l. 6. Non ego.  Horace, Odes, ii. 17. 9, 10.

ll. 11 ff. Nec vos.  These late Latin verses may be Cowley’s own, but they are not in his collected Latin poems.  Compare Virgil, Georgics, ii. 485-6.  ‘Syluaeq;’ = ‘Sylvaeque’:  ‘q;’ was a regular contraction for que:  cf. p. 44, l. 6.

61.

The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley, 1668.—­’An Account of the Life and
Writings of M’r Abraham Cowley’. (pp. [18]-[20].)

Thomas Sprat (1635-1713), author of The History of the Royal-Society, 1667, afterwards Bishop of Rochester, 1684, was entrusted by Cowley’s will with ’the revising of all his Works that were formerly printed, and the collecting of those Papers which he had design’d for the Press’; and as literary executor he brought out in 1668 a folio edition of the English works, and an octavo edition of the Latin works.  To both he prefixed a life, one in English and the other in Latin.  The more elaborate English life was written partly in the hope that ’a Character of Mr. Cowley may be of good advantage to our Nation’.  Unfortunately the ethical bias has injured the biography.  In Johnson’s words, ’his zeal 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.’  Similarly Coleridge asks ’What literary man has not regretted the prudery of Sprat in refusing to let his friend Cowley appear in his slippers and dressing-gown?’ (Biographia Literaria, ch. iii).  His method is the more to be regretted as no one knew Cowley better in his later years.  His greatest error of judgement was to suppress his large collection of Cowley’s letters.  But with all its faults Sprat’s Life of Cowley occupies an important place at the beginning of English biography of men of letters.  It is the earliest substantial life of a poet whose reputation rested on his poetry.  Fulke Greville’s life of Sir Philip Sidney was the life of a soldier and a statesman of promise; and to Izaak Walton, Donne was not so much a poet as a great Churchman.

In the edition of 1668 the life of Cowley runs to twenty-four folio pages.  The passage here selected deals directly with his character.

Page 203, ll. 25-7.  It is evidently the impression of a stranger at first sight that Aubrey gives in his short note:  ’A.C. discoursed very ill and with hesitation’ (ed.  A. Clark, vol. i, p. 190).

62.

A Character of King Charles the Second:  And Political, Moral and Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections.  By George Savile, Marquis of Halifax.  London:  MDCCL.

Halifax’s elaborate and searching account of Charles II was first published in 1750 ’from his original Manuscripts, in the Possession of his Grand-daughter Dorothy Countess of Burlington’.  It consists of seven parts:  I. Of his Religion; II.  His Dissimulation; III.  His Amours, Mistresses, &c.; IV.  His Conduct to his Ministers; V. Of his Wit and Conversation; VI.  His Talents, Temper, Habits, &c.; VII.  Conclusion.  Only the second, fifth, and sixth are given here.  The complete text is reprinted in Sir Walter Raleigh’s Works of Halifax, 1912, pp. 187-208.