COWLEY. 1 THE Life of Cowley, notwithstanding the penury of English biograpby, has been written by Dr. Sprat, an author whose pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language has deservedly set him high in the ranks of literature; but hiszeal of friendship, or ambition of eloquence, has produced a funeral oration rather than a history: he has given the character, not the life of Cowley; for he writes with so little detail, that scarcely any thing is distinctly known, but all is shewn confused and enlarged through the mist of panegyrick. ABRAHAM COWLEY was born in the year one thousand six hundred and eighteen. His father was a grocer, whose condition Dr. Sprat conceals under the general appellation of a citizen, and, what would probably not have been less carefully suppressed, the omission of his name in the register of St. Dunstan's parish, gives reason to suspect that his father was a sectary. Whoever he was, he died before the birth of his son, and consequently left him to the care of his mother; whom Wood represents as struggling earn stl, to procure hiin a literary education, and who, as she lived to the age of eighty, bad her solicitúde rewarded by seeing her son eminent, and, I hope, by seeing him fortunate, and partaking | his prosperity. We know at least, from Sprat's account, that he always acknowledged her care, and justly paid the dues of filial gratitude. In the window of his mother's apartment lay Spenser's Fairy Queen; in which he very early took delight to read, til, by feeling the charms of verse, he became, as he relates, irrecoverably a poet Such are the accidents, which, sometimes remembered, and perhaps sometimes forgotten, produce that particular designation of mind, and propenfity for some certain science or employment, which is commonly called Genius. The true Genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great Painter of the present age, had the first fondness for his art excited by the perusal of Richardson's ticatise. VOL. I. B By i |
