Cowley, at the beginning of the Civil War, joined the Royalists at Oxford; followed the queen to Paris; yielded his days and his nights to an employment of the highest confidence, that of deciphering the royal correspondence; he transacted their business, and, almost divorcing himself from his neglected muse, he yielded up for them the tranquillity so necessary to the existence of a poet. From his earliest days he tells us how the poetic affections had stamped themselves on his heart, “like letters cut into the bark of a young tree, which, with the tree, will grow proportionably.”

He describes his feelings at the court:—

“I saw plainly all the paint of that kind of life the nearer I came to it—that beauty which I did not fall in love with when, for aught I knew, it was real, was not like to bewitch or 38 entice me when I saw it was adulterate. I met with several great persons whom I liked very well, but could not perceive that any part of their greatness was to be liked or desired. I was in a crowd of good company, in business of great and honourable trust; I eat at the best table, and enjoyed the best conveniences that ought to be desired by a man of my condition; yet I could not abstain from renewing my old schoolboy’s wish, in a copy of verses to the same effect:—

Well then! I now do plainly see,
This busie world and I shall ne’er agree!”

After several years’ absence from his native country, at a most critical period, he was sent over to mix with that trusty band of loyalists, who, in secrecy and in silence, were devoting themselves to the royal cause. Cowley was seized on by the ruling powers. At this moment he published a preface to his works, which some of his party interpreted as a relaxation of his loyalty. He has been fully defended. Cowley, with all his delicacy of temper, wished sincerely to retire from all parties; and saw enough among the fiery zealots of his own, to grow disgusted even with Royalists.

His wish for retirement has been half censured as cowardice by Johnson; but there was a tenderness of feeling which had ill-formed Cowley for the cunning of party intriguers, and the company of little villains. About this time he might have truly distinguished himself as “The melancholy Cowley.”

I am only tracing his literary history for the purpose of this work: but I cannot pass without noticing the fact, that this abused man, whom his enemies were calumniating, was at this moment, under the disguise of a doctor of physic, occupied by the novel studies of botany and medicine; and as all science in the mind of the poet naturally becomes poetry, he composed his books on plants in Latin verse.

At length came the Restoration, which the poet zealously celebrated in his “Ode” on that occasion. Both Charles the First and Second had promised to reward his fidelity with the mastership of the Savoy; but, Wood says, “he lost it by certain persons enemies of the muses.” Wood has said no more; and none of Cowley’s biographers have thrown any light on the circumstance: perhaps we may discover this literary calamity.

That Cowley caught no warmth from that promised sunshine 39 which the new monarch was to scatter in prodigal gaiety, has been distinctly told by the poet himself; his muse, in “The Complaint,” having reproached him thus:—

Thou young prodigal, who didst so loosely waste
Of all thy youthful years, the good estate—
Thou changeling then, bewitch’d with noise and show,
Wouldst into courts and cities from me go—
Go, renegado, cast up thy account—
Behold the public storm is spent at last;
The sovereign is toss’d at sea no more,
And thou, with all the noble company,
Art got at last to shore—
But whilst thy fellow-voyagers I see,
All march’d up to possess the promis’d land;
Thou still alone (alas!) dost gaping stand
Upon the naked beach, upon the barren sand.