swears that Cowley's are but dull to mine.[28]

The wonder is not that he lost his pre-eminence, but that he ever
obtained it. His poetry is a puzzle from its contradictory qualities.
Some of his pieces have a gay facility which had not hitherto been
rivalled, and the greater part are harsh, heavy and obscure. He loved to
search for remote analogies, and his profusion of far-fetched similes
are constantly of a kind which debase the subject they are intended to
elevate and adorn. His language is incessantly pitched in a high, heroic
key, and then sinks in the same, or the succeeding sentence, into the
tamest, meanest phrases of colloquial prose. His verse in entire poems,
as well as in single lilies and occasional passages, is remarkable for
its tripping ease, and is more often rugged to such a degree that it is
incredible how it could pass with him for verse at all. The faulty side
in him predominates, and the general impression he leaves is that of
dullness, laboured and negligent by turns. He did not owe the whole of
his popularity to his real abilities, and the bad taste of his age. He
was a conspicuous adherent of the Stuarts, and the cavaliers adopted his
works out of compliment to his politics. The grand funeral procession,
commemorated in Windsor Forest, was a tribute paid to him by a party,
because he united the fame of a forward royalist to the celebrity of an
author. In a generation when authors and royalists were both dissolute,
his writings had at least the merit of being untainted by the prevailing
vice. Pope, describing the infidelity and debauchery of the Restoration
era, exclaims,

Unhappy Dryden! in all Charles's days,
Roscommon only boasts unspotted bays.[29]

He might have remembered Milton if he overlooked Cowley, who was
nevertheless a far greater poet than Roscommon. The one had gleams of
genius, and the other had none. The contemporaries of Cowley had not
been blind to the moral merits of his productions. "I cannot," says Sir
John Denham, "but mention with honour my friend Mr. Cowley, who was the
first who of late offered to redeem poesy from that slavery wherein this
depraved age has prostituted her to all imaginable uncleanness."[30] His
request in his will, that his compositions, printed and manuscript,
should be collected by Dr. Sprat, was accompanied by a clause
"beseeching him not to let any pass (if anything of that kind has
escaped my pen) which may give the least offence in poi