9. _Cowley._--Another project of the same kind, less ambitious but apparently more directed to practice, was published a little later (1657) by another eminent man of letters in this country. I speak of Cowley's "Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy." He suggests that a College should be established at a short distance from London, endowed with a revenue of four thousand pounds, and consisting of twenty professors with other members. The objects of the labours of these professors he describes to be, first, to examine all knowledge of nature delivered to us from former ages and to pronounce it sound or worthless; second, to recover the lost inventions of the ancients; third, to improve all arts that we now have; lastly, to discover others that we yet have not. In this proposal we cannot help marking the visible declension from Bacon's more philosophical view. For we have here only a very vague indication of improving old arts and discovering new, instead of the two clear Verulamian antitheses, Experiments and Axioms deduced from them, on the one hand, and on the other an ascent to general Laws, and a derivation, from these, of Arts for daily use. Moreover the prominent place which Cowley has assigned to the verifying the knowledge of former ages and recovering "the lost inventions and drowned lands of the ancients," implies a disposition to think too highly of traditionary knowledge; a weakness which Bacon's scheme shows _him_ to have fully overcome. And thus it has been up to the present day, that with all Bacon's mistakes, in the philosophy of scientific method few have come up to him, and perhaps none have gone beyond him. Cowley exerted himself to do justice to the new philosophy in verse as well as prose, and his Poem to the Royal Society expresses in a very noble manner those views of the history and prospects of philosophy which prevailed among the men by whom the Royal Society was founded. The fertility and ingenuity of comparison which characterize Cowley's poetry are well known; and these qualities are in this instance largely employed for the embellishment of his subject. Many of the comparisons which he exhibits are apt and striking. Philosophy is a ward whose estate (human knowledge) is, in his nonage, kept from him by his guardians and tutors; (a case which the ancient rhetoricians were fond of taking as a subject of declamation;) and these wrong-doers retain him in unjust tutelage and constraint for their own purposes; until Bacon at last, a mighty man, arose, (Whom a wise King, and Nature, chose Lord Chancellor of both their laws,) And boldly undertook the injured pupil's cause.