CHAPTER XVII

ABRAHAM COWLEY

ABRAHAM COWLEY, though chiefly known to posterity in his reputation as a poet, deserves to be remembered as the earliest exponent of the easy style of prose most fitted for the composition of essays.

Attached to the Royalist cause, he went to France with the Queen when Charles I. was fighting the Commonwealth, and for several years he was her secretary, and in that capacity, no doubt, acquired a polished diction and felicitous turn of phrase which were afterwards so conspicuously to mark his essays. There is really little to be found in them except their winning style to recommend them.

He has no passion, no moral suasions, no criticism, and no very strong opinions or convictions. It is not what he says, but the manner of his saying it, that pleases us. He is the earliest of the elegant company of essayists that filled the stage of English prose literature for a hundred years.

He is genial and humorous, and always writes like a gentleman.

His essay on the happiness of obscurity is a good example of his method:

"If we engage into a large acquaintance and various familiarities, we set open our gates to the invaders of most of our time we expose our life to a quotidian ague of frigid impertinencies, which would make a wise man tremble to think of. Now, as for being known much by sight and pointed at, I cannot comprehend the honour that lies in

that; whatsoever it be, every mountebank has it more than the best doctor, and the hangman than the Lord Chief Justice of a city.

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Every creature has it, both of nature and art, if it be anyways extraordinary.

It was as often said, 'This is that Bucephalus ' or This is that Incitatus,' when they were led prancing through the streets, as 'This is that Ålexander' or This is that Domitian'; and truly, for the latter, I take Incitatus to have been a much more honourable beast than his master, and more deserving the consulship, than he the empire."

And in pursuance of this indifference to fame, as manifested in the recognition of his person by the general public, he retired in 1665 to Chertsey, where he died; and Johnson quotes a letter of his to Dr Thomas Pratt, written on his arrival at Chertsey, which displays his playful humour most felicitously:

"The first night that I came hither I caught so great a cold, with a defluxion of rheum, as made me keep my chamber ten days.

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And, two after, had such a bruise on my ribs with a fall, that I am yet unable to move or turn myself in bed.

"This is my personal fortune to begin with. And, besides, I can get no money from my tenants, and have my meadows eaten up every night by cattle put in by my neighbours.

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What this signifies or may come to in time, God knows ; if it be ominous, it can end in nothing less than hanging. Another misfortune has been, and stranger than all the rest, that you have broke your word with me, and failed to come, even though you told Mr Bois that you would.

"This is what they call Monstri simile.

"I do hope to recover my late hurt so farre within five or six days (though it be uncertain whether I shall ever recover) as to walk about again. And then methinks, you and I, and the Dean, might be merry upon St Ann's hill. "You might very conveniently come hither the way of Hampton Town, lying there one night.

"I write this in pain and can say no more. Verbum sapienti."

In a passage of singular simplicity and sincerity in one of his essays he describes the experiences of his life and the desire for tranquillity and retirement they engendered in him:

"With my heart wholly set upon letters I went to the university; but was soon torn from thence by that violent public storm which would suffer nothing to stand where it did, but rooted up every plant, even from the princely cedars, to me, the hyssop. Yet I had as good fortune as could have befallen me in such a tempest; for I was cast by it into the family of one of the best persons, and into the court of one of the best princesses in the world. Now though I was here engaged in ways most contrary to the original design of my life, that is, into much company, and no small business, and into a daily sight of greatness both militant and triumphant (for that was the state then of both the English and the French courts), yet all this was so far from altering my opinion, that it only added the confirmation of reason to that which was before but natural inclination. I saw plainly all the paint of that kind of life, the nearer I came to it; and that beauty which I did not fall in love with, when for aught I knew it was real, was not like to bewitch me, when I saw it was adulterate. I met with several great persons whom I liked very well, but could not perceive that any part of their greatness was to be liked or desired, no more than I would be glad or content to be in a storm, though I saw many ships which rid safely and bravely in it. A storm would not agree with my stomach if it did with my courage; though I was in a crowd of as good company as could be found anywhere, though I was in business of great and honourable trust, though I ate at the best table, and enjoyed the best conveniences for present subsistence that ought to be desired by a man of my condition in banishment and public distresses; yet I could not abstain from renewing my old schoolboy's wish in a copy of verses to the same effect: "Well then; I now do plainly see,

This busy world and I shall ne'er agree,' etc.

And I never then proposed to myself any other advantage from His Majesty's happy restoration, but the getting into

some moderately convenient retreat in the country, which I thought in that case I might easily have compassed, as well as some others, who with no greater probabilities or pretences have arrived to extraordinary fortunes."

The nearest approach to eloquence is to be found in his essay on Oliver Cromwell. As his sympathies were, of course, entirely on the Royalist side in the war, this passage is quite remarkable as showing that the greatness of Cromwell nevertheless impressed itself upon Cowley as indelibly as his achievements astonished him :

"What can be more extraordinary, than that a person of mean birth, no fortune, no eminent qualities of body, which have sometimes, or of mind, which have often, raised men to the highest dignities, should have the courage to attempt, and the happiness to succeed in, so improbable a design, as the destruction of one of the most ancient and most solidly-founded monarchies upon the earth? that he should have the power or boldness to put his prince and master to an open and infamous death; to banish that numerous and strongly-allied family; to do all this under the name and wages of a parliament; to trample upon. them too as he pleased, and spurn them out of doors when he grew weary of them; to raise up a new and unheard of monster out of their ashes; to stifle that in the very infancy, and set up himself above all things that ever were called sovereign in England; to oppress all his enemies by arms, and all his friends afterwards by artifice; to serve all parties patiently for a while and to command them victoriously at last; to overrun each corner of the three nations, and overcome with equal facility both the riches of the south and the poverty of the north; to be feared and courted by all foreign princes, and adopted a brother to the gods of the earth; to call together parliaments with a word of his pen, and scatter them again with the breath of his mouth; to be humbly and daily petitioned that he would be pleased to be hired, at the rate of two millions a year, to be the master of those who had hired him before to be their servant, to have the estates and lives of three kingdoms as much at his disposal, as was the

little inheritance of his father, and to be as noble and liberal in the spending of them; and lastly, for there is no end of all the particulars of his glory, to bequeath all this with one word to his posterity, to die with peace at home, and triumph abroad; to be buried among kings, and with more than regal solemnity; and to leave a name behind him, not to be extinguished, but with the whole world; which as it is now too little for his praises, so might have been too for his conquests, if the short line of human life could have been stretched out to the extent of his immortal designs?'

Cowley loved gardens, which is not an affection that comes to a man of evil nature, or if it do, will go far to redeem him.

I have never," he said, " had any other desire so strong and so like to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and large garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life only to the culture of them and study of nature."

Evelyn dedicated the second edition of his Gardener's Almanack in 1666 (1st edition 1664) to his "worthy friend" Abraham Cowley: and a great many years afterwards, in 1690, Evelyn wrote a letter to Lady Sunderland in which the following passage occurs :

"As for the Kalendar your Ladyship mentions, whatever assistance it may be to some novice gardener, sure I am his Lordship will find nothing in it worth his notice but an old inclination to an innocent diversion and the acceptance it found with my deare and-while he lived-worthy friend Mr Cowley, upon whose reputation only it has survived seaven impressions, and is now entering the eighth."

Cowley, when the work of Evelyn's was dedicated to him, responded with "An essay of the garden to John Evelyn, Esq.," in which there occurs the following passage after some preamble: