CONTENTS. brigiensem 109 An Elegy on the Death of the Right Hon. Dudley Lord Carleton A Poetical Revenge . To the Dutchess of Buckingham To his Godfather, Mr. A. B. An Elegy on the Death of John Littleton, Esq. A Translation of Verses upon the Blessed Virgin Ode 1. On the Praise of Poetry. 2. On Poverty and Riches 3. To his Mistress . 4. On the Uncertainty of Fortune 5. In Commendation of the Reign of King Charles To the Lord Falkland, on his Return from the Nothern Ex- THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM COWLEY. BY DR. JOHNSON. THE Life of Cowley, notwithstanding the penury of English biography, has been written by Dr. Sprat, an author whose pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language have deservedly set him high in the ranks of literature; but his zeal of friendship, or ambition of eloquence, has produced a funeral oration rather than a history: he has given the character, not the life, of Cowley; for he writes with so little detail, that scarcely any thing is distinctly known, but all is shown confused and enlarged through the mist of panegyric. ABRAHAM COWLEY was born in the year 1618. His father was a grocer, whose condition Dr. Sprat conceals under the general appellation of a citizen; and, what would probably not have been less carefully suppressed, the omission of his name in the register of St. Dunstan's parish, gives reason to suspect that his father was a sectary. Whoever he was, he died before the birth of his son, and consequently left him to the care of his mother; whom Wood represents as struggling earnestly to procure him a literary education, and who, as she lived to the age of eighty, had her solicitude rewarded by seeing her son eminent, and, I hope, by seeing him fortunate, VOL. I. B |