Transcribed from 1893 Cassell & Company edition by DavidPrice,
CASSELL’S NATIONAL LIBRARY
ESSAYS
BY
ABRAHAM COWLEY
CASSELL & COMPANY Limited
LONDON PARIS &MELBOURNE
1893
INTRODUCTION.
Abraham Cowley was the son ofThomas Cowley, stationer, and citizen of London in the parish ofSt. Michael le Querne, Cheapside. Thomas Cowley signed hiswill on the 24th of July, 1618, and it was proved on the 11th ofthe next month by his widow, Thomasine. He left sixchildren, Peter, Audrey, John, William, Katherine, and Thomas,with a child unborn for whom the will made equal provision withthe rest. The seventh child, born before the end of thesame year, was named Abraham, and lived to take high place amongthe English Poets.
The calm spirit of Cowley’s “Essays” was inall his life. As he tells us in his Essay “OnMyself,” even when he was a very young boy at school,instead of running about on holidays and playing with hisfellows, he was wont to steal from them and walk into the fields,either alone with a book or with some one companion, if he couldfind any of the same temper. He wrote verse when veryyoung, and says, “I believe I can tell the particularlittle chance that filled my head first with such chimes of verseas have never since left ringing there; for I remember when Ibegan to read and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont tolie in my mother’s parlour (I know not by what accident,for she herself never in her life read any book but of devotion),but there was wont to lie Spenser’s works.” Thedelight in Spenser wakened all the music in him, and in 1628, inhis tenth year, he wrote a “Tragical Historie of Pyramusand Thisbe.”
In his twelfth year Cowley wrote another piece, also insixteen stanzas, with songs interspersed, which was placed firstin the little volume of Poetical Blossoms, by A.C., published in 1633. It was a little quarto ofthirty-two leaves, with a portrait of the author, taken at theage of thirteen. This pamphlet, dedicated to the Dean ofWestminster, and with introductory verses by Cowley and two ofhis schoolfellows, contained “Constantia andPhiletus,” with the “Pyramus and Thisbe,”written earlier, and three pieces written later, namely, twoElegies and “A Dream of Elysium.” Theinscription round the portrait describes Cowley as a King’sScholar of Westminster School; and “Pyramus andThisbe” has a special dedication to the Head Master,Lambert Osbalston. As schoolboy, Cowley tells us that heread the Latin authors, but could not be made to learn grammarrules by rote. He was a candidate at his school in 1636 fora scholarship at Cambridge, but was not elected. In thatyear, however, he went to Cambridge and obtained a scholarship atTrinity.
Cowley carried to Cambridge and extended there his reputationas boy poet. In 1636 the “Poetical Blossoms”were re-issued with an appendix of sixteen more pieces under thehead of “Sylva.” A third edition of the“Poetical Blossoms” was printed in 1637—theyear of Milton’s “Lycidas” and of BenJohnson’s death. Cowley had written a five-actpastoral comedy, “Love’s Riddle,” while yet atschool, and this was published in 1638. In the same year,1638, when Cowley’s age was tw