SOURCE: "Abraham Cowley (1618-1667)," in Lives of the Poets, Dolphin Books, pp. [22-65].

The following excerpt begins with Johnson's famous censure of seventeenth-century metaphysical poets for excessive concern with novelty, slavish adherence to fashionable style, and self-conscious displays of erudition. He considers Cowley "almost the last of that race, and undoubtedly the best, " and offers commentary on a wide range of his work. Johnson praises particular poems in the Miscellanies as well as Cowley's essays and critical writings but blames the poet for not putting his remarkable wit and learning to better advantage.

… Cowley, like other poets who have written with narrow views, and, instead of tracing intellectual pleasures in the mind of man, paid their court to temporary prejudices, has been at one time too much praised, and too much neglected at another.

Wit, like all other things subject by their nature to the choice of man...