Page:The Works of Abraham Cowley - volume 1 (ed. Aikin) (1806).djvu/136

 freemen of their company, without paying some duties, and obliging themselves to be true to love. Sooner or later they must all pass through that trial, like some Mahometan monks, that are bound by their order, once at least in their life, to make a pilgrimage to Mecca:

But we must not always make a judgment of their manners from their writings of this kind; as the Romanists uncharitably do of Beza, for a few lascivious sonnets composed by him in his youth. It is not in this sense that poesy is said to be a kind of painting; it is not the picture of the poet, but of things and persons imagined by him. He may be in his own practice and disposition a philosopher, nay a Stoic, and yet speak sometimes with the softness of an amorous Sappho,

He professes too much the use of fables (though without the malice of deceiving) to have his testimony taken even against himself. Neither would I here be misunderstood, as if I affected so much gravity as to