the poorer by his premature death can never be known now; but the students of poetry have not shown themselves adequately kind to his memory to attract readers to what he has left.

That his style has much to do with his undeserved neglect is as certain as the fact that that very style procured him instantaneous popularity in his own day. The generation which immediately preceded his had many poets; but few of them, save Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton, had much backbone of thought to give solidity as well as beauty to their poetical productions. They wrote, too, for the most part in that luxuriant softness which they had learned especially from John Fletcher, and which was the very antithesis of Cowley's more pithy and thoughtful style. They flowed along easily and gently, as poets should, if they can contrive it; while he had many rocks and barriers impeding the full stream of his rich and varied imagination. Their inspiration was perhaps somewhat slight, while his mind was filled with profound and varied thoughts of his own, in addition to those which he had culled from the ancient literature of Greece and Rome. Hence was born his pithy and antithetical style, his heaping up thought upon thought and image upon image, his rejection of no comparison, however strange, if it satisfactorily expressed his meaning, his multitude of sparkling conceits and his deceitfully simple language, which veiled his subtle and elusive faculty of perception. The phenomenon was so entirely new, that the reading public of his day was struck spell-bound, and the older poets were abandoned for their learned successor. The remarkable precocity of his youthful muse, whose wings increased in strength with every year of his life, formed an additional attraction which, for two generations, captivated the taste of thoughtful readers. Of his surprising originality there can be no doubt, a circumstance which was soon perceived and gladly welcomed. The peculiar nature of his wit, too, was of the kind to commend itself to the curious of his day. Wit is almost always the child of its own period, whereas humour is born for the ages. With the passing of time and the changes of fashion, Cowley's wit is not so easily perceptible by the general body of readers of the present. Conceits of the kind which abound in Shakespeare's Sonnets, and which are no less abundant, though by no means so delicately

R

contrived, throughout Cowley's poems, offend modern taste, though why they should do so of necessity it is not easy to explain. Perhaps the reason is because they reveal tokens of self-conscious effort, while the polish of so finished a poetic artist as Tennyson, though it be the result of extreme labour, presents the appearance of supreme ease to the uncritical reader.

Furthermore, Cowley's rhythm, though not so unmusical as some of his critics would have us believe, requires more care than even students are disposed to bestow upon it, if it is to be correctly apprehended. That his ear was not of the finest may perhaps be admitted; but that there is an undertone of solemn music in almost all of his poems is a fact which gradually reveals itself to all who are capable of catching its quiet melody. The absence of passion, too, in most of his verses has not helped to preserve his popularity down to the present generation, whose delight is equally divided between the spiritualization of nature, or the torrent force of unrestrained emotion. Some, too, are not free from an injudicious and uncritical love of musical platitudes, which indeed make up a considerable mass of modern poetical literature. In Cowley there is little of commonplace and less of platitude. In his desire to avoid this harmless but uninteresting class of poetry, he fell into the opposite tendency of straining after effect by the linking together of extremely exalted pieces of imagery. His luxuriance of thought does not, however, usually display itself in luxuriance of language. Hence it comes about that the depth of his thought peeps shyly and provokingly forth from an extreme simplicity of expression, as if some unknown being were to masquerade in the skin of a being familiar to all. These are some of the difficulties which beset the poet's style, and it must be confessed that sometimes they are so numerous as to be not a little irritating. But a modicum of perseverance and patience will reveal creations of unsuspected beauty and striking originality. Granted that he is laboured, he is not laboured because of the deficiency, but on account of the almost riotous superabundance of his thought, and it is owing to the excess of originality that his meaning is most frequently missed.

To what rank, then, in the hierarchy of poets does Abraham Cowley rightly belong? He certainly is not

a metaphysical poet, as Doctor Johnson asserts. Let any one compare him with bards of the type of Mark Akenside, and he will be found to have as little in common with their method, either of regarding a subject or of setting down their ideas, as they themselves have in common with such a poet as Byron. That he is a poet of fancy would perhaps be a truer description of his peculiar gifts. His similes are fanciful, his imagery is the offspring of fancy, his comparisons are based upon fanciful resemblances often strained to the point of cracking, and his very metres are the creations of a luxuriant but wayward fancy. Scarcely two of his poems are written in the same metre: Cowley made his lines to fit his sense, and not his sense to fit his lines; so that the reader is never led into high estimation of nonsense from the beauty of the rhythm in which it is couched. Every line of his has its full meaning, and every line fits into its proper place in its own particular poem. Hence he is often not easy to read, and his rhythm is no less difficult to detect. But once detected, and such detection is by no means impossible, it haunts the memory like an old song heard in early childhood. Cowley, then, is a poet of the fancy, endowed with a rich and fruitful imagination, whose rank as a poet is beyond a doubt with the immortals, though his appreciation in the present age of hurry and inattention is more than doubtful. Some patient students know and love his intricate mazes of thought; while others honour him for his forcible and dainty prose, as well as for his amiable life and his stainless loyalty. Some readers, too, are attracted to him by what they are pleased to term his quaint style. A strong protest must be here entered. against the abuse of this word quaint by uncritical minds, who see what they are pleased to term quaintness in all the older writers of our literature. That Cowley was occasionally quaint must be admitted; but he was not quaint because he wrote in the seventeenth century, but because of his remarkable wit. As a man, a poet, and a prose author of much distinction, who in each capacity has earned well-deserved honour, he merits loving admiration and patient study from those, whose delight it is to linger over the varied pages of forgotten poetry.

IN

THE TRAVELLER

THOMAS CORYATE

"Cælum non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt."

HORACE, Epist. I. xii. 27.

NNOCENT eccentricity is the unfailing sport of commonplace conventionality, and inoffensive vanity not seldom proves the fruitful source of infinite mirth to unsympathetic spirits. Yet eccentricity is not the positive proof of ignorance, nor is vanity the invariable sign of a shallow soul: the former failing is as commonly the token of suppressed originality as the latter is the flimsy veil of conscious but unappreciated worth. The eccentricities of one generation are the ordinary pursuits of another, and let a man be so unhappy as to be but a few years before his time, and he will not easily escape from the jibes of those who are so tied by conventional red-tape, that they cannot conceive of any wisdom lying beyond the limited scope of their own imagination. Contemporary recogni tion of merit, when that merit is wrapped up in quaint garments, is as uncommon as the oddities which characterize its unfortunate possessor, who must perforce wait for posterity to pronounce a fairer judgment upon aspirations and their realization than is possible during his lifetime. True fame is, alas! only too often the posthumous acknowledgment of the mistakes of contemporary arrogance, and resembles a laudatory epitaph set over an innocent man, who was hanged for a crime which he did not commit. Some are honoured in their life; but these are not uncommonly those men of merely average merit, who have not the courage to soar above the narrow range of the ideas of their particular time, but who in spite of their limitations do no inconsiderable service according to the extent of their ability. But when a man is born into the world, who is endowed with some originality, he is looked upon first with suspicion, next with

his