become with the French. Fortunately Milton showed us a better way. We may recollect any passage of Paradise Regained, and compare it with the following fragment from Cowley's Davideis. "Whilst thus his wrath with threats the tyrant fed, The threatned youth slept fearless on his bed; Sleep on, rest quiet as thy conscience take, For though thou sleep'st thy self, thy God's awake! Above the subtle foldings of the sky,

Above the well-set orbs' soft harmony,

Above those petty lamps that gild the night,
There is a place o'erflown with hallowed light,
Where Heaven, as if it left it self behind,

Is stretcht out far, nor its own bounds can find:
Here peaceful flames swell up the sacred place,
Nor can contain themselves in th' endless space.
For there no twilight of the sun's dull ray,
Glimmers upon the pure and native day;
No pale-fac'd moon does in stol'n beams appear,
Or with dim taper scatters darkness there;
On no smooth sphere the restless seasons slide,
No circling motion doth swift time divide;
Nothing is there To come, and nothing Past,
But an eternal Now does always last.
There sits th' Almighty, First of all, and End,
Whom nothing but Himself can comprehend;
Who with his word commanded all to be,
And all obey'd him, for that word was He.

While examining Cowley's position in the poetic literature of the age, we are struck by the fact that he was with the classicists, yet not of them. Their relations were with antiquity through France, his with antiquity through Spain. I am not certain that I perceive in his writings any direct imitation of Spanish literature, but he has the cultismo, the desire to speak politely and artificially, which the critics of the age rightly identified with the poets of Madrid. His great influence, his great prestige, clashed with those of Waller, and after having at least as much to do with forming Dryden's style as Waller had, Cowley sank into the second rank. Pope, while bending respectfully to Waller and Denham, could sneer at Cowley', and treat him as a dethroned monarch of literature.

But a curious thing happened. When the prestige of Pope himself was waning at last, and when Waller began to fade back into disrepute, the prosody of Cowley revived once more, and in the hands of Gray became the main poetic in

1

Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet

His Moral pleases, not his pointed wit;

Forgot his epic, nay Pindaric art,

But still I love the language of his heart.

Pope: Imitations of Horace. Bk. ii. Epis. 1. 1741.

fluence of the middle of the eighteenth century. It was the echo of Cowley's harmonies that broke the monotonous twanging of the distich, and in Shelley, in Coleridge, in the fluent and ingenious inventions of Mr Swinburne, we still hear variations upon that broken lyrical music, while the brilliant couplet that Waller was so assiduous in introducing has quite passed away out of our living literature.

THE REACTION.