Cowley had done much secretary's work for Charles I during the war, he was employed by the Queen in Paris, and returned in 1656 to England, where he was arrested, but presently released. He returned to France just as the star of Molière was rising, came home at the Restoration, was dissatisfied with such reward as his loyalty obtained, and left town for a very pleasant house at Chertsey, where he died in 1667. His set of amatory verses, "The Mistress," holds a high place in collections. He revelled in what Dr. Johnson called "metaphysical" conceits. Odes he wrote in great numbers, in imitation of Pindar; one of them is addressed to the Royal Society and hails the new birth of divine Science. Pindaric Odes became a fashion that lasted long, and, in its day, produced little of merit till Dryden came. Not much of Cowley in verse is now read for pleasure except the lively and graceful "Chronicle" of the names of his mistresses. If we could suppose that without Cowley the great Odes in the language would not have been written, Cowley might be regarded as an important influence. But when we turn to his "Praise of Pindar," Pindar is imitable by none; The Phœnix Pindar is a vast species alone, Cowley does not seem very inspiring! But Dr. Johnson held that Cowley "was the first who imparted to English numbers the enthusiasm of the greater ode, and the gaiety of the less," while "he left such specimens of excellence" in versification "as enabled succeeding poets to improve it". Denham. The poems of Sir John Denham (1615-1669) might, had they perished, have been reckoned in "the veniable part of things lost". He was of the Royalist party, and his occasional political rhymes are humourless libels. In 1642 he published "The Sophy," and surprised the wits, for he had been best known as a dicer and gambler. In 1642 his "Cooper's Hill," an early example of local poetry, appeared, and in this was little of what Dr. Johnson called "the old manner of continuing the sense ungracefully from verse to verse," which disfigured his translation of the Second Book of the "Æneid". For restricting the sense to the couplet, Denham was reckoned with Waller among the reformers of English poetry. Four lines of "Cooper's Hill," admired by Dryden, are all that men remember; he wrote not ungracefully on Cowley, and he succeeded in getting £10,000 for the Royal cause from the Scottish traders in Poland. He is no longer, as by Dr. Johnson, deservedly considered as one of the fathers of our English poetry, "who improved our taste and advanced our language". Sherburne, Stanley, Browne, Cotton.