Uror, et heu! nostro manat ab igne liquor:
Sum Nilus, sumque AEtna simul; restringite flammas
O lacrimae, aut lacrimas ebibe flamma meas.


One of the severe theologians of that time censured him as having
published a book of profane and lascivious verses. From the charge
of profaneness, the constant tenor of his life, which seems to have
been eminently virtuous, and the general tendency of his opinions,
which discover no irreverence of religion, must defend him; but that
the accusation of lasciviousness is unjust, the perusal of his works
will sufficiently evince.

Cowley's "Mistress" has no power of seduction: she "plays round the
head, but comes not at the heart." Her beauty and absence, her
kindness and cruelty, her disdain and inconstancy, produce no
correspondence of emotion. His poetical accounts of the virtues of
plants, and colours of flowers, is not perused with more sluggish
frigidity. The compositions are such as might have been written for
penance by a hermit, or for hire by a philosophical rhymer who had
only heard of another sex; for they turn the mind only on the
writer, whom, without thinking on a woman but as the subject for his
task, we sometimes esteem as learned, and sometimes despise as
trifling, always admire as ingenious, and always condemn as
unnatural.

The Pindaric Odes are now to be considered; a species of
composition, which Cowley thinks Pancirolus might have counted in
his list of the lost inventions of antiquity, and which he has made
a bold and vigorous attempt to recover.