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His collection of love songs the Mistress is a mass of cold conceits, in the metaphysical manner; but his elegies on Crashaw and Harvey have much dignity and natural feeling. He introduced the Pindaric ode into English, and wrote an epic poem on a biblical subject the Davideis now quite unreadable. Cowley was a royalist, and followed the exiled court to France.
Of Ellwood's life after the year in which he ends his own account of it, let it suffice to say, that he wrote earnest, gentle books in support of his opinions and against the persecution of them. He lived retired until the year 1688, and occupied himself with an attempt at a Davideis, a Life of David in verse. He had not then seen Cowley's.
That night he talked to us freely of his childhood, of the life on the old farm in Haverhill, which he has so vividly described in Snow-Bound, and showed us a venerable book, Davideis, being a history of David written in rhyme, the quaintest and most amusing rhyme, by Thomas Ellwood, a friend of Milton. It was the first book of 'poetry, he told us, that he read when a boy.
Twenty years ago there were fewer verse-makers than at present; and as our whole stock of light literature consisted of Ellwood's Davideis and the selections of Lindley Murray's English Reader, it is not improbable that we were in a condition to overestimate the contributions to the poet's corner of our village newspaper.
Immediately upon the villainous assassination, they intended to have proclaimed Charles Stuart by the assistance of a tumult," etc. etc. This with constant accounts of further arrests troubles the public mind at this time. The passage of Cowley which Dorothy refers to is in the second book of Cowley's Davideis.
He was a simple, good man, ready to suffer for his religious opinions, and has left an autobiography of singular interest alike for the details of Milton's later life, which it gives, and for the light it casts on the times of the writer. He also wrote Davideis , a sacred poem, and some controversial works.
Twenty years ago there were fewer verse-makers than at present; and as our whole stock of light literature consisted of Ellwood's Davideis and the selections of Lindley Murray's English Reader, it is not improbable that we were in a condition to overestimate the contributions to the poet's corner of our village newspaper.
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