If Pope in his time could ask, "Who now reads Cowley?" and if Cowper, at a later period, could lament that his "splendid wit" should have been "entangled in the cobwebs of the schools," it may be in our day, when most good people who cultivate poetry, either as readers or writers, swear by Wordsworth or Tennyson, that the bare mention of Cowley's name, in some circles, would be resented as a kind of impertinence. But Pope's answer to his own question is as apposite now as when the question was first put. If Cowley—
"——pleases yet,
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit;
Forgot his epic, nay pindaric art,
But still I love the language of his heart."
The Davideis and the Herbs and Plants find few readers beyond those who resort to them for special purposes; but poets of more recent times, even whilst contemning his "conceits," have (as your volumes have frequently shown) often borrowed his ideas without improving upon the phraseology in which they have been clothed. Witness, for instance, Cowper's transmutation of his noble line:
"God the first garden made—the first city, Cain,"
into his own smooth generality of—
"God made the country, and man made the town."
And Cowley's love of Nature, and his beautiful lyrics in praise of a country life, will always keep his name before us. However, to desist from this "nothing-if-not-critical" strain, let me beg of you to lay the accompanying transcript [see the next page] of a manuscript in my possession before your readers—that is, if you deem it of sufficient interest.