A NEW YEAR'S GIFT TO BRIAN LORD BISHOP OF SARUM UPON THE AUTHOR'S ENTERING INTO HOLY ORDERS, 1638.

Now that the village reverence doth lie hid,

As Egypt's Wisdom did,

In birds and beasts, and that the tenant's soul
Goes with his New-year's fowl;

So that the cock and hen speak more
Now, than in fables heretofore;
And that the feather'd things

Truly make love have wings :

Though we no flying present have to pay,
A quill yet snatch'd from thence may sign the day.

But, being the Canon bars me wit and wine,
Enjoining the true Vine,

Being the bays must yield unto the Cross,
And all be now one loss;

So that my raptures are to steal
And knit themselves in one pure zeal,

And that my each day's breath

Must be a daily death:

Without all strain or fury I must than1

Tell you this New-year brings you a new man.

New, not as th' year, to run the same course o'er
Which it hath run before,

Lest in the man himself there be a round,
As in his humour's 2 found,

And that return seem to make good
Circling of actions, as of blood.

Motion, as in a mill,

Is busy standing still;

And by such wheeling we but thus prevail,
To make the serpent swallow his own tail.

1 then.

2 moisture, i. e. the blood.

Nor new by solemnising looser toys,
And erring with less noise,

Taking the flag and trumpet from the sin,
So to offend within ;

As some men silence loud perfumes
And draw them into shorter rooms :
This will be understood

More wary, not more good.

Sins too may be severe, and so, no doubt,
The vice but only sour'd, not rooted out.

But new, by th' using of each part aright,
Changing both step and sight;

That false direction come not from the eye,
Nor the foot tread awry;

That neither that the way aver
Which doth toward fame, or profit, err,
Nor this tread that path which

Is not the right, but rich;

That thus the foot being fix'd, thus led the eye, I pitch my walk low, but my prospect high.

New too, to teach my opinions not t' submit
To favour, or to wit;

Nor yet to walk on edges, where they may
Run safe in broader way;

Nor to search out for new paths, where
Nor tracks nor footsteps do appear,

Knowing that deeps are ways

Where no impression stays;

Nor servile thus, nor curious, may I then Approve my faith to Heaven, my life to men.

But I who thus present myself as new,

Am thus made new by you.

Had not your rays dwelt on me, one long night
Had shut me up from sight.

Your beams exhale me from among

Things tumbling in the common throng.
Who thus with your fire burns,

Now gives not, but returns.

To others then be this a day of thrift:
They do receive; but you, sir, make the gift.

ON A VIRTUOUS YOUNG GENTLEWOMAN THAT DIED

SUDDENLY.

When the old flaming Prophet climb'd the sky,
Who, at one glimpse, did vanish, and not die,
He made more preface to a death than this:
So far from sick, she did not breathe amiss.
She, who to Heaven more heaven doth annex,
Whose lowest thought was above all our sex,
Accounted nothing death but t' be repriev'd,
And died as free from sickness as she liv'd.
Others are dragg'd away, or must be driven,
She only saw her time and stepp'd to Heaven,
Where Seraphims view all her glories o'er
As one return'd, that had been there before.
For while she did this lower world adorn,
Her body seem'd rather assum'd than born:
So rarefied, advanc'd, so pure and whole,
That body might have been another's soul;
And equally a miracle it were,

That she could die, or that she could live here.

ABRAHAM COWLEY.

[ABRAHAM COWLEY was the posthumous son of a London stationer, and was born in the latter part of the year 1618. He was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained from 1636 to 1643. He took the royalist side during the Civil War, and helped the King's cause both at Oxford and afterwards as Secretary to the Queen in her exile in Paris. In 1655 he returned to England, where he remained under strict surveillance till Cromwell's death; then he rejoined his friends in France. At the Restoration he came back, and lived in retirement at Barnes and Chertsey till his death in 1667. His poems were published in the following order: Poetical Blossomes, 1633; Love's Riddle, a comedy, 1638; The Mistress, 1647; The Guardian (surreptitiously published), 1650: the first folio edition of the Works, 1656; other editions of the same followed with the addition of such new poems and essays as he produced from time to time. The most complete editions of his works are those which appeared in 1708 and 1721.]

The history of Cowley's reputation offers an easy text for a discourse on the variations of the standard of taste. A marvel of precocity, widely known as a poet at fifteen; the poetical wonder of Cambridge; so famous at thirty that pirates and forgers made free with his name on their title-pages while he was serving the exiled queen; issuing in self-defence, at thirty-eight, a folio of his poems which was destined to pass through eight editions in a generation; accepted by his literary contemporaries, men of cultivated intelligence, as not only the greatest among themselves, but greater than all that had gone before; buried in state at Westminster by the side of Chaucer and Spenser, and ranked by his biographer, a sober critic, as equal not only to them but to 'the authors of that true antiquity, the best of the Greeks and Romans'; -in thirty years he had sunk out of notice and his name had become a mere memory, mentioned honoris causa but no more. 'Though

he must always be thought a great poet, he is no longer esteemed a good writer,' said Dryden in 1700. Addison praised him with even more discrimination. Two editions of his works appeared early in the eighteenth century, but in 1737 Pope was able to ask 'Who now reads Cowley?' Then followed Johnson's celebrated Life, which has eclipsed for almost every one the works of its subject. Except for a few students like Lamb and Sir Egerton Brydges, Cowley's verse is in this century unread and unreadable. Not even the antiquarian curiosity of an age which reprints Brathwaite and Crowne has yet availed to present him in a new edition. The reasons of this extraordinary decline in a poetical reputation are not difficult to find; Dryden absorbed all that was best in Cowley, and superseded him for the readers of the eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century, which reads Dryden little, naturally reads Cowley less. Yet criticism has to justify great names. There must be something in a man who was regarded by his age, and that an age which boasted of having outgrown all illusions, as the most profound and ingenious of its writers. A rapid review of Cowley's work will help us to judge between the estimate of his time and the estimate of posterity.

With the volume of Poetical Blossomes which he published at fifteen, when he was a schoolboy at Westminster, we are not further concerned than to note its vast superiority to the verses of most clever boys. If Cowley, like Chatterton, had died before manhood, these verses might perhaps have kept his name alive; but as it is he soon outdid them, and in his mature writings he valued them justly as 'commendable extravagance in a boy,' but declined to give them a place in the permanent collection of his poems. Some stanzas from The Wish he excepted, quoting them in his pleasant essay Of Myself as verses of which 'I should hardly now be ashamed.' He wrote them at thirteen, he says; and our extracts may fairly begin with them. But in the main we shall be right in confining ourselves to the mature poems of the Folio of 1656, with the additions that were made to it during his lifetime. He meant it to be a definitive edition of his poems; he excluded much from it deliberately, and he intended to add nothing to it. In 1656, as he says in his most interesting Preface-a class of writing which he raised to a new importancein 1656 he felt in no mood for making poetry. The times were against it, his own health of body and mind were against it. 'A warlike, various, and tragical age is best to write of, but worst to