MILTON DICTATING "PARADISE LOST" TO HIS DAUGHTERS. (See p. [356].)

(After the Picture by Munkacsy.)

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Besides these poetical works, were his odes, including the splendid ones of the "Nativity" and the "Passion," and a great number of translations from the chief poets of Greece, Rome, and Italy, original poems written in Latin and Italian, portion of the Psalms "done into metre," and "Paradise Regained." This last poem, though bearing no degree of equality to the "Paradise Lost," is yet a noble poem, and would have made a great reputation for any other man. It is clearly not so well thought out and elaborated as the "Paradise Lost," which was the dream of his youth, the love and the labour of his prime. "Paradise Regained," on the other hand, was the chance suggestion of Thomas Elwood, his Latin reader, and closed with the temptation of Christ in the wilderness, instead of including the Crucifixion and Ascension, which might have given the poet a scope equal in magnificence to that of his former great epic. Of his prose works we shall speak presently.

The most popular of all poets of this period was Abraham Cowley (b. 1618; d. 1667). He is a striking example of those authors whom the critics of the time cry to the skies, and whom more discriminating posterity are willing to forget. Cowley, in his lifetime, had ten times the fame of Milton. Johnson, so unjust to many of our poets, can hardly be said to be so to Cowley. He says—"Though in his own time considered of unrivalled excellence, and as having taken a flight beyond all that went before him, Cowley's reputation could not last. His character of writing was not his own; he unhappily adopted that which was predominant. He saw a certain way to present praise; and, not sufficiently inquiring by what means the ancients have continued to delight through all the changes of human manners, he contented himself with a deciduous laurel."

He, in fact, for popularity's sake, preferred art, or rather artifice, to nature. Yet there are many beautiful thoughts, much real fancy and wit scattered through his poems; but they are too often buried in outrageous conceits and distorted metre. He never seems really in earnest, but always playing with his subject, and constructing gewgaws instead of raising immortal structures.

Cowley was a zealous Royalist; he went over to France when the queen of Charles I. retired thither, and became her secretary for her private correspondence with Charles. Afterwards he was sent over in the character of a spy on the Republican party and its proceedings. "Under pretence of privacy and retirement, he was to take occasion of giving notice of the posture of things in this nation;" but became suspected, and was arrested. He then fawned on Cromwell, wrote verses in his honour, which, however, were only shown in private; and, when the Commonwealth began to exhibit signs of dissolution, he again hastened to the exiled Court in France, and came back in the crowd of Royalists eager for promotion. But his flattering of Cromwell had been reported, and he was treated with coldness. Yet after some time, through Buckingham and the Earl of St. Albans, he obtained a lease of some lands, and, after the ill reception of his play of "The Cutter of Colman Street," he retired into the country, first to Barn Elms, and next to Chertsey, in Surrey, where he died in his forty-ninth year.

The great satirist of the age was Samuel Butler (b. 1600; d. 1680), who in his "Hudibras" introduced a new kind of poetry—a comic doggerel, now styled, as sui generis, Hudibrastic. Butler was the son of a yeoman, and had been educated for the Church without those connections which lead to promotion. With an immense accumulation of learning, and talent enough to have made half a dozen bishops, he became at one time a clerk to one Jeffreys, a justice of the peace at Earl's Coomb, in Worcestershire, and afterwards to Sir Samuel Luke, at Woodend, in Bedfordshire. In these situations he gleaned the characters and materials for his "Hudibras," a burlesque on the Puritans. Sir Samuel Luke was the actual Hudibras. The poem ridicules the Puritans in every way, but especially for attempting to put down bear-baiting; and accordingly the first canto—

"The adventure of the bear and fiddle