memory, the judgment, and the wit are more conspicuous than the imagination, Abraham Cowley, born in London in the year 1618, was one of the most popular of his time.

Cowley was the son of a respectable grocer; his mother's exertions procured him a liberal education. When Oxford was surrendered to Parliament, he followed the QueenMother to France, where he remained twelve years, and was employed in such correspondence as the royal cause required, and particularly in ciphering and deciphering the letters that passed between Charles and his queen, employment of the highest confidence and honor, that for several years is said to have filled all his days, and two or three nights in each week.

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At the Restoration, Cowley expected some royal appointment as the reward of his loyalty; but his claims were overlooked. In some of his youthful writings he had not sufficiently bowed down before the golden image of monarchy; and this was now recalled at court to his disadvantage, and his hopes ended in disappointment. He had passed his fortieth year when he gladly retired from the world, and with a royal provision of three hundred pounds per annum, settled at Chertsey, on the banks of the Thames, where his house still remains.

Here, renewing his acquaintance with the beloved poets. of antiquity, he commemorated in verse the charms of a country life and composed his fine prose discourses. The happiness he sought in this retirement seems to have eluded his grasp. Dr. Johnson, who would, it is said, have preferred Fleet Street to all the charms of Arcadia and the Golden Age, dwells with grim satisfaction upon Cowley's falling out with retirement, and holds him up as an awful warning to all who may dare pant for solitude.

He died on the 28th of July, 1667, about seven years after his retirement from court and the world. He was interred with great pomp in Westminster Abbey, and "the King himself," observes Sprat, "was pleased to bestow on him the best epitaph when he declared that Mr. Cowley had not left a better man behind him.'"

Cowley is said to have lisped in numbers; in his tenth year he wrote the "Tragical History of Pyramus and Thisbe," published in his "Poetic Blossoms." He wrote the four books of his unfinished poem, entitled "Davideis," a heroical poem of the troubles of David,while a student at Trinity College. His "Miscellanies," his "Mistress, or, Love Verses," and his "Pindaric Odes," complete the list of his poetical compositions.

Cowley's "Mistress," though in imitation of Petrarch, is without passion or real tenderness, and was conceived in this wise: "Poets," he says, "are scarce thought freemen of their company, without paying some duties, and obliging themselves to be true to love." Whereupon he obligingly sets himself to the wooing of an imaginary mistress, and amiably counterfeits that passion of whose power he must have been shockingly ignorant, as it is positively asserted that he was never in love but once, and then never found courage to declare himself!

Cowley's wit, accomplishments, and amiability rendered him exceedingly popular. He has great sense, ingenuity, and learning; but as a poet his fancy is far-fetched and mechanical. He was, in his own time, considered as of unrivalled excellence; and some of his cotemporaries have even gone so far as to prophesy that posterity would hold him to have been equalled by Virgil alone among the poets of antiquity.

His "Pindaric Odes," though deformed by conceits, contain some noble lines.

His "Anacreons," which are thought to be the happiest of his poems, abound in images of natural and poetic beauty; this, entitled "Drinking," is worthy of Bacchus himself:

"The thirsty earth soaks up the rain,

And drinks, and gapes for drink again.
The plants suck in the earth, and are
With constant drinking fresh and fair.
The sea itself, which one would think
Should have but little need of drink,
Drinks ten thousand rivers up,
So filled that they o'erflow the cup.
The busy sun (and one would guess
By 's drunken fiery face no less)
Drinks up the sea, and when he has done,
The moon and stars drink up the sun.
They drink and dance by their own light;
They drink and revel all the night.
Nothing in Nature's sober found,
But an eternal health goes round.
Fill up the bowl, then, fill it high,
Fill all the glasses there, for why
Should every creature drink but I,
Why, men of morals, tell me why?'

"

John Dryden, one of the great masters of English verse, and who may be regarded as founder of the school of critical poets, was born in August, 1631. His father was a strict Puritan, of an ancient family, long established in Northamptonshire. Dryden was the eldest of fourteen children, and received a good education, first at Westminster, and afterward at Trinity College, Cambridge.

The first poetical production of Dryden was a set of heroic stanzas on the death of Cromwell. When Charles was restored, he had done with the Puritans, and wrote poetical addresses to the King and Lord Chancellor.

In 1663 he married the Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. This match added neither

to his wealth nor his happiness; and when his wife wished to be a book that she might enjoy more of his company, Dryden is said to have replied, "Be an almanac, my dear, that I may change you once a year."

In 1667 he published a long poem, "Annus Mirabilis," being an account of the events of the year 1666. The amusements of the drama revived after the Restoration; and Dryden became a candidate for theatrical laurels.

Charles II. returned from his long exile in France with the political maxims and social habits of his favorite people; and it was to please this ignoble monarch, of whom it has been said that "politeness was his solitary good quality," that a mortal blow was first dealt to the English drama by introducing into it rhyming plays. Charles having adopted the French taste in composition, the good old dramas of Elizabeth and James were banished from the stage for the degenerate, fashionable rhyming plays of France, in which conjugal fidelity and sincerity were held up for constant ridicule; till the corruptions of the stage became so notorious that "a grave lawyer," it is said, “would have debased his dignity, and a young trader would have impaired his credit, by appearing in those mansions of dissolute licentiousness that were the proper element for a depraved king and a corrupt court."

Dryden unhappily became a panderer to this vitiated taste, and was the most eminent among the crowd of authors who courted notoriety and won royal patronage, by adopting the bombast and meanness of the new style. Thus while Milton, in blindness and poverty, kept his pure and lofty muse unspotted from the world, the offspring of Dryden's genius "passed through the fire to Moloch;" and to his everlasting shame, he produced those comedies which, as Macaulay aptly says, "introduce us into a world where there is no humanity, no veracity, no

sense of shame, a world for which any good-natured man would gladly exchange the society of Milton's devils; and the tragedies that introduce us to people whose proceedings we can trace to no motives; of whose feelings we can form no more idea than of a sixth sense."

Of Dryden's plays, nearly thirty in number, few have much merit considered as entire works, although there are brilliant scenes and spirited passages in most of them. He was an incomparable reasoner in verse, and the discussions between his heroes are considered by critics his best scenes. He undertook to write for the king's players no less than three plays a year, for which he was to receive three hundred pounds per annum. He was afterward made poet laureate and royal historiographer with a salary of two hundred pounds.

In Dryden's plays, debased though they may be, there may be found occasional true sentiment, and now and then a fine simile relieves the huge mass of turgid dramatic A few of these I subjoin:

verse.

Love is that madness which all lovers have;

But yet 't is sweet and pleasing so to rave.

'Tis an enchantment, where the reason 's bound,

But Paradise is in the enchanted ground.

Conquest of Granada.

Man is but man; unconstant still, and various;
There's no to-morrow in him like to-day.

Perhaps the atoms rolling in his brain
Make him think honestly this present hour;

The next, a swarm of base ungrateful thoughts

May mount aloft; and where's our Egypt then?

Who would trust chance? Since all men have the seeds
Of good and ill, which should work upward first.

Courage uncertain dangers may abate,
But who can bear the approach of certain fate?

Cleomenes.

Tyrannic Love.