[23] Preface to Fables. Men are always inclined to revenge themselves
on their old idols in the first enthusiasm of conversion to a purer
faith. Cowley had all the faults that Dryden loads him with, and yet
his popularity was to some extent deserved. He at least had a theory
that poetry should soar, not creep, and longed for some expedient, in
the failure of natural wings, by which he could lift himself away
from the conventional and commonplace. By beating out the substance
of Pindar very thin, he contrived a kind of balloon which, tumid with
gas, did certainly mount a little, _into_ the clouds, if not above
them, though sure to come suddenly down with a bump. His odes,
indeed, are an alternation of upward jerks and concussions, and smack
more of Chapelain than of the Theban, but his prose is very
agreeable,--Montaigne and water, perhaps, but with some flavor of the
Gascon wine left. The strophe of his ode to Dr. Scarborough, in which
he compares his surgical friend, operating for the stone, to Moses
striking the rock, more than justifies all the ill that Dryden could
lay at his door. It was into precisely such mud-holes that Cowley's
Will-o'-the-Wisp had misguided him.
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