Cowley, Abraham

Cowley, Abraham (1618–67), scholar and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His precocity is shown by ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, a verse romance written when he was 10 years old, and ‘Constantia and Philetus’, written two years later (both included in Poetical Blossomes, 1633). Loves Riddle, a pastoral drama, and Naufragium Joculare, a Latin comedy, appeared in 1638. On the outbreak of the Civil War Cowley left Cambridge for Oxford where he contributed to the Royalist cause by writing a satire, The Puritan and the Papist (1643), and a political epic, The Civil War. (Bk I was published in 1679; the two other books were presumed lost until recently discovered and edited.) In 1644 he left Oxford for Paris, where he served at the court of Henrietta Maria. Returning to England, apparently as a Royalist spy, he was imprisoned briefly in 1655. At the Restoration the earl of St Albans and the duke of Buckingham combined to provide him with a competence. On his death Charles II bestowed on him the epitaph, ‘That Mr Cowley had not left a better man behind him in England.’ He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

His other principal works include The Mistress (1647), love poems; ‘Miscellanies’ in Poems (1656); also in the same collection ‘Davideis’, an epic on the biblical history of David, and ‘Pindarique Odes’ (see ode), in which he introduces the irregular ode imitated by Dryden and others. His prose works, marked by grace and simplicity of style, include some ‘Essays’, notably one ‘Of My Self’ containing interesting particulars of his early life, first published in The Works (1668) to which was prefixed a life by his friend Sprat.