# The Works of Abraham Cowley/Volume 1/Author's Preface to the Edition of 1656

THE
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
TO
HIS EDITION IN FOLIO, 1656.
At my return lately into England, I met by great accident (for such I account it to be, that any copy of it should be extant any where so long, unless at his house who printed it) a book intituled, "The Iron Age," and published under my name, during the time of my absence. I wondered very much how one who could be so foolish to write so ill verses, should yet be so wise to set them forth as another man's rather than his own; though perhaps he might have made a better choice, and not fathered the bastard upon such a person, whose stock of reputation is, I fear, little enough for maintenance of his own numerous legitimate offspring of that kind. It would have been much less injurious, if it had pleased the author to put forth some of my writings under his own name, rather than his own under ​mine: he had been in that a more pardonable plagiary, and had done less wrong by robbery, than he does by such a bounty; for nobody can be justified by the imputation even of another's merit; and our own coarse cloaths are like to become us better than those of another man, though never so rich: but these, to say the truth, were so beggarly, that I myself was ashamed to wear them. It was in vain for me, that I avoided censure by the concealment of my own writings, if my reputation could be thus executed in effigie; and impossible it is for any good name to be in safety, if the malice of witches have the power to consume and destroy it in an image of their own making. This indeed was so ill made, and so unlike, that I hope the charm took no effect. So that I esteem myself less prejudiced by it, than by that which has been done to me since, almost in the same kind; which is, the publication of some things of mine without my consent or knowledge, and those so mangled and imperfect, that I could neither with honour acknowledge, nor with honesty quite disavow them.
Of which sort, was a comedy called "The Guardian," printed in the year 1650; but made and acted before the Prince, in his passage through Cambridge towards York, at the beginning of the late unhappy war; or rather neither made or acted, but ​rough-drawn only, and repeated; for the haste was so great, that it could neither be revised or perfected by the author, nor learned without book by the actors, nor set forth in any measure tolerably by the officers of the college. After the representation (which, I confess, was somewhat of the latest) I began to look it over, and changed it very much, striking out some whole parts, as that of the poet and the soldier; but I have lost the copy, and dare not think it deserves the pains to write it again, which makes me omit it in this publication, though there be some things in it which I am not ashamed of, taking the excuse of my age and small experience in human conversation when I made it. But, as it is, it is only the hasty first-sitting of a picture, and therefore like to resemble me accordingly.
From this which has happened to myself, I began to reflect on the fortune of almost all writers, and especially poets, whose works (commonly printed after their deaths) we find stuffed out, either with counterfeit pieces, like false money put in to fill up the bag, though it add nothing to the sum; or with such, which, though of their own coin, they would have called in themselves, for the baseness of the allay: whether this proceed from the indiscretion of their friends, who think a vast heap of stones or rubbish a better monument than a little tomb of marble; ​or by the unworthy avarice of some stationers, who are content to diminish the value of the author, so they may increase the price of the book; and, like vintners, with sophisticate mixtures, spoil the whole vessel of wine, to make it yield more profit. This has been the case with Shakespeare, Fletcher, Jonson, and many others; part of whose poems I should take the boldness to prune and lop away, if the care of replanting them in print did belong to me: neither would I make any scruple to cut off from som the unnecessary young suckers, and from others the old withered branches; for a great wit is no more tied to live in a vast volume, than in a gigantic body; on the contrary, it is commonly more vigorous, the less space it animates, And, as Statius says of little Tydeus,
I am not ignorant, that, by saying this of others, I expose myself to some raillery, for not using the same severe discretion in my own case, where it concerns me nearer: but though I publish here more than in strict wisdom I ought to have done, yet I have supprest and cast away more than I publish; and, for the ease of myself and others, have lost, I ​believe too, more than both. And upon these considerations I have been persuaded to overcome all the just repugnances of my own modesty, and to produce these poems to the light and view of the world; not as a thing that I approved of in itself, but as a less evil, which I chose rather than to stay till it were done for me by somebody else, either surreptitiously before, or avowedly after, my death: and this will be the more excusable, when the reader shall know in what respects he may look upon me as a dead, or at least a dying person, and upon my Muse in this action, as appearing, like the emperor Charles the fifth, and assisting at her own funeral.
For, to make myself absolutely dead in a poetical capacity, my resolution at present is, never to exercise any more that faculty. It is, I confess, but seldom seen that the poet dies before the man; for, when we once fall in love with that bewitching art, we do not use to court it as a mistress, but marry it as a wife, and take it for better or worse, as an inseparable companion of our whole life. But, as the marriages of infants do but rarely prosper, so no man ought to wonder at the diminution or decay of my affection to poesy; to which I had contracted myself so much under age, and so much to my own preju​dice in regard of those more profitable matches, which I might have made among the richer sciences. As for the portion which this brings of fame, it is an estate (if it be any, for men are not oftener deceived in their hopes of widows, than in their opinion of "Exegi monumentum ære perennius") that hardly ever comes in whilst we are living to enjoy it, but is a fantastical kind of reversion to our own selves: neither ought any man to envy poets this posthumous and imaginary happiness, since they find commonly so little in present, that it may be truly applied to them, which St. Paul speaks of the first Christians, "If their reward be in this life, they are of all men the most miserable."
And, if in quiet and flourishing times they meet with so small encouragement, what are they to expect in rough and troubled ones? If wit be such a plant, that it scarce receives heat enough to preserve it alive even in the summer of our cold climate, how can it choose but wither in a long and a sharp winter? A warlike, various, and a tragical age is best to write of, but worst to write in. And I may, though in a very unequal proportion, assume that to myself, which was spoken by Tully to a much better person, upon occasion of the civil wars and revolutions in his time: "Sedin te intuens. Brute, doleo: cujus in adolescen​tiam, per medias laudes, quasi cjuadrigis vehentem, transversa incurrit misera fortuna reipublicæ."
Neither is the present constitution of my mind more proper than that of the times for this exercise, or rather divertisement. There is nothing that requires so much serenity and cheerfulness of spirit; it must not be either overwhelmed with the cares of life, or overcast with the clouds of melancholy and sorrow, or shaken and disturbed by the storms of injurious fortune; it must, like the halcyon, have fair weather to breed in. The soul must be filled with bright and delightful ideas, when it undertakes to communicate delight to others; which is the main end of poesy. One may see through the style of Ovid de Trist the humbled and dejected condition of spirit with which he wrote it; there scarce remains any footstep of that genius,
"—quem nec Jovis ira, nec ignes, &c.
The cold of the country had strucken through all his faculties, and benumbed the very feet of his verses. He is himself, methinks, like one of the stories of his own Metamorphosis; and, though there remain some weak resemblances of Ovid at Rome, it is but, as he says of Niobe,
The truth is, for a man to write well, it is necessary to be in good humour; neither is wit less eclipsed with the unquietness of mind, than beauty with the indisposition of body. So that it is almost as hard a thing to be a poet in despite of fortune, as it is in despite of nature. For my own part, neither my obligations to the Muses, nor expectations from them, are so great, as that I should suffer myself on no considerations to be divorced, or that I should say like Horace,
"Quisquis erit vitæ, scribam, color."
I shall rather use his words in another place,
And this resolution of mine does the more befit me, because my desire has been for some years past (though ​the execution has been accidentally diverted) and does still vehemently continue, to retire myself to some of our American plantations, not to seek for gold, or enrich myself with the traffic of those parts (which is the end of most men that travel thither; so that of these Indies it is truer than it was of the former,
but to forsake this world for ever, with all the vanities and vexations of it, and to bury myself there in some obscure retreat (but not without the consolation of letters and philosophy)
"Oblitúsque meorum, obliviscendus & illis—"
as my former author speaks too, who has enticed me here, I know not how, into the pedantry of this heap of Latin sentences. And I think Dr. Donne's Sundyal in a grave is not more useless and ridiculous, than poetry would be in that retirement. As this therefore is in a true sense a kind of death to the Muses, and a real literal quitting of this world; so, methinks, I may make a just claim to the undoubted privilege of deceased poets, which is, to be read with more favour than the living;
"Tanti est ut placcam tibi, perire."
Having been forced, for my own necessary justification, to trouble the reader with this long discourse of the reasons why I trouble him also with all the rest of the book; I shall only add somewhat concerning the several parts of it, and some other pieces, which I have thought fit to reject in this publication: as, first, all those which I wrote at school, from the age of ten years, till after fifteen; for even so far backward there remain yet some traces of me in the little footsteps of a child; which, though they were then looked upon as commendable extravagancies in a boy (men setting a value upon any kind of fruit before the usual season of it), yet I would be loth to be bound now to read them all over myself; and therefore should do ill to expect that patience from others. Besides, they have already passed through several editions, which is a longer life than uses to be enjoyed by infants that are born before the ordinary terms. They had the good fortune then to find the world so indulgent (for, considering the time of their production, who could be so hard-hearted to be severe?) that I scarce yet apprehend so much to be censured for them, as for not having made advances afterwards proportionable to the speed of my setting out; and am obliged too in a manner by discretion to conceal and suppress them, as promises and instru​ments under my own hand, whereby I stood engaged for more than I have been able to perform; in which truly if I have failed, I have the real excuse of the honestest sort of bankrupts, which is, to have been made unsolvable not so much by their own negligence and ill-husbandry, as by some notorious accidents and public disasters. In the next place, I have cast away all such pieces as I wrote during the time of the late troubles, with any relation to the differences that caused them; as, among others, three books of the civil war itself, reaching as far as the first battle of Newbury, where the succeeding misfortunes of the party stopped the work,
As for the ensuing book, it consists of four parts. The first is a Miscellany of several subjects, and some of them made when I was very young, which it is perhaps superfluous to tell the reader: I know not by what chance I have kept copies of them; for they are but a very few in comparison of those which I have lost; and I think they have no extraordinary virtue in them, to deserve more care in preservation than was bestowed upon their brethren; for which I am so little concerned, that I am ashamed of the arrogancy of the word, when I said I had lost them.
The second is called "The Mistress," or "Love-Verses;" for so it is, that poets are scarce thought ​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:
"In furias ignemque ruunt: amor omnibus idem."
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,
"———ferat & rubus asper amomum."
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 ​be ashamed to be thought really in love. On the contrary, I cannot have a good opinion of any man, who is not at least capable of being so. But I speak it to excuse some expressions (if such there be) which may happen to offend the severity of supercilious readers: for much excess is to be allowed in love, and even more in poetry; so we avoid the two unpardonable vices in both, which are obscenity and profaneness, of which, I am sure, if my words be ever guilty, they have ill represented my thoughts and intentions. And if, notwithstanding all this, the lightness of the matter here displease any body, he may find wherewithal to content his more serious inclinations in the weight and height of the ensuing arguments.
For, as for the "Pindarick Odes," (which is the third part,) I am in great doubt whether they will be understood by most readers; nay, even by very many who are well enough acquainted with the common roads and ordinary tracks of poesy. They either are, or at least were meant to be, of that kind of style which Dion. Halicarnasseus calls Μεγαλοφυὲς καὶ ἡδὺ μετὰ δεινότητος, and which he attributes to Alcæus. The digressions are many, and sudden, and sometimes long, according to the fashion of all lyriques, and of Pindar above all men living: the figures are unusual and bold, even to temerity, and such as I durst not have to do withal in any other kind of poetry: the ​numbers are various and irregular, and sometimes (especially some of the long ones) seem harsh and uncouth, if the just measures and cadences be not observed in the pronunciation. So that almost all their sweetness and numerosity (which is to be found, if I mistake not, in the roughest, if rightly repeated) lies in a manner wholly at the mercy of the reader. I have briefly described the nature of these verses, in the Ode intituled "The Resurrection:" and though the liberty of them may incline a man to believe them easy to be composed, yet the undertaker will find it otherwise—
I come now to the last part, which is "Davideis," or an heroical poem of the troubles of David: which I designed into twelve books; not for the tribes' sake, but after the pattern of our master Virgil; and intended to close all with that most poetical and excellent elegy of David on the death of Saul and Jonathan: for I had no mind to carry him quite on to his anointing at Hebron, because it is the custom of heroic poets (as we see by the examples of Homer and Virgil, whom we should do ill to forsake to imitate others) ​never to come to the full end of their story: but only so near, that every one may see it; as men commonly play not out the game, when it is evident that they can win it, but lay down their cards, and take up what they have won. This, I say, was the whole design: in which there are many noble and fertile arguments behind; as the barbarous cruelty of Saul to the priests at Nob; the several flights and escapes of David, with the manner of his living in the Wilderness; the funeral of Samuel; the love of Abigail; the sacking of Ziglag; the loss and recovery of David's wives from the Amalekites; the witch of Endor; the war with the Philistines; and the battle of Gilboa: all which I meant to interweave, upon several occasions, with most of the illustrious stories of the Old Testament, and to embellish with the most remarkable antiquities of the Jews, and of other nations before or at that age.
But I have had neither leisure hitherto, nor have appetite at present, to finish the work, or so much as to revise that part which is done, with that care which I resolved to bestow upon it, and which the dignity of the matter well deserves. For what worthier subject could have been chosen, among all the treasuries of past times, than the life of this young prince; who, from so small beginnings, through such infinite troubles and oppositions, by such miraculous virtues, and ex​cellencies, and with such incomparable variety of wonderful actions and accidents, became the greatest monarch that ever sat on the most famous throne of the whole earth? Whom should a poet more justly seek to honour, than the highest person who ever honoured his profession? whom a Christian poet, rather than the man after God's own heart, and the man who had that sacred pre-eminence above all other princes, to be the best and mightiest of that royal race from whence Christ himself, according to the flesh, disdained not to descend?
When I consider this, and how many other bright and magnificent subjects of the like nature the holy Scripture affords and proffers, as it were, to poesy; in the wise managing and illustrating whereof the glory of God Almighty might be joined with the singular utility and noblest delight of mankind; it is not without grief and indignation that I behold that divine science employing all her inexhaustible riches of wit and eloquence, either in the wicked and beggarly flattery of great persons, or the unmanly idolizing of foolish women, or the wretched affectation of scurril laughter, or at best on the confused antiquated dreams of senseless fables and metamorphoses. Amongst all holy and consecrated things, which the devil ever stole and alienated from the service of the Deity; as altars, temples, sacrifices, prayers, and the like; there is none ​that he so universally, and so long, usurped, as poetry. It is time to recover it out of the tyrant's hands, and to restore it to the kingdom of God, who is the father of it. It is time to baptize it in Jordan, for it will never become clean by bathing in the water of Damascus. There wants, methinks, but the conversion of that, and the Jews, for the accomplishment of the kingdom of Christ. And as men, before their receiving of the faith, do not without some carnal reluctancies apprehend the bonds and fetters of it, but find it; afterwards to be the truest and greatest liberty: it will fare no otherwise with this art, after the regeneration of it; it will meet with wonderful variety of new, more beautiful, and more delightful objects; neither will it want room, by being confined to heaven.
There is not so great a lye to be found in any poet, as the vulgar conceit of men, that lying is essential to good poetry. Were there never so wholesome nourishment to be had (but, alas! it breeds nothing but diseases) out of these boasted feasts of love and fables; yet, methinks, the unalterable continuance of the diet should make us nauseate it: for it is almost impossible to serve up any new dish of that kind. They are all but the cold-meats of the ancients, new-heated, and new set forth. I do not at all wonder that the old poets made some rich crops out of these grounds; the heart of the soil was not then wrought out with con​tinual tillage: but what can we expect now, who come a-gleaning, not after the first reapers, but after the very beggars? Besides, though those mad stories of the gods and heroes seem in themselves so ridiculous; yet they were then the whole body (or rather chaos) of the theology of those times. They were believed by all, but a few philosophers, and perhaps some atheists; and served to good purpose among the vulgar (as pitiful things as they are), in strengthening the authority of law with the terrors of conscience, and expectation of certain rewards and unavoidable punishments. There was no other religion; and therefore that was better than none at all. But to us, who have no need of them; to us, who deride their folly, and are wearied with their impertinencies; they ought to appear no better arguments for verse, than those of their worthy successors, the knights-errant. What can we imagine more proper for the ornaments of wit or learning in the story of Deucalion than in that of Noah? Why will not the actions of Sampson afford as plentiful matter as the labours of Hercules? Why is not Jephtha's daughter as good a woman as Iphigenia? and the friendship of David and Jonathan more worthy celebration than that of Theseus and Pirithous? Does not the passage of Moses and the Israelites into the Holy Land yield incomparably more poetical variety than the voyages of Ulysses or Æneas? Are the obsolete thread-bare tales of Thebes and Troy half ​so stored with great, heroical, and supernatural actions (since verse will needs find or make such), as the wars of Joshua, of the Judges, of David, and divers others? Can all the transformations of the gods give such copious hints to flourish and expatiate on, as the true miracles of Christ, or of his prophets and apostles? What do I instance in these few particulars? All the books of the Bible are either already most admirable and exalted pieces of poesy, or are the best materials in the world for it.
Yet, though they be in themselves so proper to be made use of for this purpose; none but a good artist will know how to do it: neither must we think to cut and polish diamonds with so little pains and skill as we do marble. For, if any man design to compose a sacred poem, by only turning a story of the Scripture, like Mr. Quarles's, or some other godly matter, like Mr. Heywood of angels, into rhyme; he is so far from elevating of poesy, that he only abases divinity. In brief, he who can write a profane poem well, may write a divine one better; but he who can do that but ill, will do this much worse. The same fertility of invention; the same wisdom of disposition; the same judgment in observance of decencies; the same lustre and vigour of elocution; the same modesty and majesty of number; briefly, the same kind of habit, is required to both: only this latter allows better stuff; ​and therefore would look more deformedly, ill drest in it. I am far from assuming to myself to have fulfilled the duty of this weighty undertaking: but sure I am, there is nothing yet in our language (nor perhaps in any) that is in any degree answerable to the idea that I conceive of it. And I shall be ambitious of no other fruit from this weak and imperfect attempt of mine, but the opening of a way to the courage and industry of some other persons, who may be better able to perform it thoroughly and successfully.
* ↑ In 1656.
* ↑ Stat. Theb. lib. i. 416.
* ↑ Cic. de Clar. Orator. § 331,
* ↑ Metam. l. xv. 871.
* ↑ Metam. l. vi. 304.
* ↑ Hor. 2 Sat. i. 60.
* ↑ 3 Carm. Ode xxvi. "Vixi puellis," &c.
* ↑ Hor. 1 Ep. i. 45.
* ↑ Hor. 1 Ep. xi. 9.
* ↑ Martial, lib viii cp. 69.
* ↑ Virg. Georg. iii. 244.
* ↑ Virg. Ecl. iii. 89.
* ↑ Hor. Ars. Poet. 240.
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