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Who travels in religious jars, Truth mix'd with error, clouds with rays, With Whifton wanting pyx and ftars, In the wide ocean finks or ftrays.

Cowley feems to have had, what Milton is believed to have wanted, the skill to rate his own performances by their juft value, and has therefore clofed his Mifcellanies with the yerfes upon Crashaw, which apparently excel all that have gone before them, and in which there are beauties which common authors may juftly think not only above their attainment, but above their ambition.

To the Mifcellanies fucceed the Anacrcontiques, or paraphraftical tranflations

of fome little poems, which pass, however juftly, under the name of Anacreon. Of those fongs dedicated to festivity and gaiety, in which even the morality is voluptuous, and which teach nothing but the enjoyment of the prefent day, he has given rather a pleafing than a faithful reprefentation, having retained their fpriteliness, but loft their fimplicity. The Anacreon of Cowley, like the Homer of Pope, has admitted the decoration of fome modern graces, by which he is undoubtedly made more amiable to common readers, and perhaps, if they would honeftly declare their own perceptions, to far the greater part of thofe whom courtefy and ignorance are content to ftile the Learned.

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Thefe little pieces will be found more finished in their kind than any other of Cowley's works. The diction fhews nothing of the mould of time, and the fentiments are at no great distance from our present habitudes of thought. Real mirth must be always natural, and nature is uniform. Men have been wife in very different modes; but they have always laughed the fame way.

Levity of thought naturally pro

duced familiarity of language, and the familiar part of language continues long the fame the dialogue of comedy, when it is tranfcribed from popular manners and real life, is read from age to age with equal pleasure. The artifices of inverfion by which the eftablished

blifhed order of words is changed, or of innovation, by which new words or new meanings of words are introduced, is practifed not by thofe who talk to be understood, but by thofe who write to be admired.

The Anacreontiques therefore of Cowley give now all the pleasure which they ever gave. If he was formed by nature for one kind of writing more than for another, his power feems to have been greatest in the familiar and the feftive..

The next clafs of his poems is called The Miftrefs, of which it is not neceffary to select any particular pieces for praise or cenfure. They have all the fame beauties and faults, and nearly in the fame proportion. They are writtenwith

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with exuberance of wit, and with copiousness of learning; and it is truly afferted by Sprat, that the plenitude of the writer's knowledge flows in upon his page, fo that the reader is commonly furprised into fome improvement. But, confidered as the verses of a lover, no man that has ever loved will much. commend them. They are neither courtly nor pathetick, have neither gallantry nor fondnefs. His praifes are too far-fought, and too hyperbolical, either to expreís love or to excite it: every ftanza is crouded with darts and flames, with wounds and death, with mingled fouls, and with broken hearts.

The principal artifice by which The Miftrefs is filled with conceits is very

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