Exclamation and Interrogation. These will be exemplified under the head of Strength.

QUALITIES OF STYLE.

Simplicity. The subjects of the Essays are easy. Upon ambition, obscurity, procrastination, and suchlike, a writer can hardly produce new ideas; all his powers may be given to producing new turns of expression, illustrative anecdotes, historical allusions. If he is abstruse, the abstruseness must be wholly in the expression.

Cowley's treatment of his subjects is gay rather than grave, and the expression is easy and sprightly. He quotes a good deal of Latin, but he makes his quotations with a grace, and, apologising for "the pedantry of a heap of Latin sentences," provides us in most cases with fluent translations. The following on the Danger of Procrastination is a fair specimen :

"A gentleman in our late civil wars, when his quarters were beaten up by the enemy, was taken prisoner, and lost his life afterwards, only by staying to put on a band, and adjust his periwig; he would escape like a person of quality or not at all, and died the noble martyr of ceremony and gentility. I think your counsel of Festina lente' is as ill to a man who is flying from the world, as it would have been to that unfortunate well-bred gentleman, who was so cautious as not to fly undecently from his enemies; and therefore I prefer Horace's advice before yours—

Sapere aude,

Incipe-2

Begin; the getting out of doors is the greatest part of the journey. Varro teaches us that Latin proverb: but to return to Horace

Begin; be bold, and venture to be wise;
He who defers this work from day to day,

Does on a river's bank expecting stay,

Till the whole stream, which stopt him, should be gone,
That runs, and as it runs, for ever will run on.

Caesar (the man of expedition above all others) was so far from this folly, that whensoever, in a journey, he was to cross any river, he never went one foot out of his way for a bridge, or a ford, or a ferry; but flung himself into it immediately, and swam over: and this is the course we ought to imitate, if we meet with any stops in our way to happiness. Stay, till the waters are low; stay, till some boats come by to transport you; stay, till a bridge be built for you: you had even as good stay, till the river be quite past. Persius (who, you use to say, you do not know whether he be a good poet or no, because you cannot understand him, and whom, therefore, I say, I know to be not a good poet) has an odd expression of these procrastinators, which, methinks, is full of fancy

Our yesterday's to-morrow now is gone,
And still a new to-morrow does come on;
We by to-morrows draw up all our store,
Till the exhausted well can yield no more.

1 ["Take it easy;" lit. "Hasten slowly."]
2["Have the courage to be wise,―begin."]

"And now, I think, I am even with you, for your 'Otium cum dignitate,' and Festina lente,' and three or four other more of your new Latin sentences; if I should draw upon you all my forces out of Seneca and Plutarch upon this subject, I should overwhelm you; but I leave those, as Triarii, for your next charge. I shall only give you now a light skirmish out of an epigrammatist, your special good friend; and so, vale.'

The above exemplifies the simple style of his familiar essays; we shall see that even in his most ambitious declamations there is a peculiar lightness and ease, a singular absence of stiffness and constraint.

Strength. The passage just quoted from the Essays is an example of our author's sprightliness and animation. The passage quoted before to show how modern his expression is, exemplifies animation in a more serious vein, the animation of finished brevity and point. In some parts of his Prefaces, and throughout the Discourse on Cromwell, he assumes a loftier tone of declamation. Some of these declamatory passages are highly finished. One of the finest of them, the summary of the striking paradoxes in the career of Cromwell, is quoted and analysed in Bain's Rhetoric.'

remarks upon the 'Davideis,' he presents the fortunes of David in the same striking form, though the contrasts are not portrayed at the same length :

"What worthier subject could have been chosen, among all the treasuries of past times, than the life of this young prince, who from so small beginnings, through such infinite troubles and oppositions, by such miraculous virtues and excellencies, and with such incomparable variety of wonderful actions and accidents, became the greatest monarch that ever sat on the most famous throne of the whole earth?"

His plea for dramatising the characters and incidents of the Old Testament, being an apology for his own practice, is written with all his powers of style. After enumerating the dramatic elements in the life of David, he continues :--

"What can we imagine more proper for the ornaments of wit or learning in the story of Deucalion, than in that of Noah? Why will not the actions of Sampson afford as plentiful matter as the labours of Hercules? Why is not Jephtha's daughter as good a woman as Iphigenia? and the friendship of David and Jonathan more worthy celebration than that of Theseus and Pirithous? Does not the passage of Moses and the Israelites into the Holy Land yield incomparably more poetical variety than the voyages of Ulysses or Æneas? Are the obsolete threadbare tales of Thebes and Troy half so stored with great, heroical, and supernatural actions (since verse will needs find or make such) as the wars of Joshua, of the Judges, of David, and divers others? Can all the transformations of the gods give such copious hints to flourish and expatiate on, as the true miracles of Christ, or of His prophets and apostles? Why do I instance in these few particulars? All the books of the Bible are either already most admirable and exalted pieces of poesy, or are the best materials in the world for it."

Perhaps the most effective piece of rhetoric in all his composition

is the passage beginning with the simile of "Jack in the clockhouse." The melodious solemnity of the rhythm, the vigour and propriety of the language, the fine similes, and the imposing examples, exhibit probably the utmost stretch of the author's

power :

In

"I have often observed (with all submission and resignation of spirit to the inscrutable mysteries of Eternal Providence) that, when the fulness and maturity of time is come, that produces the great confusions and changes in the world, it usually pleases God to make it appear, by the manner of them, that they are not the effects of human force or policy, but of the divine justice and predestination; and, though we see a man, like that which we call Jack of the clock-house, striking, as it were, the hour of that fulness of time, yet our reason must needs be convinced that his hand is moved by some secret, and, to us who stand without, invisible direction. And the stream of the current is then so violent, that the strongest men in the world cannot draw up against it; and none are so weak but they may sail down with it. These are the spring-tides of public affairs, which we see often happen, but seek in vain to discover any certain causes. And one man then, by maliciously opening all the sluices that he can come at, can never be the sole author of all this (though he may be as guilty as if really he were, by intending and imagining to be so); but it is God that breaks up the flood-gates of so general a deluge, and all the art then, and industry of mankind, is not sufficient to raise up dikes and ramparts against it. such a time, it was, as this, that not all the wisdom and power of the Roman senate, nor the wit and eloquence of Cicero, nor the courage and virtue of Brutus, was able to defend their country, or themselves, against the unexperienced rashness of a beardless boy, and the loose rage of a voluptuous madman. The valour, and prudent counsels, on the one side, are made fruitless, and the errors, and cowardice, on the other, harmless, by unexpected accidents. The one general saves his life, and gains the whole world, by a very dream; and the other loses both at once, by a little mistake of the shortness of his sight. And though this be not always so, for we see that, in the translation of the great monarchies from one to another, it pleased God to make choice of the most eminent men in nature, as Cyrus, Alexander, Scipio, and his contemporaries, for his chief instruments, and actors, in so admirable a work (the end of this being, not only to destroy or punish one nation, which may be done by the worst of mankind, but to exalt and bless another, which is only to be effected by great and virtuous persons); yet, when God only intends the temporary chastisement of a people, he does not raise up his servant Cyrus (as he himself is pleased to call him), or an Alexander (who had as many virtues to do good, as vices to do harm); but he makes the Massaniellos, and the Johns of Leyden, the instruments of his vengeance, that the power of the Almighty might be inore evident by the weakness of the means which he chooses to demonstrate it. He did not assemble the serpents, and the monsters of Afric, to correct the pride of the Egyptians; but called for his armies of locusts out of Ethiopia, and formed new ones of vermin out of the very dust; and, because you see a whole country destroyed by these, will you argue from thence they must needs have had both the craft of foxes, and the courage of lions?"

Wit and Humour.-Wit and humour are undoubtedly the ruling features of Cowley's prose. His ridicule is for the most part gay and genial. Here and there we meet with passages of keen satire;

but there is nothing approaching to personal spleen in his sarcasms. In his bitterest shots at Cromwell, he keeps in view rather what he supposed to be Cromwell's vices-tyrannous ambition and hypocrisy. The man himself he admits to be an extraordinary person, and professes to look upon him with no greater animosity than upon Marius or Sylla. Besides, the invective is supposed to be delivered in a dream, and to the face of a terrible angel professing to be an admirer of the late Lord Protector. The circumstances are managed with a kind of comic effect; and, keeping in mind the situation, we see the most bitter invective through a humorous medium.

As an example of his powers of sarcastic irony, take the following ludicrously-unexpected banter by the terrible apparition, the "North-West Principality." Cowley had been proceeding in a full tide of denunciation, accusing Cromwell of tyranny, craft, and other crimes :

"Here I stopt; and my pretended protector, who, I expected, should have been very angry, fell a-laughing; it seems at the simplicity of my dis course, for thus he replied: "You seem to pretend extremely to the old obsolete rules of virtue and conscience, which makes me doubt very much, whether, from this vast prospect of three kingdoms, you can show me any acres of your own. But these are so far from making you a prince, that I am afraid your friends will never have the contentment to see you so much as a justice of peace in your own country. For this, I perceive, which you call virtue, is nothing else but either the forwardness of a Cynic, or the laziness of an Epicurean. I am glad you allow me at least artful dissimulation, and unwearied diligence in my hero; and I assure you that he, whose life is constantly drawn by these two, shall never be misled out of the way of greatness. But I see you are a pedant, and Platonical statesman, a theoretical commonwealth's-man, an Utopian dreamer. Was ever riches gotten by your golden mediocrities? or the supreme place attained to by virtues that must not stir out of the middle? Do you study Aristotle's politics, and write, if you please, comments upon them; and let another but practise Machiavel: and let us see, then, which of you two will come to the greatest preferments. If the desire of rule and superiority,'

""&c.

The satire of the Essays is never long kept up; some goodhumoured familiarity of expression comes in after a short passage of keener language, and puts us into a humorous mood by revealing the easy unexcited temper of the satirist. Thus, in the Essay on Obscurity:

"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 more than the lord chief justice of a city. Every creature has it, both of nature and art, if it be any ways 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 Alexander,' 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."

He can be humorous at his own expense, as in the description of his country experiences:

"One would think that all mankind had bound themselves by an oath to do all the wickedness they can; that they had all (as the Scripture speaks) sold themselves to sin: the difference only is, that some are a little more crafty (and but a little, God knows) in making of the bargain. I thought, when I went first to dwell in the country, that, without doubt, I should have met there with the simplicity of the old poetical golden age; I thought to have found no inhabitants there, but such as the shepherds of Sir Philip Sidney in Arcadia, or of Monsieur d'Urfé, upon the banks of Lignon; and began to consider with myself, which way I might recommend no less to posterity the happiness and innocence of the men of Chertsea : but to confess the truth, I perceived quickly, by infallible demonstrations, that I was still in Old England, and not in Arcadia, or La Forrest; that, if I could not content myself with anything less than exact fidelity in human conversation, I had almost as good go back and seek for it in the Court, or the Exchange, or Westminster-hall. I ask again then, whither shall we fly, or what shall we do?"

The Essay on Agriculture is written in his happiest vein. He searches out the authorities for the dignity of agricultural life with great pleasantry :

"From Homer, we must not expect much concerning our affairs. He was blind, and could neither work in the country, nor enjoy the pleasures of it; his helpless poverty was likeliest to be sustained in the richest places; he was to delight the Grecians with fine tales of the wars and adventures of their ancestors; his subject removed him from all commerce with us, and yet, methinks, he made a shift to show his goodwill a little. For though he could do us no honour in the person of his hero Ulysses (much less of Achilles), because his whole time was consumed in wars and voyages; yet he makes his father Laertes a gardener all that while, and seeking his consolation for the absence of his son in the pleasure of planting, and even dunging his own grounds. Ye see, he did not contemn us peasants; nay, so far was he from that insolence, that he always styles Eumæus, who kept the hogs, with wonderful respect, dîov vpopẞov, the divine swine-herd: he could have done no more for Menelaus or Agamemnon."

OTHER WRITERS.

The justification of departing from the usual chronological arrangement, which dates a period from the Restoration, is that by the present arrangement we get a more compact grouping of our authors relatively to the great Rebellion. By annexing to

the period of the Commonwealth the first ten years of the reign of Charles II., we bind together those that wrote during the agitation of the political storm, and those whose literary activity was greatest, indeed, when that storm was laid, but whose