HIS FAME.--Cowley had all his good things in his lifetime; he was the most
popular poet in England, and is the best illustration of the literary
taste of his age. His poetry is like water rippling in the sunlight,
brilliant but dazzling and painful: it bewilders with far-fetched and
witty conceits: varied but full of art, there is little of nature or real
passion to be found even in his amatory verses. He suited the taste of a
court which preferred an epigram to a proverb, and a repartee to an
apothegm; and, as a consequence, with the growth of a better culture and a
better taste, he has steadily declined in favor, so that at the present
day he is scarcely read at all. Two authoritative opinions mark the
history of this decline: Milton, in his own day, placed him with Spenser
and Shakspeare as one of the three greatest English poets; while Pope, not
much more than half a century later, asks:
Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet,
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit.
Still later, Dr. Johnson gives him the credit of having been the first to
master the Pindaric ode in English; while Cowper expresses, in his Task,
regret that his "splendid wit" should have been
Entangled in the cobwebs of the schools.
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