Again Cowley’s personal character, learning, and public employments conferred dignity upon his literary work. He was the darling of Cambridge; and, when ejected by the parliament, joined the king at Oxford, and then followed the queen to Paris. He was a steadfast loyalist; but among the reckless, intriguing, dissolute Cavaliers who formed the entourage of the exiled court, Cowley’s serious and thoroughly respectable character stood out in high relief. He took a medical degree from Oxford, and became proficient in botany, composing a Latin poem on plants. Dr. Johnson thought his Latin verse better than Milton’s. After 1660 a member of the triumphant party, he was, notwithstanding, highly esteemed by political opponents. He held a position of authority like Addison’s or Southey’s at a later day. When he died, Charles II said that Mr. Cowley had not left a better man behind him in England. But, after all, the chief reason why Cowley was rated so high by his contemporaries was that his poetry fell in with the prevailing taste. Matthew Arnold said that the trouble with the Queen Anne poetry was that it was conceived in the wits and not in the soul. Cowley’s poetry was cerebral, “stiff with intellection,” as Coleridge said of another. He anticipated Dryden in his power of reasoning in verse. He is pedantically learned, bookish, scholastic, smells of the lamp, crams his verse with allusions and images drawn from physics, metaphysics, geography, alchemy, astronomy, history, school divinity, logic, grammar, and constitutional law. Above all, he had the quality on which his century placed such an abnormal value—wit: i.e., ingenuity in devising far-fetched conceits and detecting remote analogies. Without the subtlety of Donne and the quaintness of Herbert, he coldly carried out the method of the _concetti_ poets into a system. At its best, this fashion now and then struck out a brilliant effect, as where Donne says of Mistress Elizabeth Drury: Her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheek, and so divinely wrought That one might almost say her body thought. Or in Crashaw’s celebrated line about the miracle at Cana: Nympha pudica deum vidit et ernbuit, Englished by Dryden as The conscious water saw its God and blushed. But except in such rarely felicitous instances, this manner of writing is deplorable. Some of its most flagrant offenses are still notorious. Crashaw’s description of Mary Magdalene’s eyes as: Two walking baths, two weeping motions, Portable and compendious oceans. Or Carew’s lines on Maria Wentworth: Else the soul grew so fast within It burst the outward shell of sin, And so was hatched a cherubin.