is vile, though the conceit that there was
but one poetess in England and many
poets, does credit to Cowley's proficiency
in the art of flattery.

It is difficult to procure a copy of the
poems of this paragon of poetesses, once
possessor of "the female coasts of Fame,"
nor does the surmounting of the difficulty
repay the trouble it costs. Orinda was a
devoted Royalist, and her poems consist
principally of odes and addresses to the
king and queen, and to the great lords and
ladies of the court, on their marriages, and
other interesting personal events. One
specimen of the talent, the wit, the cleverness,
the genius, whichever it may be, of
which our ancestors thought so highly, may
serve to prove two things: firstly, that they
were easily pleased, and secondly, that the
taste for poetry in their day was something
very different from the taste of ours. She
addresses a friend, one Mrs. Anne Owen,
under the name of "Lucasta:"

I did not live until this time
Crown'd my felicity,
When I could say without a crime,
I am not thine, but thee.

This carcass breathed, and waked, and slept,
So that the world believed
There was a soul the motions kept,
But they were all deceived.

For as a watch by art is wound
To motion, such was mine,
But never had Orinda found
A soul till she found thine.

There is more in the same style, neither
much worse nor much better. Where
are now the works of the matchless
Orinda, the delight of her age? They
sleep in her forgotten folio, and are as
unknown to modern readers as the poems,
if there be any, of the dwellers in another
planet.

Abraham Cowley, the last of the popular
trio, is a poet of much greater mark than
Tom D'Urfey and Mrs. Phillips, though his
fame, or what is left of it, depends more
upon the account given of him in Johnson's
Lives of the Poets than upon his own
writings. Mrs. Phillips was "the matchless;"
to Cowley was reserved the epithet
of "the incomparable."   He was essentially
a man of his own time, and of no other,
and neither looked before nor after—as all
great poets do. His poems abound in
conceits and prettinesses, in wordy quirks, in
quibbles, and in quodlibets, and when he
gives birth to a great thought, as he
sometimes does, he is apt to overlay it with
words, to smother his Venus, as it were,
under the weight of her ribbons, her laces,
her velvets, and her furbelows, till the
poor beauty is scarcely able to waddle
under the mass of finery. A tone of
melancholy pervades his writings; and as he
calls himself "the melancholy Cowley," it
is to be supposed that such was the real
character of his mind, as well as of his
poems. In one of his compositions he
asks, half ambitiously, half despondently:

What shall I do to be for ever known,
And make the age to come mine own?

Posterity, without thinking of him, has
replied, "Nothing!" He could not
accomplish so great a task. He was, however
much he may have been admired in his
own age, for his age, and for his age only.
He was born in London in 1618, the son of
a grocer in Fleet-street. He died in 1667,
in his forty-ninth year, at his country house
in Chertsey, whither he had retired to live
a life of rural and philosophic solitude. In
his youth and early prime he was a Royalist,
involved in the troubles of the Revolution.
His first step in life was an appointment as
private secretary to Lord Jermyn, afterwards
Earl of St. Alban's, with whom he
went to Paris in 1646, his principal duty
being to translate from secret cipher the
confidential correspondence of the king and
queen. He remained abroad for ten years,
living no one very well knew how. At the
end of that time he returned to England,
ostensibly to pursue the practice of medicine,
which he had studied, or feigned to
study, while on the Continent, but, in reality,
it is supposed, to report the state of affairs
in England to the exiled royal family and
their friends in Paris. On the death of
Cromwell, and the subsequent restoration
of Charles the Second, he expected to
obtain the mastership of the Savoy, which it
appears had been promised to him by
Charles the First and by Charles the
Second. But Charles the Second forgot
him, as he did so many other friends,
though some tardy and inefficient amends
were made for his zealous services by the
grant of a beneficial lease of the queen's
lands at Chertsey. Here he wrote poems,
and cultivated flowers and vegetables, but,
having overheated himself at haymaking
in one of his own fields, he caught a violent
cold, of which he died. All the minor poets
and littérateurs of the day rushed into print,
and sang odes and elegies in praise of the
"incomparable" writer who had departed.
And oblivion, stealing silently over his
memory, left him, like others as great or