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may believe; fourthly, grant the things true they jeer at, yet this music is unlawful in any Christian church, to play upon the sins and miseries of others; the fitter object of the elegies than the satires of all truly religious.

marriage are abundantly recompensed with other comforts which God bestoweth on them who make a wise choice of a wife, and observe the following rules:

4. Let grace and goodness be the principal loadstone of thy affections. For love which hath ends will have an end; whereas that which is founded in true virtue will always continue. Some hold it unhappy to be married with a dia

But what do I speaking against multiplicity of books in this age, who trespass in this nature myself? What was a learned man's compliment, may serve for my confession and conclusion: "Multi mei similes hoc morbo laborant, ut cummond ring, perchance (if there be so much reason scribere nesciant tamen a scribendo temperare non possint."*

OF MARRIAGE.

Some men have too much decried marriage, as if she, the mother, were scarce worthy to wait on virginity her daughter, and as if it were an advancement for marriage to be preferred before fornication, and praise enough for her to be adjudged lawful. Give this holy estate her due, and then we shall find,

1. Though bachelors be the strongest stakes, married men are the best binders in the hedge of the commonwealth. It is the policy of the Londoners, when they send a ship into the Levant or Mediterranean Sea, to make every mariner therein a merchant, each seaman adventuring somewhat of his own, which will make him more wary to avoid, and more valiant to undergo dangers. Thus married men, especially if having posterity, are the deeper sharers in that state wherein they live, which engageth their affections to the greater loyalty.

2. It is the worst clandestine marriage when God is not invited to it. Wherefore beforehand beg His gracious assistance. Marriage shall prove no lottery to thee, when the hand of Providence chooseth for thee, who, if drawing a blank, can turn it into a prize, by sanctifying a bad wife

unto thee.

3. Deceive not thyself by over-expecting happiness in the married estate. Look not therein for contentment greater than God will give, or a creature in this world can receive, namely, to be free from all inconveniences. Marriage is not like the hill Olympus, öλos λаμπpòs, wholly clear, without clouds; yea, expect both wind and storms sometimes, which when blown over, the air is the clearer and wholesomer for it. Make account of certain cares and troubles which will attend thee. Remember the nightingales, which sing only some months in the spring, but commonly are silent when they have hatched their eggs, as if their mirth were turned into care for their young ones. Yet all the molestations of

* Erasmus, in Præfat., in 3 seriem 4 tomi Hieron. p. 408.

in their folly) because the diamond hinders the roundness of the ring, ending the infiniteness thereof, and seems to presage some termination in their love, which ought ever to endure, and so it will when it is founded in religion.

5. Neither choose all, nor not at all for beauty. A cried-up beauty makes more for her own praise than her husband's profit. They tell us of a floating island in Scotland: but sure no wise pilot will cast anchor there, lest the land swim away with his ship. So are they served, and justly enough, who only fasten their love on fading beauty, and both fail together.

6. Let there be no great disproportion in age. They that marry ancient people merely in expectation to bury them, hang themselves in hope that one will come and cut the halter. Nor is God's ordinance, but man's abusing thereof, taxed in this homely expression used by the apostle himself. If virginity, enforced above the parties' power, be termed by St Paul a "snare or halter,"* marriage is no better when against one's will for private respects.

7. Let wealth in its due distance be regarded. There be two towns in the land of Liege, called Bovins and Dinant, the inhabitants whereof bear almost an incredible hatred one to another, and yet, notwithstanding, their children usually marry together; and the reason is, because there is none other good town or wealthy place near them. Thus parents for a little pelf often marry their children to those whose persons they hate; and thus union betwixt families is not made, but the breach rather widened the more.

This shall serve for a conclusion. A bachelor was saying, "Next to no wife, a good wife is best." "Nay," said a gentlewoman, "next to a good wife, no wife is the best." I wish to all married people the outward happiness which (anno 1605) happened to a couple in the city of Delph, in Holland,‡ living most lovingly together seventy-five years in wedlock, till the man being one hundred and three, the woman ninety-nine years of age, died within three hours each of other, and were buried in the same grave.

* Ουχ ἵνα βρόχον ὑμῖν ἐπιβάλω.-1 Cor. vii. 35 Phil. Com., lib. 2, cap. 1.

Thuan, de Obit. Vir. Doct., in eod. anno, p. 185.

ABRAHAM COWLEY.*

OF SOLITUDE.

BORN 1618: DIED 1667.

(From his Miscellaneous Essays.)

"NUNQUAM minus solus, quam cum solus," is now become a very vulgar saying. Every man, and almost every boy, for these seventeen hundred years, has had it in his mouth. But it was at first spoken by the excellent Scipio, who was without question a most eloquent and witty person, as well as the most wise, most worthy, most happy, and the greatest of all mankind. His meaning, no doubt, was this, that he found more satisfaction to his mind, and more improvement of it, by solitude than by company; and, to show that he spoke not this loosely, or out of vanity, after he had made Rome mistress of almost the whole world, he retired himself from it by a voluntary exile, and at a private house in the middle of a wood near Linternum, passed the remainder of his glorious life no less gloriously. This house Seneca went to see so long after with great veneration; and, among other things, describes his baths to have been of so mean a structure, that now, says he, the basest of the people would despise them, and cry out, "Poor Scipio understood not how to live." What an authority is here for the credit of retreat! and happy had it been for Hannibal, if adversity could have taught him as much wisdom as was learned by Scipio from the highest prosperities. This would be no wonder, if it were as truly as it is colourably and wittily said by Monsieur de Montaigne, "that ambition itself might teach us to love solitude; there is nothing does so much hate to have companions." It is true, it loves to have its elbows free, it detests to have company on either side; but it delights, above all things, in a train behind, ay, and ushers too before it. But the greatest part of men are so far from the opinion of that noble Roman, that, if they chance at any time to be without company, they are like a becalmed ship; they never move but by the wind of other men's breath, and have no oars of their own to steer withal. It is very fantastical and contradictory in human nature, that men

* "Cowley's prose stamps him as a man of genius, and an improver of the English language."-Thomas Campbell.

"No author ever kept his verse and his prose at a greater distance from each other. His thoughts are natural, and his style has a smooth and placid equability, which has never yet obtained its due commendation. Nothing is far-sought or hard-laboured; but all is easy without feebleness, and familiar without grossness."-Johnson.

should love themselves above all the rest of the world, and yet never endure to be with themselves. When they are in love with a mistress, all other persons are importunate and burdensome to them. "Tecum vivere amem, tecum obeam lubens," they would live and die with her alone.

"Sic ego secretis possum bene vivere sylvis,
Qua nulla humano sit via trita pede.
Tu mihi curarum requies, tu nocte vel atra
Lumen, et in solis tu mihi turba locis."

With thee for ever I in woods could rest,
Where never human foot the ground has pressed.
Thou from all shades the darkness canst exclude,
And from a desert banish solitude.

And yet our dear self is so wearisome to us, that we can scarcely support its conversation for an hour together. This is such an odd temper of mind, as Catullus expresses towards one of his mistresses, whom we may suppose to have been of a very unsociable humour:

"Odi, et amo: quare id faciam fortasse requiris. Nescio; sed fieri sentio, et excrucior."

I hate, and yet I love thee too;
How can that be? I know not how;
Only that so it is I know,

And feel with torment that 'tis so.

It is a deplorable condition this, and drives a man sometimes to pitiful shifts in seeking how to avoid himself.

The truth of the matter is, that neither he who is a fop in the world, is a fit man to be alone; nor he who has set his heart much upon the world, though he have never so much understanding; so that solitude can be well fitted and sit right, but upon a very few persons. They must have enough knowledge of the world to see the vanity of it, and enough virtue to despise all vanity; if the mind be possessed with any lust or passions, a man had better be in a fair than in a wood alone. They may, like petty thieves, cheat us perhaps, and pick our pockets, in the midst of company; but, like robbers, they use to strip and bind, or murder us, when they catch us alone. This is but to retreat from men, and to fall into the hands of devils. It is like the punishment of parricides among the Romans, to be sewed into a bag, with an ape, a dog, and a serpent.

The first work, therefore, that a man must do, to make himself capable of the good of solitude,

"Never less alone than when alone;" a saying is, the very eradication of all lusts; for how is it genera ly ascribed to Cicero.

| possible for a man to enjoy himself while his

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affections are tied to things without himself? In the second place, he must learn the art, and get the habit of thinking; for this, too, no less than well speaking, depends upon much practice; and cogitation is the thing which distinguishes the solitude of a god from a wild beast. Now, because the soul of man is not, by its own nature or observation, furnished with sufficient materials to work upon, it is necessary for it to have continual recourse to learning and books for fresh supplies, so that the solitary life will grow indigent, and be ready to starve, without them; but if once we be thoroughly engaged in the love of letters, instead of being wearied with the length of any day, we shall only complain of the shortness of our whole life.

"O vita, stulto longa, sapienti brevis !"* O life, long to the fool, short to the wise! The first minister of state has not so much business in public, as a wise man has in private: if the one have little leisure to be alone, the other has less leisure to be in company; the one has but part of the affairs of one nation, the other all the works of God and nature, under his consideration. There is no saying shocks me so much as that which I hear very often, "That a man does not know how to pass his time." It would have been but ill spoken by Methusalem in the nine hundred and sixty-ninth year of his life; so far it is from us, who have not time enough to attain to the utmost perfection of any part of any science, to have cause to complain that we are forced to be idle for want of work. But this, you will say, is work only for the learned ; others are not capable either of the employments or divertisements that arrive from letters. I know they are not; and, therefore, cannot much recommend solitude to a man totally illiterate. But, if any man be so unlearned, as to want entertainment of the little intervals of accidental solitude, which frequently occur in almost all conditions (except the very meanest of the people, who have business enough in the necessary provisions for life), it is truly a great shame both to his parents and himself; for a very small portion of any ingenious art will stop up all those gaps of our time: either music, or painting, or designing, or chemistry, or history, or gardening, or twenty other things, will do it usefully and pleasantly; and, if he happen to set his affections upon poetry (which I do not advise him too immoderately), that will over-do it; no wood will be thick enough to hide him from the importunities of company or business, which would abstract him from his beloved.

"O qui me gelidis in vallibus Hæmi Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra?"

"O vita, misero longa, felici brevis !" (O life, long to the unhappy, to the happy brief).—Publius Syrus.

1.

Hail, old patrician trees, so great and good!
Hail, ye plebeian under-wood!
Where the poetic birds rejoice,
And for their quiet nests and plenteous food
Pay with their grateful voice.

2.

Hail, the poor Muses' richest manor-seat!
Ye country houses and retreat,
Which all the happy gods so love,
That for you oft they quit their bright and great
Metropolis above.

3.

Here Nature does a house for me erect,
Nature, the wisest architect,

Who those fond artists does despise That can the fair and living trees neglect; Yet the dead timber prize.

4.

Here let me, careless and unthoughtful lying, Hear the soft winds, above me flying, With all their wanton boughs dispute, And the more tuneful birds to both replying, Nor be myself, too, mute.

5.

A silver stream shall roll his waters near, Gilt with the sunbeams here and there, On whose enamelled bank I'll walk, And see how prettily they smile, and hear How prettily they talk.

6.

Ah, wretched and too solitary he,

Who loves not his own company! He'll feel the weight of 't many a day, Unless he call in sin and vanity To help to bear 't away.

7.

O Solitude, first state of human-kind!
Which blest remained, till man did find
Ev'n his own helper's company.

As soon as two (alas !) together joined,
The serpent makes up three.

8.

Though God himself, through countless ages, thee
His sole companion chose to be,
Thee, sacred Solitude, alone,
Before the branchy head of number's tree
Sprang from the trunk of one.

9.

Thou (though men think thine an inactive part)
Dost break and tame th' unruly heart,
Which else would know no settled pace,
Making it move, well managed by thy art,
With swiftness and with grace.

10.

Thou the faint beams of reason's scattered light
Dost, like a burning glass, unite,
Dost multiply the feeble heat,

And fortify the strength, till thou dost bright
And noble fires beget.

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