"The Guardian;" a piece which served the cause
of loyalty. After the Restoration, he rewrote it under the title of
"Cutter of Coleman Street;" a comedy which may still be read with
equal curiosity and interest: a spirited picture of the peculiar
characters which appeared at the Revolution. It was not only ill
received by a faction, but by those vermin of a new court, who,
without merit themselves, put in their claims, by crying down those
who, with great merit, are not in favour. All these to a man accused
the author of having written a satire against the king's party. And
this wretched party prevailed, too long for the author's repose, but
not for his fame.[29] Many years afterwards this comedy became
popular. Dryden, who was present at the representation, tells us that
Cowley "received the news of his ill success not with so much firmness
as might have been expected from so great a man." Cowley was in truth
a great man, and a greatly injured man. His sensibility and delicacy
of temper were of another texture than Dryden's. What at that moment
did Cowley experience, when he beheld himself neglected, calumniated,
and, in his last appeal to public favour, found himself still a victim
to a vile faction, who, to court their common master, were trampling
on their honest brother?

We shall find an unbroken chain of evidence, clearly demonstrating the
agony of his literary feelings. The cynical Wood tells us that, "not
finding that preferment he expected, while others for their money
carried away most places, he retired discontented into Surrey." And
his panegyrist, Sprat, describes him as "weary of the vexations and
formalities of an active condition--he had been perplexed with a long
compliance with foreign manners. He was satiated with the arts of a
court, which sort of life, though his virtue made it innocent to him,
yet nothing could make it quiet. These were the reasons that moved him
to follow the violent inclination of his own mind," &c. I doubt if
either the sarcastic antiquary or the rhetorical panegyrist have
developed the simple truth of Cowley's "violent inclination of his own
mind." He does it himself more openly in that beautiful picture of an
injured poet, in "The Complaint," an ode warm with individual feeling,
but which Johnson coldly passes over, by telling us that "it met the
usual fortune of complaints, and seems to have excited more contempt
than pity."

Thus the biographers of Cowley have told us not