Read Ebook: Cowley's Essays by Cowley Abraham

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 252 lines and 35485 words, and 6 pages

Odi et Amo, qua nam id faciam ratione requiris? Nescio, sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.

I hate, and yet I love thee too; How can that be? I know not how; Only that so it is I know, And feel with torment that 'tis so.

It is a deplorable condition this, and drives a man sometimes to pitiful shifts in seeking how to avoid himself.

The truth of the matter is, that neither he who is a fop in the world is a fit man to be alone, nor he who has set his heart much upon the world, though he has ever so much understanding; so that solitude can be well fitted and set right but upon a very few persons. They must have enough knowledge of the world to see the vanity of it, and enough virtue to despise all vanity; if the mind be possessed with any lust or passions, a man had better be in a fair than in a wood alone. They may, like petty thieves, cheat us perhaps, and pick our pockets in the midst of company, but like robbers, they use to strip and bind, or murder us when they catch us alone. This is but to retreat from men, and fall into the hands of devils. It is like the punishment of parricides among the Romans, to be sewed into a bag with an ape, a dog, and a serpent. The first work, therefore, that a man must do to make himself capable of the good of solitude is the very eradication of all lusts, for how is it possible for a man to enjoy himself while his affections are tied to things without himself? In the second place, he must learn the art and get the habit of thinking; for this too, no less than well speaking, depends upon much practice; and cogitation is the thing which distinguishes the solitude of a god from a wild beast. Now because the soul of man is not by its own nature or observation furnished with sufficient materials to work upon; it is necessary for it to have continual resource to learning and books for fresh supplies, so that the solitary life will grow indigent, and be ready to starve without them; but if once we be thoroughly engaged in the love of letters, instead of being wearied with the length of any day, we shall only complain of the shortness of our whole life.

O vita, stulto longa, sapienti brevis! O life, long to the fool, short to the wise!

The First Minister of State has not so much business in public as a wise man has in private; if the one have little leisure to be alone, the other has less leisure to be in company; the one has but part of the affairs of one nation, the other all the works of God and nature under his consideration. There is no saying shocks me so much as that which I hear very often, "That a man does not know how to pass his time." It would have been but ill spoken by Methusalem in the nine hundred and sixty-ninth year of his life, so far it is from us, who have not time enough to attain to the utmost perfection of any part of any science, to have cause to complain that we are forced to be idle for want of work. But this you will say is work only for the learned, others are not capable either of the employments or the divertisements that arise from letters. I know they are not, and therefore cannot much recommend solitude to a man totally illiterate. But if any man be so unlearned as to want entertainment of the little intervals of accidental solitude, which frequently occur in almost all conditions , it is truly a great shame both to his parents and himself; for a very small portion of any ingenious art will stop up all those gaps of our time, either music, or painting, or designing, or chemistry, or history, or gardening, or twenty other things, will do it usefully and pleasantly; and if he happen to set his affections upon poetry that will overdo it; no wood will be thick enough to hide him from the importunities of company or business, which would abstract him from his beloved.

- O quis me geldis sub montibus Haemi Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra?

Hail, old patrician trees, so great and good! Hail, ye plebeian underwood! Where the poetic birds rejoice, And for their quiet nests and plenteous food Pay with their grateful voice.

Hail, the poor Muses' richest manor seat! Ye country houses and retreat Which all the happy gods so love, That for you oft they quit their bright and great Metropolis above.

Here Nature does a house for me erect, Nature the wisest architect, Who those fond artists does despise That can the fair and living trees neglect, Yet the dead timber prize.

Here let me, careless and unthoughtful lying, Hear the soft winds, above me flying, With all their wanton boughs dispute, And the more tuneful birds to both replying, Nor be myself too mute.

A silver stream shall roll his waters near, Gilt with the sunbeams here and there, On whose enamelled bank I'll walk, And see how prettily they smile, and hear How prettily they talk.

Ah wretched, and too solitary he Who loves not his own company! He'll feel the weight of't many a day, Unless he call in sin or vanity To help to bear't away.

Oh solitude, first state of human-kind! Which blest remained till man did find Even his own helper's company. As soon as two, alas, together joined, The serpent made up three.

Though God himself, through countless ages, thee His sole companion chose to be, Thee, sacred Solitude alone; Before the branchy head of numbers Three Sprang from the trunk of One.

Thou Dost break and tame th' unruly heart, Which else would know no settled pace, Making it move, well managed by thy art With swiftness and with grace.

Thou the faint beams of Reason's scattered light Dost like a burning glass unite; Dost multiply the feeble heat, And fortify the strength, till thou dost bright And noble fires beget.

Whilst this hard truth I teach, methinks, I see The monster London laugh at me; I should at thee too, foolish city, If it were fit to laugh at misery. But thy estate, I pity.

Let but thy wicked men from out thee go, And the fools that crowd thee so, - Even thou, who dost thy millions boast, A village less than Islington wilt grow, A solitude almost.

OF OBSCURITY.

Nam neque divitibus contingunt gaudia solis, Nec vixit male, qui natus moriensque fefellit.

God made not pleasures only for the rich, Nor have those men without their share too lived, Who both in life and death the world deceived.

This seems a strange sentence thus literally translated, and looks as if it were in vindication of the men of business whereas it is in commendation of those who live and die so obscurely, that the world takes no notice of them. This Horace calls deceiving the world, and in another place uses the same phrase.

Secretum iter et fallentis semita vitae. The secret tracks of the deceiving life.

It is very elegant in Latin, but our English word will hardly bear up to that sense, and therefore Mr. Broome translates it very well:

Or from a life, led as it were by stealth.

Yet we say in our language, a thing deceives our sight, when it passes before us unperceived, and we may say well enough out of the same author:

Sometimes with sleep, sometimes with wine we strive The cares of life and troubles to deceive.

But that is not to deceive the world, but to deceive ourselves, as Quintilian says, Vitam fallere, To draw on still, and amuse, and deceive our life, till it be advanced insensibly to the fatal period, and fall into that pit which Nature hath prepared for it. The meaning of all this is no more than that most vulgar saying, Bene qui latuit, bene vixit, He has lived well, who has lain well hidden. Which, if it be a truth, the world, I'll swear, is sufficiently deceived. For my part, I think it is, and that the pleasantest condition of life, is in incognito. What a brave privilege is it to be free from all contentions, from all envying or being envied, from receiving and from paying all kind of ceremonies? It is in my mind a very delightful pastime, for two good and agreeable friends to travel up and down together in places where they are by nobody known, nor know anybody. It was the case of AEneas and his Achates, when they walked invisibly about the fields and streets of Carthage, Venus herself

A veil of thickened air around them cast, That none might know, or see them as they passed.

The common story of Demosthenes's confession that he had taken great pleasure in hearing of a Tanker-woman say as he passed, "This is that Demosthenes," is wonderful ridiculous from so solid an orator. I myself have often met with that temptation to vanity , but am so far from finding it any pleasure, that it only makes me run faster from the place, till I get, as it were, out of sight shot. Democritus relates, and in such a manner, as if he gloried in the good fortune and commodity of it, that when he came to Athens, nobody there did so much as take notice of him; and Epicurus lived there very well, that is, lay hid many years in his gardens, so famous since that time, with his friend Metrodorus: after whose death, making in one of his letters a kind commemoration of the happiness which they two had enjoyed together, he adds at last, that he thought it no disparagement to those great felicities of their life, that in the midst of the most talked of and talking country in the world, they had lived so long, not only without fame, but almost without being heard of. And yet within a very few years afterward, there were no two names of men more known or more generally celebrated. If we engage into a large acquaintance and various familiarities, we set open our gates to the invaders of most of our time: we expose our life to a Quotidian Ague of frigid impertinences, which would make a wise man tremble to think of. Now, as for being known much by sight, and pointed at, I cannot comprehend the honour that lies in that. Whatsoever it be, every mountebank has it more than the best doctor, and the hangman more than the Lord Chief Justice of a city. Every creature has it both of nature and art if it be any ways extraordinary. It was as often said, "This is that Bucephalus," or, "This is that Incitatus," when they were led prancing through the streets, as "This is that Alexander," or, "This is that Domitian"; and truly for the latter, I take Incitatus to have been a much more honourable beast than his master, and more deserving the consulship than he the empire. I love and commend a true good fame, because it is the shadow of virtue; not that it doth any good to the body which it accompanies, but 'tis an efficacious shadow, and like that of St. Peter cures the diseases of others. The best kind of glory, no doubt, is that which is reflected from honesty, such as was the glory of Cato and Aristides, but it was harmful to them both, and is seldom beneficial to any man whilst he lives; what it is to him after his death, I cannot say, because I love not philosophy merely notional and conjectural, and no man who has made the experiment has been so kind as to come back to inform us. Upon the whole matter, I account a person who has a moderate mind and fortune, and lives in the conversation of two or three agreeable friends, with little commerce in the world besides; who is esteemed well enough by his few neighbours that know him, and is truly irreproachable by anybody; and so after a healthful quiet life, before the great inconveniences of old age, goes more silently out of it than he came in ; this innocent deceiver of the word, as Horace calls him, this Muta Persona, I take to have been more happy in his part, than the greatest actors that fill the stage with show and noise, nay, even than Augustus himself, who asked with his last breath, whether he had not played his farce very well.

Seneca, ex Thyeste, Act 2. Chor. Stet quicunque volet, potens, Aulae culmine lubrico; etc.

OF AGRICULTURE.

The first wish of Virgil , was to be a good philosopher; the second, a good husbandman; and God dealt with him just as he did with Solomon: because he prayed for wisdom in the first place, he added all things else which were subordinately to be desired. He made him one of the best philosophers, and best husbandmen, and to adorn and communicate both those faculties, the best poet. He made him, besides all this, a rich man, and a man who desired to be no richer, O fortunatas nimium et bona qui sua novit. To be a husbandman, is but a retreat from the city; to be a philosopher, from the world; or rather, a retreat from the world, as it is Man's--into the world, as it is God's. But since Nature denies to most men the capacity or appetite, and Fortune allows but to a very few the opportunities or possibility, of applying themselves wholly to philosophy, the best mixture of human affairs that we can make are the employments of a country life. It is, as Columella calls it, Res sine dubitatione proxima et quasi consanguinea sapientiae, the nearest neighbour, or rather next in kindred to Philosophy. Varro says the principles of it are the same which Ennius made to be the principles of all nature; earth, water, air, and the sun. It does certainly comprehend more parts of philosophy than any one profession, art, or science in the world besides; and, therefore, Cicero says, the pleasures of a husbandman, Mihi ad sapientis vitam proxime videntur aecedere, come very nigh to those of a philosopher. There is no other sort of life that affords so many branches of praise to a panegyrist: The utility of it to a man's self; the usefulness, or, rather, necessity of it to all the rest of mankind; the innocence, the pleasure, the antiquity, the dignity. The utility is not so great now in our nation as arises from merchandise and the trading of the city, from whence many of the best estates and chief honours of the kingdom are derived; we have no men now fetched from the plough to be made lords, as they were in Rome to be made consuls and dictators, the reason of which I conceive to be from an evil custom now grown as strong among us as if it were a law, which is, that no men put their children to be bred up apprentices in agriculture, as in other trades, but such who are so poor, that when they come to be men they have not wherewithal to set up in it, and so can only farm some small parcel of ground, the rent of which devours all but the bare subsistence of the tenant; whilst they who are proprietors of the land are either too proud or, for want of that kind of education, too ignorant to improve their estates, though the means of doing it be as easy and certain in this as in any other track of commerce. If there were always two or three thousand youths, for seven or eight years bound to this profession, that they might learn the whole art of it, and afterwards be enabled to be masters in it, by a moderate stock, I cannot doubt but that we should see as many aldermen's estates made in the country as now we do out of all kind of merchandising in the city. There are as many ways to be rich; and, which is better, there is no possibility to be poor, without such negligence as can neither have excuse nor pity; for a little ground will, without question, feed a little family, and the superfluities of life must be supplied out of the superabundance of art and industry, or contemned by as great a degree of philosophy. As for the necessity of this art, it is evident enough, since this can live without all others, and no one other without this. This is like speech, without which the society of men cannot be preserved; the others like figures and tropes of speech which serve only to adorn it. Many nations have lived, and some do still, without any art but this; not so elegantly, I confess, but still they have; and almost all the other arts which are here practised are beholding to them for most of their materials. The innocence of this life is in the next thing for which I commend it, and if husbandmen preserve not that, they are much to blame, for no men are so free from the temptations of iniquity. They live by what they can get by industry from the earth, and others by what they can catch by craft from men. They live upon an estate given them by their mother, and others upon an estate cheated from their brethren. They live like sheep and kine, by the allowances of Nature, and others like wolves and foxes by the acquisitions of rapine; and, I hope, I may affirm that sheep and kine are very useful, and that wolves and foxes are pernicious creatures. They are, without dispute, of all men the most quiet and least apt to be inflamed to the disturbance of the commonwealth; their manner of life inclines them, and interest binds them, to love peace. In our late mad and miserable civil wars, all other trades, even to the meanest, set forth whole troops, and raised up some great commanders, who became famous and mighty for the mischiefs they had done. But I do not remember the name of any one husbandman who had so considerable a share in the twenty years' ruin of his country, as to deserve the curses of his countrymen; and if great delights be joined with so much innocence, I think it is ill done of men not to take them here where they are so tame and ready at hand, rather than hunt for them in courts and cities, where they are so wild and the chase so troublesome and dangerous.

We are here among the vast and noble scenes of Nature; we are there among the pitiful shifts of policy. We walk here in the light and open ways of the divine bounty; we grope there in the dark and confused labyrinths of human malice. Our senses are here feasted with the clear and genuine taste of their objects, which are all sophisticated there, and for the most part overwhelmed with their contraries. Here Pleasure looks, methinks, like a beautiful, constant, and modest wife; it is there an impudent, fickle, and painted harlot. Here is harmless and cheap plenty, there guilty and expenseful luxury.

I shall only instance in one delight more, the most natural and best natured of all others, a perpetual companion of the husbandman: and that is, the satisfaction of looking round about him, and seeing nothing but the effects and improvements of his own art and diligence; to be always gathering of some fruits of it, and at the same time to behold others ripening, and others budding; to see all his fields and gardens covered with the beauteous creatures of his own industry; and to see, like God, that all his works are good.

Hinc atque hinc glomerantur Oreades; ipsi Agricolae tacitum pertentant gaudia pectus.

On his heart-strings a secret joy does strike.

The antiquity of his art is certainly not to be contested by any other. The three first men in the world were a gardener, a ploughman, and a grazier; and if any man object that the second of these was a murderer, I desire he would consider, that as soon as he was so, he quitted our profession and turned builder. It is for this reason, I suppose, that Ecclesiasticus forbids us to hate husbandry; because, says he, the Most High has created it. We were all born to this art, and taught by nature to nourish our bodies by the same earth out of which they were made, and to which they must return and pay at last for their sustenance.

Behold the original and primitive nobility of all those great persons who are too proud now not only to till the ground, but almost to tread upon it. We may talk what we please of lilies and lions rampant, and spread eagles in fields d'or or d'argent; but if heraldry were guided by reason, a plough in a field arable would be the most noble and ancient arms.

All these considerations make me fall into the wonder and complaint of Columella, how it should come to pass that all arts or Sciences , metaphysic, physic, morality, mathematics, logic, rhetoric, etc., which are all, I grant, good and useful faculties, except only metaphysic, which I do not know whether it be anything or no, but even vaulting, fencing, dancing, attiring, cookery, carving, and such like vanities, should all have public schools and masters; and yet that we should never see or hear of any man who took upon him the profession of teaching this so pleasant, so virtuous, so profitable, so honourable, so necessary art.

A man would think, when he's in serious humour, that it were but a vain, irrational, and ridiculous thing for a great company of men and women to run up and down in a room together, in a hundred several postures and figures, to no purpose, and with no design; and therefore dancing was invented first, and only practised anciently, in the ceremonies of the heathen religion, which consisted all in mummery and madness; the latter being the chief glory of the worship, and accounted divine inspiration. This, I say, a severe man would think, though I dare not determine so far against so customary a part now of good breeding. And yet, who is there among our gentry that does not entertain a dancing master for his children as soon as they are able to walk? But did ever any father provide a tutor for his son to instruct him betimes in the nature and improvements of that land which he intended to leave him? That is at least a superfluity, and this a defect in our manner of education; and therefore I could wish, but cannot in these times much hope to see it, that one college in each university were erected, and appropriated to this study, as well as there are to medicine and the civil law. There would be no need of making a body of scholars and fellows, with certain endowments, as in other colleges; it would suffice if, after the manner of Halls in Oxford, there were only four professors constituted to teach these four parts of it. First, aration, and all things relating to it. Secondly, pasturage; thirdly, gardens, orchards, vineyards, and woods; fourthly, all parts of rural economy, which would contain the government of bees, swine, poultry, decoys, ponds, etc., and all that which Varro calls Villaticas Pastiones, together with the sports of the field, which ought not to be looked upon only as pleasures, but as parts of housekeeping, and the domestical conservation and uses of all that is brought in by industry abroad. The business of these professors should not be, as is commonly practised in other arts, only to read pompous and superficial lectures out of Virgil's Georgics, Pliny, Varro, or Columella, but to instruct their pupils in the whole method and course of this study, which might be run through perhaps with diligence in a year or two; and the continual succession of scholars upon a moderate taxation for their diet, lodging, and learning, would be a sufficient constant revenue for maintenance of the house and the professors, who should be men not chosen for the ostentation of critical literature, but for solid and experimental knowledge of the things they teach such men; so industrious and public spirited as I conceive Mr. Hartlib to be, if the gentleman be yet alive. But it is needless to speak further of my thoughts of this design, unless the present disposition of the age allowed more probability of bringing it into execution. What I have further to say of the country life shall be borrowed from the poets, who were always the most faithful and affectionate friends to it. Poetry was born among the shepherds.

Nescio qua natale solum dulcedine musas Ducit, et immemores non sinit esse sui.

The Muses still love their own native place, 'T has secret charms which nothing can deface.

The truth is, no other place is proper for their work. One might as well undertake to dance in a crowd, as to make good verses in the midst of noise and tumult.

As well might corn as verse in cities grow; In vain the thankless glebe we plough and sow, Against th' unnatural soil in vain we strive, 'Tis not a ground in which these plants will thrive.

It will bear nothing but the nettles or thorns of satire, which grow most naturally in the worst earth; and therefore almost all poets, except those who were not able to eat bread without the bounty of great men, that is, without what they could get by flattering of them, have not only withdrawn themselves from the vices and vanities of the grand world into the innocent happiness of a retired life; but have commended and adorned nothing so much by their ever-living poems. Hesiod was the first or second poet in the world that remains yet extant , and he is the first writer, too, of the art of husbandry. He has contributed, says Columella, not a little to our profession; I suppose he means not a little honour, for the matter of his instructions is not very important. His great antiquity is visible through the gravity and simplicity of his style. The most acute of all his sayings concerns our purpose very much, and is couched in the reverend obscurity of an oracle. . The half is more than the whole. The occasion of the speech is this: his brother Perses had by corrupting some great men gotten from him the half of his estate. It is no matter, says he, they have not done me so much prejudice as they imagine.

This I conceive to have been honest Hesiod's meaning. From Homer we must not expect much concerning our affairs. He was blind, and could neither work in the country nor enjoy the pleasures of it; his helpless poverty was likeliest to be sustained in the richest places, he was to delight the Grecians with fine tales of the wars and adventures of their ancestors; his subject removed him from all commerce with us, and yet, methinks, he made a shift to show his goodwill a little. For though he could do us no honour in the person of his hero Ulysses , because his whole time was consumed in wars and voyages, yet he makes his father Laertes a gardener all that while, and seeking his consolation for the absence of his son in the pleasure of planting and even dunging his own grounds. Yet, see, he did not contemn us peasants; nay, so far was he from that insolence, that he always styles Eumaeus, who kept the hogs with wonderful respect, , the divine swine-herd; he could have done no more for Menelaus or Agamemnon. And Theocritus gave the same epithet to a husbandman . The divine husbandman replied to Hercules, who was but himself. These were civil Greeks, and who understood the dignity of our calling. Among the Romans, we have in the first place our truly divine Virgil, who, though by the favour of Maecenas and Augustus he might have been one of the chief men of Rome, yet chose rather to employ much of his time in the exercise, and much of his immortal wit in the praise and instructions of a rustic life; who, though he had written before whole books of Pastorals and Georgics, could not abstain in his great and imperial poem from describing Evander, one of his best princes, as living just after the homely manner of an ordinary countryman. He seats him in a throne of maple, and lays him but upon a bear's skin, the kine and oxen are lowing in his courtyard, the birds' under the eaves of his window call him up in the morning; and when he goes abroad only two dogs go along, with him for his guard. At last, when he brings AEneas into his royal cottage, he makes him say this memorable compliment, greater than ever yet was spoken at the Escurial, the Louvre, or our Whitehall.

Haec, inquit, limina victor Alcides subiit, haec illum Regia cepit, Aude, Hospes, contemnere opes, et te quoque dignum Finge Deo, rebusque veni non asper egenis.

This humble roof, this rustic court, said he, Received Alcides crowned with victory. Scorn not, great guest, the steps where he has trod, But contemn wealth, and imitate a god.

The next man whom we are much obliged to, both for his doctrine and example, is the next best poet in the world to Virgil: his dear friend Horace, who, when Augustus had desired Mecaenas to persuade him to come and live domestically and at the same table with him, and to be Secretary of State of the whole world under him, or rather jointly with him could not be tempted to forsake his Sabine or Tiburtine Manor, for so rich and so glorious a trouble. There was never, I think, such an example as this in the world, that he should have so much moderation and courage as to refuse an offer of such greatness, and the Emperor so much generosity and good nature as not to be at all offended with his refusal, but to retain still the same kindness, and express it often to him in most friendly and familiar letters, part of which are still extant. If I should produce all the passages of this excellent author upon the several subjects which I treat of in this book, I must be obliged to translate half his works; of which I may say more truly than, in my opinion, he did of Homer, "Qui quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non, plenius, et melius Chrysippo, et Crantore dicit." I shall content myself upon this particular theme with three only, one out of his Odes, the other out of his Satires, the third out of his Epistles, and shall forbear to collect the suffrages of all other poets, which may be found scattered up and down through all their writings, and especially in Martial's. But I must not omit to make some excuse for the bold undertaking of my own unskilful pencil upon the beauties of a face that has been drawn before by so many great masters, especially that I should dare to do it in Latin verses and have the confidence to translate them. I can only say that I love the matter, and that ought to cover, many faults; and that I run not to contend with those before me, but follow to applaud them.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet