Birth and Parentage - Genius - Educated at Westminster and Cambridge His learned Puerilities His Mistress' His Compliance with the Times - His Latin Poetry His 'Davideis'- His Love of Solitude - Death and Burial in Westminster Abbey - The Metaphysical Poets- Pindarism - Works and Character.
THE Life of Cowley, notwithstanding the penury of English biography, has been written by Dr. Sprat,' an author whose pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language have deservedly set him high in the ranks of literature; but his zeal of friendship, or ambition of eloquence, has produced a funeral oration rather than a history: he has given the character, not the life of Cowley; for he writes with so little detail, that scarcely anything is distinctly known, but all is shown confused and enlarged through the mist of panegyric.
Abraham Cowley was born in the year 1618. His father was a grocer, whose condition Dr. Sprat conceals under the general appellation of a citizen; and, what would probably not have been less carefully suppressed, the omission of his name in the register of St. Dunstan's parish gives reason to suspect that his father was a sectary. Whoever he was, he died before the
1 In 1668 in Latin, before a collection of Cowley's Latin Poems, afterwards in English, and enlarged before his English Works, 1669, folio. It is,
2 Johnson's account of Cowley's parentage is entirely erroneous. however, still the received account, and is derived principally from Aubrey. Abraham Cowley was the posthumous son of Thomas Cowley, citizen and stationer, and of the parish of St. Michael at Querne, a church in Cheapside, destroyed in the Great Fire, and not rebuilt. His father died in August, 1618, and by will, dated 24th July in that year, left 1401. apiece to his six children, Peter, Andrew, John, William, Katherine, and Thomas, "and the child or children which my wife now goeth withal." He leaves his wife his full and