Cowley’s literary fortunes have been in marked contrast with those of his contemporary, Robert Herrick, whose “Hesperides” fell silently from the press in 1643, and who died unnoticed in his remote Devonshire vicarage in 1674. You may search the literature of England for a hundred and fifty years without finding a single acknowledgment of Herrick’s gift to that literature. The folio edition of Cowley’s works, 1668, was accompanied with an imposing account of his life and writings by Thomas Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Rochester. Dr. Johnson’s “Lives of the English Poets,” 1779–1781, begins with the life of Cowley, in which he gives his famous analysis of the metaphysical school, the _locus classicus_ on that topic. And although Cowley’s poetry had faded long ago and he had lost his readers, Johnson treats him as a dignified memory, worthy of a solid monument. No one had thought it worth while to write Herrick’s biography, to address him in complimentary verse, to celebrate his death in elegy, to comment on his work, or even to mention his name. Dryden, Addison, Johnson, all the critics of three successive generations are quite dumb concerning Herrick. But for the circumstance that some of his little pieces, with the musical airs to which they were set, were included in several seventeenth century songbooks, there is nothing to show that there was any English poet named Herrick, until Dr. Nott reprinted a number of selections from “Hesperides” in 1810. But now Herrick is thoroughly revived and almost a favorite. His best things are in all the anthologies, and many of them are set to music by modern composers, and sung to the piano, as once to the lute. The critics rank him with Shelley among our foremost lyrical poets. Swinburne thought him the best of English song writers. The “Hesperides” is frequently reprinted, sometimes in _editions de luxe_, with sympathetic illustrations by Mr. Abbey and other distinguished artists. There are several reasons why Cowley cut so disproportionate a figure in his own generation. In the first place, he was a marvel of precocity. He wrote an epic at the age of ten and another at twelve. His first volume of verse, “Poetical Blossoms,” was published in his fifteenth year, and one or two of the pieces in it were as good as anything that he did afterward. Chatterton was perhaps equally wonderful; while Milton, Pope, Keats, and Bryant all produced work, while still under age, which outranks Cowley’s. Yet none of them showed quite so early maturity.