unrefined and plebeian words that none but philosophers can distinguish it, and both may be so buried in impurities, as not to pay the cost of their extraction. The diction, being the vehicle of the thoughts, first presents itself to the intellectual eye; and if the first appearance offends, a further knowledge is not often sought. Whatever professes to benefit by pleasing, must please at once. The pleasures of the mind imply something sudden and unexpected; that which elevates must always surprise. What is perceived by slow degrees may gratify us with consciousness of improvement, but will never strike with the sense of pleasure. Of all this, Cowley appears to have been without knowledge, or without care. He makes no selection of words, nor seeks any neatness of phrase; he has no elegances either lucky or elaborate; as his endeavours were rather to impress sentences upon the understanding than images upon the fancy; he has few epithets, and those scattered without peculiar propriety or nice adaptation. It seems to follow from the necessity of the subject, rather than the care of the writer, that the diction of his heroic poem is less familiar than that of his slightest writings. He has given not the same numbers, but the same diction, to the gentle Anacreon and the tempestuous Pindar. His versification seems to have had very little of his care; and if what he thinks be true, that his numbers are unmusical only when they are ill-read, the art of reading them is at present lost; for they are commonly harsh to modern ears. He has indeed many noble lines, such as the feeble care of Waller never could produce. The bulk of his thoughts sometimes swelled his verse to unexpected and inevitable grandeur; but his excellence of this kind is merely fortuitous he sinks willingly down to his general carelessness, and avoids with very little care either meanness or asperity. His contractions are often rugged and harsh : One flings a mountain, and its rivers too His rhymes are very often made by pronouns, or particles, or the like unimportant words, which disappoint the ear, and destroy the energy of the line. His combination of different measures is sometimes dissonant and unpleasing; he joins verses together, of which the former does not slide easily into the latter. The words do and did, which so much degrade in present estimation the line that admits them, were, in the time of Cowley, little censured or avoided how often he used them, and with how bad an effect, at least to our ears, will appear by a passage, in which every reader will lament to see just and noble thoughts defrauded of their praise by inelegance of language: Where honour or where conscience does not bind, Who by resolves and vows engag'd does stand, Does like an unthrift, mortgage his estate The bondman of the cloister so, All that he does receive does always owe. He says of the Messiah, Round the whole earth his dreaded name shall sound, Yet bid him go securely, when he sends; Yet amidst his negligence he sometimes attempts an improved and scientific versification; of which it will be best to give his own account subjoined to this line: Nor can the glory contain itself in th' endless space "I am sorry that it is necessary to admonish the most part of readers, that it is not by negligence that this verse is so loose, long, and, as it were, vast; it is to paint in the number the nature of the thing which it describes, which I would have observed in divers other places of this poem, that else will pass for very careless verses: as before, And over-runs the neighb'ring fields with violent course. In the second book; Down a precipice deep, down he casts them all -And, And fell a-down his shoulders with loose care In the third, Brass was his helmet, his boots brass, and o'er His breast a thick plate of strong brass he wore In the fourth, Like some fair pine o'erlooking all the ignobler wood. And, Some from the rocks cast themselves down headlong And many more: but it is enough to instance in a few. The thing is, that the disposition of words and numbers should be such, as that, out of the order and sound of them, the things themselves may be represented. This the Greeks were not so accurate as to bind themselves to: neither have our English poets observed it, for aught I can find. The Latins (qui Musas colunt severiores) sometimes did it; and their prince, Virgil, always: in whom the examples are in numerable, and taken notice of by all judi cious men, so that it is superfluous to collect them." I know not whether he has, in many of these instances, attained the representation or resemblance that he purposes. Verse can imitate only sound and motion. A boundless verse, a headlong verse, and a verse of brass or of strong brass, seem to comprise very incongruous and unsociable ideas. What there is peculiar in the sound of the line expressing loose care, I cannot discover; nor why the pine is taller in an Alexandrine than in ten syllables. But, not to defraud him of his due praise, he has given one example of representative versifi " cation, which perhaps no other English line can his mind, for, in the verses on the government equal. of Cromwell he inserts theml iberally with great happiness. After so much criticism on his poems, the essays which accompany them must not be forgotten. What is said by Sprat of his conversation, that no man could draw from it any suspicion of his excellence in poetry, may be applied to these compositions. No author ever kept his verse and his prose at a greater distance from each other. His thoughts are natural, and his style has a smooth and placid equability, which has never yet obtained its due commendation. Nothing is far-sought, or hard-laboured; but all is easy without feebleness, and familiar without grossness. It has been observed by Felton, in his Essay on the Classics, that Cowley was beloved by every muse that he courted; and that he has rivalled the ancients in every kind of poetry but tragedy. Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise: He who defers this work from day to day, Does on a river's bank expecting stay Till the whole stream that stopp'd him shall be gone, Which runs, and as it runs, for ever shall run on. Cowley was, I believe, the first poet that mingled Alexandrines at pleasure with the common heroic of ten syllables; and from him Dryden borrowed the practice, whether ornamental or licentious. He considered the verse of twelve syllables as elevated and majestic, and has therefore deviated into that measure when he supposes the voice had heard of the Supreme Being. The author of the Davideis is commended by Dryden for having written it in couplets, because he discovered that any staff was too lyrical for an heroic poem; but this seems to have been known before by May and Sandys, the translators of the Pharsalia and the Metamorphoses. In the Davideis are some hemistichs, or verses It may be affirmed, without any encomiastic left imperfect by the author, in imitation of Vir- fervour, that he brought to his poetic labours a gil, whom he supposes not to have intended to mind replete with learning, and that his pages complete them: that this opinion is erroneous, are embellished with all the ornaments which may be probably concluded, because this trun-books could supply; that he was the first who cation is imitated by no subsequent Roman imparted to English numbers the enthusiasm of poet; because Virgil himself filled up one the greater ode, and the gayety of the less; that broken line in the heat of recitation; because he was equally qualified for sprightly sallies, and in one the sense is now unfinished; and be- for lofty flights; that he was among those who cause all that can be done by a broken verse, a freed translation from servility, and, instead of ine intersected by a cœsura, and a full stop, will following his author at a distance, walked by equally effect. his side; and that, if he left versification yet improvable, he left likewise from time to time such specimens of excellence as enabled succeeding poets to improve it. Of triplets in his Davideis he makes no use, and perhaps did not at first think them allowable; but he appears afterwards to have changed 10 N OF SIR JOHN DENHAM very little is known | fore gave no prognostics of his future eminence; but what is related of him by Wood, or by himself. He was born at Dublin in 1615;* the only son of Sir John Denham, of Little Horseley, in Essex, then chief baron of the Exchequer in Ireland, and of Eleanor, daughter of Sir Garret More, baron of Mellefont. Two years afterwards, his father, being made one of the barons of the Exchequer in England, Drought him away from his native country, and educated him in London. nor was suspected to conceal, under sluggishness and laxity, a genius born to improve the literature of his country. When he was, three years afterwards, removed to Lincoln's Inn, he prosecuted the common law with sufficient appearance of application; yet did not lose his propensity to cards and dice; but was very often plundered by gamesters. Being severely reproved for this folly, he professed, and perhaps believed, himself reclaimed; and, to testify the sincerity of his repentance, wrote and published "An Essay upon Gam 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 there-ing." He seems to have divided his studies between law and poetry: for, in 1636, he translated the second book of the Æneid. In Hamilton's Memoirs of Count Grammont, Sir John Denham is said to have been 79 when he married Miss Brook, about the year 1664: according to which Two years after, his father died; and then, statement he was born in 1585. But Dr. Johnson, who has followed Wood, is right. He entered Trinity' Col-notwithstanding his resolutions and professions, lege, Oxford, at the age of 16, in 1631, as appears by he returned again to the vice of gaming, and lost the following entry, which I copied from the matrí- several thousand pounds that had been left him. In 1642, he published "The Sophy." This seems to have given him his first hold of the public attention; for Waller remarked, "That culation book: Trin. Coll. "1631. Nov. 18. Johannes Denham, Essex, filius J. Denham, de Horseley parva in com. prædict. militis annos natus 16."-Malone he broke out like the Irish rebellion, threescore | for Wood says, that he got by this place seven thousand strong, when nobody was aware, or in thousand pounds. the least suspected it; an observation which could have had no propriety, had his poetical abilities been known before. After the restoration, he wrote the poem on Prudence and Justice, and perhaps some of his other pieces: and, as he appears, whenever any serious question comes before him, to have been a man of piety, he consecrated his poetical pow He was after that pricked for sheriff of Surry, and made governor of Farnham Castle for the King; but he soon resigned that charge, and re-ers to religion, and, made a metrical version of treated to Oxford, where, in 1643, he published "Cooper's Hill.” This poem had such reputation as to excite the common artifice by which envy degrades excellence. A report was spread, that the performance was not his own, but that he had bought it of a vicar for forty pounds. The same attempt was made to rob Addison of Cato, and Pope of his Essay on Criticism. the Psalms of David. In this attempt he has failed; but in sacred poetry who has succeeded? It might be hoped that the favour of his master, and esteem of the public, would now make him happy. But human felicity is short and uncertain; a second marriage brought upon him so much disquiet, as for a time disordered his understanding; and Butler lampooned him for his lunacy. I know not whether the malignant In 1647, the distresses of the royal family re-lines were then made public, nor what provocaquired him to engage in more dangerous em- tion incited Butler to do that which no provoployments. He was entrusted by the Queen cation can excuse. with a message to the King; and, by whatever means, so far softened the ferocity of Hugh Peters, that by his intercession admission was procured. Of the King's condescension he has given an account in the dedication of his works. He was afterwards employed in carrying on the King's correspondence; and, as he says, discharged this office with great safety to the royalists and, being accidentally discovered by the adverse party's knowledge of Mr. Cowley's hand, he escaped happily both for himself and his friends. He was yet engaged in a greater undertaking. In April, 1648, he conveyed James the duke of York from London into France, and delivered him there to the queen and prince of Wales. This year he published his translation of "Cato Major." He now resided in France as one of the followers of the exiled king; and, to divert the melancholy of their condition, was sometimes enjoined by his master to write occasional verses; one of which amusements was probably his ode or song upon the embassy to Poland, by which he and Lord Crofts procured a contribution of ten thousand pounds from the Scotch that wandered over that kingdom. Poland was at that time very much frequented by itinerant traders, who, in a country of very little commerce and of great extent, where every man resided on his own estate, contributed very much to the accommodation of life, by bringing to His frenzy lasted not long;* and he seems to have regained his full force of mind; for he wrote afterwards his excellent poem upon the death of Cowley, whom he was not long to survive; for on the 19th of March, 1668, he was buried by his side. Denham is deservedly considered as one of the fathers of English poetry. "Denham and Waller," says Prior, "improved our versification, and Dryden perfected it." He has given specimens of various composition, descriptive, ludicrous, didactic, and sublime. He appears to have had, in common with almost all mankind, the ambition of being upon proper occasions "a merry fellow," and in common with most of them, to have been by nature, or by early habits, debarred from it. Nothing is less exhilarating than the ludicrousness of Denham; he does not fail for want of efforts: he is familiar, he is gross; but he is never merry, unless the "Speech against Peace in the close Committee" be excepted. For grave burlesque, however, his imitation of Davenant shows him to be well qualified. Of his more elevated occasional poems, there is perhaps none that does not deserve commendation. In the verses to Fletcher, we have an image that has since been often adopted. But whither am I stray'd? I need not raise Trophies to thee, from other men's dispraise; Nor is thy fame on lesser ruins built, Nor need thy juster title the foul guilt Of Eastern kings, who, to secure their reign, Must have their brothers, sons, and kindred slain. Poets are sultans, if they had their win; every man's house those little necessaries which After Denham, Orrery, in one of his prologues, it was very inconvenient to want, and very troublesome to fetch. I have formerly read, without much reflection, of the multitude of Scotchmen that travelled with their wares in | Poland; and that their numbers were not small, the success of this negotiation gives sufficient evidence. About this time, what estate the war and the gamesters had left him, was sold by order of the parliament; and when, in 1652, he returned to England, he was entertained by the earl of Pembroke. Of the next years of his life there is no account. At the restoration he obtained that which many missed-the reward of his loyalty; being made surveyor of the king's buildings, and dignified with the order of the Bath. He seems now to have learned some attention to money; Should such a man, too fond to rule alone, Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne. excelled by his poem to Fanshaw, and his Elegy But this is not the best of his little pieces: it is on Cowley. His praise of Fanshaw's version of Guarini related, both of his marriage and his frenzy, very little In Grammont's Memoirs, many circumstances are favourable to his character.-R. It is remarkable that Johnson should not have reAriscollected, that this image is to be found in Bacon. toteles more othomannoram, regna; re se haud tuto posse putabat, nisi fratres suos, omnes contra udasset.→→ De augment. scient. lib. iii. 21 contains a very sprightly and judicious charac- |lation from the drudgery of counting lines and ter of a good translator: That servile path thou nobly dost decline, The excellence of these lines is greater, as the truth which they contain was not at that time generally known. His poem on the death of Cowley was his last, and, among his shorter works, his best performance: the numbers are musical, and the thoughts are just. "Cooper's Hill" is the work that confers upon him the rank and dignity of an original author. He seems to have been, at least among us, the author of a species of composition that may be denominated local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection or incidental meditation. To trace a new scheme of poetry, has in itself a very high claim to praise, and its praise is yet more when it is apparently copied by Garth and Pope; after whose names little will be gained by an enumeration of smaller poets, that have left scarcely a corner of the island not dignified either by rhyme or blank verse. "Cooper's Hill," if it be maliciously inspected, will not be found without its faults. The digressions are too long, the morality too frequent, and the sentiments sometimes such as will not bear a rigorous inquiry. The four verses, which, since Dryden has commended them, almost every writer for a century past has imitated, are generally known: O, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream interpreting single words. How much this servile practice obscured the clearest and deformed the most beautiful parts of the ancient authors, may be discovered by a perusal of our earlier versions; some of them are the works of men well qualified, not only by critical knowledge, but by poetical genius, who yet by a mistaken ambition of exactness, degraded at once their originals and themselves. Denham saw the better way, but has not pursued it with great success. His versions of Virgil are not pleasing; but they taught Dry. den to please better. His poetical imitation of Tully on "Old Age" has neither the clearness of prose, nor the sprightliness of poetry. 66 The strength of Denham," which Pope so emphatically mentions, is to be found in many lines and couplets, which convey much meaning in few words, and exhibit the sentiment with more weight than bulk. ON THE THAMES. Though with those streams he no resemblance hold ON STRAFFORD. His wisdom such, at once it did appear Such was his force of eloquence, to make ON COWLEY. To him no author was unknown, In his translation of Virgil, written when he found the old manner of continuing the sense was about twenty-one years old, may be still ungracefully from verse to verse: As one of Denham's principal claims to the regard of posterity arises from his improvement The lines are in themselves not perfect: for of our numbers, his versification ought to be conmost of the words, thus artfully opposed, are to arises from the observation of a man of judgsidered. It will afford that pleasure which be understood simply on one side of the compa- ment, naturally right, forsaking bad copies by rison, and metaphorically on the other; and if there be any language that does not express in-degrees, and advancing towards a better practellectual operations by material images, into tice as he gains more confidence in himself. that language they cannot be translated. But so much meaning is comprised in so few words; the particulars of resemblances are so perspicaciously collected, and every mode of excellence separated from its adjacent fault by so nice a line of limitation; the different parts of the sentence are so accurately adjusted; and the flow of the last couplet is so smooth and sweet; that the passage, however celebrated, has not been praised above its merit. It has beauty peculiar to itself, and must be numbered among those felicities, which cannot be produced at will by wit and labour, but must arise unexpectedly in some hour propitious to poetry. He appears to have been one of the first that understood the necessity of emancipating trans By Garth, in his "Poem on Claremont ;" and by Pope, in his "Windsor Forest." } -Then all those the art of concluding their sense in couplets; which has perhaps been with rather too much constancy pursued. This passage exhibits one of those triplets which are not unfrequent in this first essay; but which it is to be supposed his maturer judgment disapproved, since in his latter works he has totally forborne them. His rhymes are such as seem found without difficulty, by following the sense; and are for the most part as exact at least as those of other poets, though now and then the reader is shifted off with what he can get : O how transform'd! How much unlike that Hector, who return'd Clad in Achilles' spoils! And again : From thence a thousand lesser poets sprung -Troy confounded falls Nor ten years conflict, nor a thousand sail He is not very careful to vary the ends of his verses; in one passage the word die rhymes three couplets in six. Most of these petty faults are in his first productions, where he was less skilful, or at least less dexterous in the use of words; and though they had been more frequent, they could only have lessened the grace, not the strength, of his composition. He is one of the writers that improved our taste, and advanced our language; and whom we ought therefore to read with gra Sometimes the weight of rhyme is laid upon a titude, though, having done much, he left much word too feeble to sustain it. to do. MILTON. THE life of Milton has been already written in | so many forms, and with such minute inquiry, that I might perhaps more properly have contented myself with the addition of a few notes on Mr. Fenton's elegant Abridgment, but that a new narrative was thought necessary to the uniformity of this edition. JOHN MILTON was by birth a gentleman, descended from the proprietors of Milton, near Thame, in Oxfordshire, one of whom forfeited his estate in the times of York and Lancaster. Which side he took I know not; his descendant inherited no veneration for the White Rose. His grandfather, John, was keeper of the forest of Shotover, a zealous papist, who disinherited his son because he had forsaken the religion of his ancestors. His father, John, who was the son disinherited, had recourse for his support to the profession of a scrivener. He was a man eminent for his skill in music, many of his compositions being still to be found; and his reputation in his profession was such, that he grew rich, and retired to an estate. He had probably more than common literature, as his son addresses him in one of his most elaborate Latin poems. He married a gentlewoman of the name of Caston, a Welsh family, by whom he had two sons, John, the poet, and Christopher, who studied the law, and adhered, as the law taught him, to the King's party, for which he was a while persecuted; but having, by his brother's interest, obtained permission to live in quiet, he supported himself so honourably by chamber-practice, that, soon after the accession of King James, he was knighted, and made a judge; but, his constitution being too weak for business, he retired before any disreputable compliances became ne Philips, who came from Shrewsbury, and rose in the Crown-office to be secondary: by him, she had two sons, John and Edward, who were educated by the poet, and from whom is derived the only authentic account of his domestic manners. John, the poet, was born in his father's house, at the Spread Eagle, in Bread-street, Dec. 9, 1608, between six and seven in the morning. His father appears to have been very solicitous about his education; for he was instructed at first by private tuition, under the care of Tho mas Young, who was afterwards chaplain to the English merchants at Hamburg, and of whom we have reason to think well, since his scholar considered him as worthy of an epistolary elegy. He was then sent to St. Paul's School, under the care of Mr. Gill; and removed, in the beginning of his sixteenth year, to Christ's College, in Cambridge, where he entered a sizar,* Feb. 12, 1624. He was at this time eminently skilled in the Latin tongue; and he himself, by annexing the dates to his first compositions, a boast of which the learned Politian had given him an example, seems to commend the earliness of his own proficiency to the notice of posterity. But the products of his vernal fertility have been surpassed by many, and particularly by his contemporary Cowley. Of the powers of the mind it is difficult to form an estimate: many have excelled Milton in their first essays, who never rose to works like Paradise Lost. *In this assertion Dr. Johnson was mistaken. Milton was admitted a pensioner, and not a sizar, as will appear by the following extract from the College Register, "Johannes Milton Londinensis, filius Johannis, institutus fuit in literarum elementis sub Mag'ro Gill Gymnasii Feb. 12, 1624, sub M'ro Chappell, solvitq. pro Ingr. Paulini, præfecto; admissus est Pensionarius Minor 01. 108. Od."-R |