Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/210

190 popularity, one can note very clearly the meeting of stream and sea. His wit is as "metaphysical," as pedantic and fantastic, as Donne's; but he has neither the emancipated imaginative ardour of the Renaissance, nor the devotional and ecstatic tone of the Catholic reaction, but the alert, inquisitive, rational temper of Dryden and the epoch of the Royal Society. When not merely light badinage, his love-verses are frigid and execrable conceits. His Pindariques are often bright and vigorous, but are as like Pindar's odes as one of his essays is like the prophecies of Isaiah. His Davideis, in which he expands the incidents of David's adventures during Saul's reign by means of dreams and descriptions—just as Saint-Amant was doing in his Moyse Sauvé—is written in the pointed and tasteless style of Marino's Strage degli Innocenti, and in a less poetic tone. In the pursuit of a point the pious Cowley will deviate into blasphemy, as when he makes the Deity foretell Saul's suicide—

"That hand which now on David's life would prey      Shall then turn just and its own master slay."

What is best in Cowley are poems—like the lines on a retired life, the Elegy on Harvey, or the verses on Crashaw's death—in which he is a link between Jonson and Dryden, with less of fancy than the former but greater ease of expression, less sonorous and effective than the latter.

Cowley was not the only poet who essayed the heroic poem under French and Italian influence. Sir William Davenant (1606-1668), the son of a vintner at