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till his death, continued to satirize, with great wit and pungency, the proffigacy and arbitrary measures of the court. He died on the sixteenth of August, 1678, without any previous illness or visible decay, which gave rise to a report that he had been poisoned. The town of Hull voted an appropriate sum to erect a monument to his memory; but the court interfered, and forbade the votive tribute.

As an author, Marvell's reputation rested, in his day, much more upon his prose than upon his poetry. As his prosaic works were, however, chiefly written for temporary purposes, they have passed out of mind with the circumstances that produced them. In 1672, he attacked the future Bishop Parker, in a piece entitled The Rehearsal Transposed, and with great force of argument vindicated the fair fame of Milton, who he says, was and is a man of as great learning and sharpness of wit as any man living.' One of Marvell's treatises, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England, was considered so formidable that a reward was offered for the discovery of the author and printer. Among the first, if not the very first traces of that vein of sportive humor and raillery on national manners and absurdities, which was afterward carried to perfection by Addison, Steele, and others, may be found in Marvell. He wrote with great liveliness, point and vigor, though he was often too coarse and personal. His poetry is easy and elegant, rather than elevated and forcible: it was an embellishment to his character of patriot and controversialist, but not a 'substantive ground of honor and distinction.' Yet none but a good and amiable man could have written verses so full of tenderness and pathos as the following:

THE EMIGRANTS IN BERMUDAS.

Where the remote Bermudas ride
In th' ocean's bosom unespied,
From a small boat that row'd along
The list'ning winds received their song.
'What should we do but sing His praise
That led us through the watery maze
Unto an isle so long unknown,
And yet far kinder than our own?
Where He the huge sea monsters racks,
That left the deep upon their backs;

He lands us on a grassy stage,

Safe from the storms and prelates, rage.

He gave us this eternal spring

Which here enamels every thing,
And sends the fowls to us in care,

On daily visits through the air.
He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night,
And does in the pomegranates close
Jewels more rich than Ormus shows.
He makes the figs our mouths to meet,
And throws the melons at our feet.

But apples, plants of such a price,
No tree could ever bear them twice.
With cedars, chosen by his hand,
From Lebanon he stores the land;
And makes the hollow seas that roar,
Proclaim the ambergris on shore.
He cast (of which we rather boast)
The Gospel's pearl upon our coast;
And in these rocks for us did frame
A temple where to sound his name.
Oh let our voice his praise exalt,
Till we arrive at Heaven's vault,
Which then perhaps rebounding may
Echo beyond the Mexic bay.'
Thus sang they in the English boat,
A holy and a cheerful note,
And all the way to guide their chime
With falling oars they kept the time.

Lecture the Twenty-Third.

ABRAHAM COWLEY-THOMAS STANLEY-THE DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLEKATHERINE PHILIPS-CHARLES COTTON-JOHN DRYDEN.

E are now in the midst of the poets of the Commonwealth, and of

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the delight of the learned and the ingenious, had not yet become food for the multitude. The chivalrous and romantic spirit which prevailed in the age of Elizabeth, had even, before her death, begun to yield to more sober and practical views of human life and society; and a spirit of inquiry was fast spreading among the people. The long period of peace under James the First, and the progress of commerce, gave scope to domestic improvement, and fostered the reasoning faculties, rather than the imagination. The reign of Charles the First, a prince of taste and accomplishments, partially revived the style of the Elizabethan era, but its lustre extended little beyond the court and the nobility. During the civil war, and the protectorate, poetry and the drama were buried under the strife and anxiety of contending factions. Cromwell, with a just and generous spirit, boasted that he would make the name of an Englishman, as great as ever that of a Roman had been; and he realized the fulfillment of this declaration in Blake's naval triumphs, and the unquestioned supremacy of England abroad; but neither the time nor the inclination of the Protector allowed him to be a patron of literature. Charles the Second was, by natural powers, birth, and education, better fitted for such a task; but he had imbibed a false taste, which, added to his indolent and sensual disposition, was as injurious to art and literature as to the public morals. Poetry now declined, and was degraded from a high and noble art, to a mere courtly amusement, a pander to immorality. Happily, to this general truth, there were a few brilliant exceptions; and among these, Cowley, after Milton, is, perhaps, the most conspicuous.

ABRAHAM COWLEY, was born in the city of London in 1618, and was the posthumous son of a respectable grocer. His mother, through the influence of some powerful friends, procured admission for him as a king's scholar into Westminster school; and in his eighteenth year he was elected a member

of Trinity College, Cambridge. Cowley 'lis ped in numbers;' and in 1633, before he had attained the sixteenth year of his age, and while yet at Westminster, he published a volume of poems under the appropriate title of Poetical Blossoms. According to his own statement, a copy of Spenser's poems used to lie in his mother's parlor, with the reading of which he was so much delighted, that to its influence he attributes his first poetical impulses. The intensity of his youthful ambition may be seen from the two first lines in his miscellanies

What shall I do to be forever known,
And make the age to come mine own?

In 1643, Cowley, having previously taken his master's degree, was ejected from Cambridge for being a royalist; upon which he entered St. John's College, Oxford, and there prosecuted his studies, until his affection for the royal family induced him to enter into the service of the king. Here he became intimately acquainted with Lord Falkland and many other eminent men, whom the fortune of the war had drawn together. During the heat of the civil strife, he was settled in the family of the Earl of St. Albans; and when the queen mother was forced to retire, for safety, into France, he attended her thither, and remained in that country twelve years, the whole of which were passed, either in bearing a share in the distresses of the royal family, or in exertions to promote their interest. He was sent on various embassies, and deciphered the correspondence of Charles and his queen, which, for years, occupied his exclusive time.

At length, the Restoration came, with all its hopes and fears. England anticipated happy days, and loyalty ample reward for its devotion to the royal cause; but both were sadly disappointed. Cowley expected to be made master of the Savoy, or to receive some other appointment equally advantageous; but his claims were entirely disregarded. In his youth he had written an Ode to Brutus, which was now remembered to his disadvantage; and a dramatic production, The Cutter of Coleman Street, which he brought out soon after the Restoration, and in which the jollity and debauchery of the cavaliers are painted in strong colors, was misrepresented, or misconstrued, at court. This disappointment Cowley felt so keenly, that he at once resolved to retire into the country. He had only just passed his fortieth year, but the most important part of his life had been spent in incessant labor, amid dangers and suspense. 'He always professed,' says his biographer Sprat, 'that he went off the world as it was man's, into the same world as it was nature's, and as it was God's. The whole compass of the creation, and all the wonderful effects of the divine wisdom, were the constant prospect of his senses and his thoughts. And, indeed, he entered with great advantage on the studies of nature, even as the first great men of antiquity did, who were generally both poets and philosophers.'

Though disappointed, Cowley was not, however, altogether neglected ; for he obtained, through the influence of Lord St. Albans, and the Duke of

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