The Life of Cowley, notwithstanding the penury of English biography,
has been written by Dr. Sprat, an author whose pregnancy of
imagination and elegance of language have deservedly set him high in
the ranks of literature; but his zeal of friendship, or ambition of
eloquence, has produced a funeral oration rather than a history: he
has given the character, not the life, of Cowley; for he writes with
so little detail, that scarcely anything is distinctly known, but
all is shown confused and enlarged through the mist of panegyric.


Abraham Cowley was born in the year one thousand sir hundred and
eighteen. His father was a grocer, whose condition Dr. Sprat
conceals under the general appellation of a citizen; and, what would
probably not have been less carefully suppressed, the omission of
his name in the register of St. Dunstan's parish gives reason to
suspect that his father was a sectary. Whoever he was, he died
before the birth of his son, and consequently left him to the care
of his mother: whom Wood represents as struggling earnestly to
procure him a literary education, and who, as she lived to the age
of eighty, had her solicitude rewarded by seeing her son eminent,
and, I hope, by seeing him fortunate, and partaking his prosperity.
We know at least, from Sprat's account, that he always acknowledged
her care, and justly paid the dues of filial gratitude.

In the window of his mother's apartment lay Spenser's "Fairy Queen,"
in which he very early took delight to read, till by feeling the
charms of verse, he became, as he relates, irrecoverably a poet.
Such are the accidents which, sometimes remembered, and perhaps
sometimes forgotten, produce that particular designation of mind,