the Civil War, joined the Royalists at Oxford; followed the queen to Paris; yielded his days and his nights to an employment of the highest confidence, that of deciphering the royal correspondence; he transacted their business, and, almost divorcing himself from his neglected muse, he yielded up for them the tranquillity so necessary to the existence of a poet. From his earliest days he tells us how the poetic affections had stamped themselves on his heart, “like letters cut into the bark of a young tree, which, with the tree, will grow proportionably.”
He describes his feelings at the court:—
“I saw plainly all the paint of that kind of life the nearer I came to it—that beauty which I did not fall in love with when, for aught I knew, it was real, was not like to bewitch or 38 entice me when I saw it was adulterate. I met with several great persons whom I liked very well, but could not perceive that any part of their greatness was to be liked or desired. I was in a crowd of good company, in business of great and honourable trust; I eat at the best table, and enjoyed the best conveniences that ought to be desired by a man of my condition; yet I could not abstain from renewing my old schoolboy’s wish, in a copy of verses to the same effect:—
| Well then! I now do plainly see, This busie world and I shall ne’er agree!” |
After several years’ absence from his native country, at a most critical period, he was sent over to mix with that trusty band of loyalists, who, in secrecy and in silence, were devoting themselves to the royal cause. Cowley was seized on by the ruling powers. At this moment he published a preface to his works, which some of his party interpreted as a relaxation of his loyalty. He has been fully defended. Cowley, with all his delicacy of temper, wished sincerely to retire from all parties; and saw enough among the fiery zealots of his own, to grow disgusted even with Royalists.
His wish for retirement has been half censured as cowardice by Johnson; but there was a tenderness of feeling which had ill-formed Cowley for the cunning of party intriguers, and the company of little villains. About this time he might have truly distinguished himself as “The melancholy Cowley.”
I am only tracing his literary history for the purpose of this work: but I cannot pass without noticing the fact, that this abused man, whom his enemies were calumniating, was at this moment, under the disguise of a doctor of physic, occupied by the novel studies of botany and medicine; and as all science in the mind of the poet naturally becomes poetry, he composed his books on plants in Latin verse.
At length came the Restoration, which the poet zealously celebrated in his “Ode” on that occasion. Both Charles the First and Second had promised to reward his fidelity with the mastership of the Savoy; but, Wood says, “he lost it by certain persons enemies of the muses.” Wood has said no more; and none of Cowley’s biographers have thrown any light on the circumstance: perhaps we may discover this literary calamity.
That Cowley caught no warmth from that promised sunshine 39 which the new monarch was to scatter in prodigal gaiety, has been distinctly told by the poet himself; his muse, in “The Complaint,” having reproached him thus:—
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Thou young prodigal, who didst so loosely waste Of all thy youthful years, the good estate— Thou changeling then, bewitch’d with noise and show, Wouldst into courts and cities from me go— Go, renegado, cast up thy account— Behold the public storm is spent at last; The sovereign is toss’d at sea no more, And thou, with all the noble company, Art got at last to shore— But whilst thy fellow-voyagers I see, All march’d
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