Abraham Cowley (1618-1667) had been so much a model for Swift's early poems, that the tempered description of his engagement with Pindar, ending with the transformation of a portion of his body into a dove, is not surprising. The contemporary of Denham, he cultivated letters with a far greater devotion than he and has left a far deeper impression on our literature. He has suffered perhaps unduly, from being made the subject of some of Johnson's most pointed criticism, in the Lives of the Poets, and has been remembered as the typical specimen of that overwrought an- ficiality in poetry to which Johnson has given the name of Metaphysical School. Cowley, in fact, only followed a custom much more rife in the preceding age; but his laboured conceits are more remarked because joined with more graceful language than his predecessors used. His Pindarics were a literary error: but it: does not therefore follow that they did not help the later triumphs of the Ode as a phase in English poetry. The shield given him by Venus is that 'language of the heart' which Pope declares himself still to love, though 'forgot his epic, nay Pindaric art.'