The only writings of Cowley which keep afloat on time’s current are his simplest and least ambitious—what Pope called “the language of his heart.” His prose essays may still be read with enjoyment, though Lowell somewhat cruelly describes them as Montaigne and water. His translations from the Pseudo-Anacreon are standard, particularly the first ode, Θέλω λέγειν Ἀτρείδας; the Τέττιξ, or cicada; and the ode in praise of drinking, Ἡ γῆ μέλαινα πίνει. There is one little poem which remains an anthology favorite, “The Chronicle,” Cowley’s solitary experiment in society verse, a catalogue of the quite imaginary ladies with whom he has been in love. This is well enough, but compared with the “agreeable impudence,” the Cavalier gayety and ease of a genuine society verser, like Suckling, it is sufficiently tame. For the Cowleian wit is so different from the spirit of comedy that one would have predicted that anything which he might undertake for the stage would surely fail. Nevertheless, one of his plays, “Cutter of Coleman Street,” has been selected by Professor Gayley for his series of representative comedies, as a noteworthy transition drama, with “political and religious satire of great importance.” The scene is London in 1658, the year when Cromwell died, and Cowley, though under bonds, escaped a second time to Paris. The plot in outline is this: Colonel Jolly, a gentleman whose estate was confiscated in the late troubles for taking part with the King at Oxford, finds himself in desperate straits for money. He has two disreputable hangers-on, “merry, sharking fellows about the town,” who have been drinking and feasting at his expense. One of these, Cutter of Coleman Street, pretends to have been a colonel in the royal army and to have fought at Newbury—the action, it will be remembered, in which Clarendon’s friend, Lord Falkland, met his tragic death (1643); or, as Carlyle rather brutally puts it, “Poor Lord Falkland, in his ‘clean shirt,’ was killed here.” Worm, the other rascal, professes likewise to have been in the King’s service and to have been at Worcester and shared in the romantic escape of the royal fugitive. This precious pair are new types in English comedy and are evidently from the life. They represent the class of swashbucklers, impostors, and soldiers of fortune, who lurked about the lowest purlieus of London during the interregnum, living at free quarters on loyalist sympathizers. They were parodies of the true “distressed Cavaliers,” such as Colonel Richard Lovelace, who died in London in this same year, 1658, in some obscure lodging and in abject poverty, having spent all his large fortune in the King’s cause.