DIALOGUE II. ON RETIREMENT. MR. ABRAHAM COWLEY THE REV. MR. SPRAT. TO THE EARL OF ST. ALBANS a. MY LORD, THE duty I owe your LORDSHIP, as well as my friendship for Mr. COWLEY, determined me to lose no time in executing the commission you was pleased to charge me with by Mr. D***. I went early the next morning to a This Dialogue is founded on a short passage in Mr. SPRAT'S Life of Mr. CowLEY, in which he observes, "That in his long dependance on my Lord St. ALBANK there never happened any manner of difference between them; except a little at LAST, because he would leave his II. DIALOGUE Barn Elmsb; intending to pass the whole day with him, and to try if what I might be able to suggest on the occasion, together with the weight of your lordship's advice, could not divert him from his strange project of Retirement. Your lordship, no doubt, as all his other friends, had observed his bias that way to be very strong; but who, that knew his great sense, could have thought of its carrying him to so extravagant a resolution? For my own part, I suspected it so little, that, though he would often talk of retiring, and especially since your lordship's favour to him, I considered it only as the usual language of poets, which they take up one after another, and love to indulge in, as what they suppose becomes their family and profession. It could never come into my thoughts, that one, who knew the world so well as Mr. COWLEY, and had lived so long in it, who had so fair hopes and so noble a patron, could seriously think of quitting the scene at his years, and all for so fantastic a purpose as that of growing old in the corner of a country village. b A small village on the Thames, which was Mr. CowLEY's first retreat, before he removed to Chertsea: c Meaning an estate he had obtained by means of this lord. This particular is several times referred to in the course of the Dialogue. |