Page:The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Volume 1.djvu/79

Rh Cowley, whatever was his subject, seems to have been carried, by a kind of destiny, to the light and the familiar, or to conceits which require still more ignoble epithets. A slaughter in the Red Sea new dies the waters name; and England, during the Civil War, was Albion no more, nor to be named from white. It is surely by some fascination not easily surmounted, that a writer, professing to revive the noblest and highest writing in verse, makes this address to the new year:

The reader of this will be inclined to cry out with Prior—

Rh