Notes and Queries, Vol. V, Number 125, March 20, 1852: A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc.Various
History
Notes and Queries, Vol. V, Number 125, March 20, 1852: A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc.
Various
Questions and answers -- Periodicals
Although we are not without hopes of receiving further information from
the same source, we could not refrain from bringing this new fact in the
history of the Tradescants at once before our readers.
COWLEY AND HIS MONUMENT.
If Pope in his time could ask, "Who now reads Cowley?" and if Cowper, at
a later period, could lament that his "splendid wit" should have been
"entangled in the cobwebs of the schools," it may be in our day, when
most good people who cultivate poetry, either as readers or writers,
swear by Wordsworth or Tennyson, that the bare mention of Cowley's name,
in some circles, would be resented as a kind of impertinence. But Pope's
answer to his own question is as apposite now as when the question was
first put. If Cowley--
"----pleases yet,
His _moral_ pleases, not his pointed wit;
Forgot his epic, nay pindaric art,
But still I love the language of his _heart_."
The _Davideis_ and the _Herbs and Plants_ find few readers beyond those
who resort to them for special purposes; but poets of more recent times,
even whilst contemning his "conceits," have (as your volumes have
frequently shown) often borrowed his ideas without improving upon the
phraseology in which they have been clothed. Witness, for instance,
Cowper's transmutation of his noble line:
"God the first garden made--the first city, Cain,"
into his own smooth generality of--
"God made the country, and man made the town."
And Cowley's love of Nature, and his beautiful lyrics in praise of a
country life, will always keep his name before us. However, to desist
from this "nothing-if-not-critical" strain, let me beg of you to lay the
accompanying transcript [_see the next page_] of a manuscript in my
possession before your readers--that is, if you deem it of sufficient
interest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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