Pindaric Odes became a fashion that lasted long, and, in its day, produced little of merit till Dryden came. Not much of Cowley in verse is now read for pleasure except the lively and graceful "Chronicle" of the names of his mistresses. If we could suppose that without Cowley the great Odes in the language would not have been written, Cowley might be regarded as an important influence. But when we turn to his "Praise of Pindar,"
Pindar is imitable by none;
The Phœnix Pindar is a vast species alone,
Cowley does not seem very inspiring! But Dr. Johnson held that Cowley "was the first who imparted to English numbers the enthusiasm of the greater ode, and the gaiety of the less," while "he left such specimens of excellence" in versification "as enabled succeeding poets to improve it".
Denham.
The poems of Sir John Denham (1615-1669) might, had they perished, have been reckoned in "the veniable part of things lost". He was of the Royalist party, and his occasional political rhymes are humourless libels. In 1642 he published "The Sophy," and surprised the wits, for he had been best known as a dicer and gambler. In 1642 his "Cooper's Hill," an early example of local poetry, appeared, and in this was little of what Dr. Johnson called "the old manner of continuing the sense ungracefully from verse to verse," which disfigured his translation of the Second Book of the "Æneid". For restricting the sense to the couplet, Denham was reckoned with Waller among the reformers of English poetry.
Four lines of "Cooper's Hill," admired by Dryden, are all that men remember; he wrote not ungracefully on Cowley, and he succeeded in getting £10,000 for the Royal cause from the Scottish traders in Poland. He is no longer, as by Dr. Johnson, deservedly considered as one of the fathers of our English poetry, "who improved our taste and advanced our language".
Sherburne, Stanley, Browne, Cotton.
It is customary to mention among English poets of the seventeenth century Sir Edward Sherburne, Thomas Stanley his kinsman, Alexander Browne, and Charles Cotton, whose birth and death dates range from 1618 to 1702—Sherburne's life occupied the whole space. All but Cotton, the latest born (1630), were of the Royalist party. Sherburne dealt most in translations and sacred verses; Browne in ditties of love, wine, and politics, with epistles and elegies; Stanley was a scholar—his amorous verses often approach excellence; Cotton celebrated Chloris with little inspiration, wrote angling songs, and was the friend of Izaak Walton, a fact that preserves his name in lavender. He wrote the part on fly-fishing (in which Walton was no expert) for a late edition of "The Compleat Angler," and (1681) celebrated in verse "The Wonders of the Peak," as he had sung the praises of his well-loved river, the Dove. His "Scarronides or Virgil Travestie," in the manner of Scarron gave offence to reverent admirers of the "Æneid".
Waller.
Edmund Waller, certainly the greatest wit of his time (for it would be sacrilege to speak of Milton as "a wit"), was born at Coleshill in Bucks, on 3 March, 1606. He was early left a rich orphan, was educated at Eton, and King's, Cambridge, entered Parliament at 18, and was familiar with the Court of James I. His first-known poem, on "The Escape of the Prince at Saint Andero," is in the same correct and elegant heroic verse as that of his later measures: Waller had at 18 command of the instrument to which Dryden fell heir. Possibly the poem, with some of his other loyal pieces of almost the same period, may have been improved by Waller in later days, but his ear was already as excellent as that of Davies in his "Nosce te Ipsum" or of Fairfax in his translation of Tasso. Waller had no taste for the venture-some irregular lines of his contemporaries, and seldom, like so many of them, drew amorous conceits from the depths of the fanciful science of the age.