em the last finishing strokes.' But that was not the case
with his Translation of the Pastor Fido, which was published by
himself, and applauded by some of the best judges, particularly Sir
John Denham, who after censuring servile translators, thus goes on,

A new and nobler way thou dost pursue
To make translations and translators too.
They but preserve the ashes, these the flame,
True to his sense, but truer to his fame.

Footnotes:
1. Short Account of Sir Richard Fanshaw, prefixed to his Letters.
2. Wood, Fast. ed. 1721, vol. ii. col. 43, 41.
3. Wood, ubi supra.

* * * * *

ABRAHAM COWLEY

Was the son of a Grocer, and born in London, in Fleet-street, near the
end of Chancery Lane, in the year 1618. His mother, by the interest of
her friends, procured him to be admitted a King's scholar in
Westminster school[1]; his early inclination to poetry was occasioned
by reading accidentally Spencer's Fairy Queen, which, as he himself
gives an account, 'used to lye in his mother's parlour, he knew not by
what accident, for she read no books but those of devotion; the
knights, giants, and monsters filled his imagination; he read the
whole over before he was 12 years old, and was made a poet, as
immediately as a child is made an eunuch.'

In the 16th year of his age, being still at Westminster school, he
published a collection of poems, under the title of Poetical Blossoms,
in which there are many things that bespeak a ripened genius, and a
wit, rather manly than puerile. Mr. Cowley himself has given us a
specimen in the latter end of an ode written when he was but 13 years
of age. 'The beginning of it, says he, is boyish, but of this part
which I here set down, if a very little were corrected, I should not
be much ashamed of it.' It is indeed so much superior to what might be
expected from one of his years, that we shall satisfy the reader's
curiosity by inserting it here.

IX.

This only grant me, that my means may lye,
Too low for envy, for contempt too high:
Some honour I would have;
Not from great deeds, but good alone,
The unknown are better than ill known,
Rumour can ope the grave:
Acquaintance I would have, but when 't depends
Not on the number, but the choice of friends.

X.

Books should, not business, entertain the light