short time before his death, in 1777. He lived in celibacy, and left his property to two sisters and a brother, the latter, king's architect and inspector of the buildings. D'Argenville Vies des Sculpt.-A. COUSTURIER, PETER, commonly called SUTOR, a French carthusian Monk, in the 16th century, was distinguished by his zeal for the catholic faith, and a variety of publications in its defence, of which a particular account may be seen in the third volume of D. Liron's "Singularités Historiques et Littéraires." He was born at Chemiré-le-Roy, in the county of Maine, and was educated in the college of the Sorbonne at Paris, of which he became prior, and afterwards doctor. He was and afterwards doctor. But he quitted that society to join the carthusian order, to the management of which, in different monasteries, he devoted the time not employed on his polemical writings, until his death in the year 1537. The most ingenious of his productions are, "Petri Sutoris, Doctoris Theologi, Professione Carthusiana, de Vita Carthusiana, Libri Duo," 1522, 4to.; "De Translatione Bibliæ, & novarum reprobatione Interpretationum, &c." 1525, folio; "Apologia Petri Sutoris, Doct. Theol. Carth. Prof. adversus damnatam Lutheri Heresim, de votis Monasticis," 1531, 8vo.; and " Petri Sutoris Carthusiani de potestate Ecclesiæ in occultis," 1534, 8vo. Moreri. Nouv. Dict. Hist.-M. His last, and perhaps his best work, is the two horses with each his leader, on the terrace of Marly, at the head of the watering-place. They have been preferred to those of the Monte Cavallo at Rome. While he was employed about them, a pretended connoisseur remarked to him that the bridles ought to have been more upon the stretch." Sir (replied Coustou), if you had come a moment sooner, you would have found them as you desire; but these horses have such tender mouths, that it was changed in the twinkling of an eye." This artist died in 1745, after having passed through all the gradations of the academy to the post of director. William was more lively than his brother, but had less elegance and elevation in his ideas. He was equally correct in his figures, but gave them less of the antique character, and more of the French air. D'Argenville Vies des Sculpt.-A. COUSTOU, WILLIAM, the younger, son of the preceding, was born at Paris in 1716, and educated under his father. He gained the first prize of sculpture in 1735, and then went to study at Rome. On his return, he was admmitted into the academy in 1742, of which he was made successively professor, rector, and treasurer. He assisted his father in the group of horses at Marly above mentioned. One of his first works was the Apotheosis of St. Francis Xavier in the Jesuits' church at Bourdeaux. Though this was a piece of great merit, he was a long time unemployed; and being a man of a tranquil modest character, he lived in retirement, attending solely to his improvement in the art. He made several models, one of which, representing the satyr Marsyas teaching a young man to play on the flute, gained him much applause. Madame de Pompadour gave him some employment; and in 1764, Frederic the Great, king of Prussia, fixed his reputation by ordering, among other pieces of French sculptors, the statues of Mars and Venus from Coustou. He succeeded so well in these, that the marquis de Marigny, director of the royal buildings, brought him forwards; and he was preferred for the execution of the mausoleum of the dauphin and dauphiness. In his model, he ingeniously indicated that the dauphin was already dead, and that his spouse desired nothing so much as to join him, by representing Time as having already covered one urn with the funeral veil, while the other was left open. He afterwards was chosen to make a statue of the king (Lewis XV.) at Menars. Falling into a declining state of health, his pas tron hastened to procure for him the order of St. Michael, with which he was decorated a COUVREUR, ADRIENNE LE, a very celebrated French actress, was born at Fismes in Champagne, in 1700. Her first entrance on the stage was at Paris in May, 1717, in the part of Electra in the tragedy of that name, Such was the impression she made, that she was admitted in the same month to the firs parts in tragedy and comedy. Not greatly favoured by nature in external qualifications, her soul supplied every want of voice, stature, and beauty. She was the first actress who discarded the artificial and melodious cries and lamen tations which were so much the resource of former tragic performers. Expression and truth were the secrets of her action. She particularly excelled in the difficult character of Phèdre, which she entered into as if it had been made purposely for her, or she for it. The grammatical philosopher, Marsais, who was also a man of taste, took pleasure in giving her lessons. She was one of the many mistresses of the famous marshal Saxe; and when he was duke of Courland, and, finding himself hard pressed, wrote to France for sup plies of men and money, mademoiselle le Couvreur displayed her faithful attachment to him : COWLEY, ABRAHAM, a distinguished English poet, was born at London in 1618. His father, who was a grocer, died before his birth; but his mother, through the interest of her friends, obtained his admission into Westminster school as a king's scholar. He has represented himself as so deficient in memory as to have been unable to retain the common rules of grammar; a defect with which it is difficult to conceive how he could go through a public school. It is, however, certain that he became by some process an elegant and correct classical scholar. Fancy was early a predominant faculty in his composition, and it cannot be doubted that it received much aliment from his perusal of Spenser's Fairy Queen, which accidentally lay in his mother's parlour window, and which he had devoured before he was twelve years old. He imbibed a decided taste for poetry and so soon did it germinate in his youthful mind, that in his fifteenth or sixteenth year, while yet at school, he published a collection of verses under the appropriate title of "Poetical Blossoms." They were graced by some commendatory copies of verses by his school-fellows and two of the principal pieces were dedicated to the bishop of Lincoln, and to his master Mr. Osbaldeston. These juvenile productions do not appear to have been distinguished, like Milton's, by extraordinary flights of imagination, but rather to have indicated a turn for the moral and sententious. In 1636 he was elected a scholar of Trinity college, Cambridge; and in this favourable situation for the display of literary talents, a genius like his could not fail of obtaining distinction. His academical exercises were much admired, and he again appeared as an author by publishing a pastoral comedy entitled "Love's Riddle," and a Latin comedy entitled "Naufragium Joculare," which last was acted before the university by the members of Trinity college. He continued to reside in Cambridge till 1643, and was a master of arts when he was ejected from the university by the puritanical visitors. He then repaired to Oxford, and fixed himself in St. John's college; and, probably in order to attract notice, he published a satirical poem, under the title of "The Puritan and the Papist." He engaged actively in the royal cause, but in what capaeity it was that he was present in several of the king's journeys and expeditions, does not appear. He ingratiated himself, however, with the principal persons about the court, and was particularly honoured with the friendship of ford Falkland. When the events of the war obliged the queen-mother to quit the kingdom, Cowley accompanied her to France, and obtained a settlement at Paris in the family of the earl of St. Alban's. During an absence of nearly ten years from his native country, he was chiefly engaged in the service of the royal family, on whose account he took various journeys into Jersey, Scotland, Holland, and Flanders; and it was principally through his instrumentality that a correspondence was maintained between the king and his consort. The business of cyphering and decyphering their letters was entrusted to his care, and often occupied his nights as well as his days. In the midst of these serious concerns, we find his collection of amorous poems, entitled the "Mistress," printed at London in 1647. Most of them were probably composed in his juvenile years; yet as they are mere exercises of wit, they might have amused his maturer age. Indeed, it does not appear that real love, or attachment to the fair sex, ever exerted any considerable influence over his conduct or character. His comedy called "The Guardian" was published in 1650. This is the same which afterwards appeared in an altered form, under the title of "The Cutter of Coleman-street." In 1656, having no longer any affairs to transact abroad, he returned to England; still, it is said, engaged in the service of his party as a medium of secret intelligence. Soon after his arrival, he published an edition of his poems, containing most of those which now appear among his works. In a search for another person, he was apprehend ed by the messengers of the ruling powers, and committed to custody; from which he was liberated by that generous and learned physician, Dr. Scarborough, who gave bail for him in the sum of 1000l. For the purpose, probably, of appearing under some known character, he assumed that of a physician, and obtained the degree of doctor of physic by mandamus, from Oxford, in December, 1657. This instance of favour, with something that he had inserted in the preface of his poems (to which his biographer, Dr. Sprat, alludes, but without quoting it), threw some suspicion upon the constancy of his loyalty; but it does not appear that his conduct was ever blamed by those who would have had the best right to complain, if they disapproved it. Cowley probably never practised as a physician, for which profession a slender study of the virtues of plants seems to have been his chief preparation; but his name appears as doctor Cowley among the experimentalists who made the commencement of the Royal Society. After the death of Cromwell, Cowley went over again to France, and resumed his station as an agent in the royal cause, the hopes of which now began to revive. On the event of the restoration, he returned with the other royalists, and naturally expected a reward for the laborious services he had performed. He had received, both from Charles the First and the Second, a promise of the mastership of the Savoy, but he was unsuccessful in his application for its fulfilment. He also had the misfortune of displeasing his party by his revived comedy of "The Cutter of Coleman-street," which was unjustly construed as a satire upon the cavaliers, and was con demned accordingly. At length, through the interest of the duke of Buckingham and the earl of St. Alban's, he obtained a lease of a farm at Chertsey, held under the queen, by which his income was made about 300l. per annum. A country retirement had from early youth been a real or imaginary object of his wishes. The passion had been fostered by the favourite strains of the poets, and it had furnished a frequent theme as well for his prose as his verse. A late eminent critic and moralist, Dr. Johnson, who had himself no sensibility to rural pleasures, and to whose very existence society and conversation were necessary, has treated Cowley's declared longing after solitude with a severity and ridicule which it surely does not merit. That a man long tossed in political storms, agitated by the anxieties of At the time of his death he certainly ranked business, and the vicissitudes of an unsettled as the first poet in England, for Milton lay un-condition, should pant for a tranquil retreat, der a cloud, and the age was not qualified to can scarcely be thought extraordinary; and taste him. And though a great portion of from a consciousness of the stores laid up in Cowley's celebrity has since vanished, it canhis mind, Cowley might as reasonably as most not be uninteresting to enter into a brief dismen expect to enjoy it. It is not unlikely, cussion of those qualifications which were once however, that chagrin and disappointment so highly esteemed. The poetry of Cowley might accelerate his resolution to bury himself comes almost exclusively under the class of the in early obscurity. He took up his abode first ingenious. Sometimes, though rarely, rising to at Barn-elms on the bank of the Thames; but the sublime, scarcely ever touching the pathis place not agreeing with his health, he re- thetic, he is by turns easy, gay, splendid, moved to Chertsey. It seems, however, in witty, never trite and vulgar, often fanciful, fact, that neither his mind nor body was well strained, and extravagant. It was well said of fitted for this new scene of life. His temper him (though perhaps a little profanely) by lord was ruffled by vexatious trifles; and he con- Rochester, that " not being of God, he could tracted indispositions from exposure to cold not stand." Substitate the word nature, and it and dampness. His life, instead of being pro- is exactly true. Scarcely any thing in his poems tracted by the pure air and leisure of the coun-appeals to the eternal unchangeable principles try, was soon brought to a close. According to the account of his biographer, Dr.Sprat, the fatal disease was an affection of the lungs, in consequence of staying too late in the field among his Labourers. But Dr. Warton, from the authority of Mr. Spence, has ascribed it to a very different cause. He says, that Cowley paid a visit on foot, with his friend Sprat, to a gentleman in the neighbourhood of Chertsey, which they. prolonged in free conviviality till midnight; and that missing their way on their return, they were obliged to pass the night under a hedge, which gave the poet a severe cold and fever that terminated in death. (Ess. on Pope,. vol. II.) He died on July 28, 1667, in the forty-ninth year of his age, and was interred; with a most honourable attendance of persons of distinction, in Westminster abbey, near the remains of Chaucer and Spenser King Charles II. pronounced his eulogy by declaring, "that Mr. Cowley had not left a better man behind him in England." This moral estimate was probably rather deduced from his general blamelessness of character, than from any proofs of exalted and superior virtue. It was however, a distinguished testimony to acknowledged worth, which has been confirmed by the unanimous voice of contemporaries. It was to the credit both of the king and the subject, that the latter had not purchased court favour by any of those servilities and gross adulations so frequent among his immediate successors. For Cowley was of a free independent spirit, a pupil of philosophy, modest, sober, and sincere, of gentle affections and moderate wishes, neither making a parade of his own merits, nor undervaluing those of others. of human nature, to those tastes and affections which alter not with age and climate: his works are modelled as much upon local and temporary manners of thinking, as were those of the scholastic divines and philosophers. That kind of sport of the imagination, which consists in pursuing a thought through all its variations and obliquities, and searching the whole material world for objects of similitude to intellectual ideas, connected by the most remote and fanciful relations, took its rise in the Italian school of poetry, and was early transplanted into the English. The great master of it before the time of Cowley was Donne, whose poetical faculty was comprised in it. Cowley had many more parts of a poet; but, infected with the false taste of the time, he sacrificed all his powers to excellence in this point. He did, indeed, attain that excellence, and stands at the head of those whom Dr. Johnson (after Dryden) has termed the metaphysical poets. It seems impossible for a human fancy to surpass that of Cowley in the variety, brilliancy, and novelty, of his conceptions; but this fertility precluded selection; and though he has more elegance and less coarseness than Donne, he frequently sinks to familiarity, or deviates into grotesque. At best it is all trick and flourish, unfit for any of the nobler purposes of poetry. Referring our readers for a more particular examination of this species of writing, to Dr. Johnson's excellent critique in his account of Cowley (English Poets), we shall conclude the article with a cursory view of his different works. Among his "Miscellanies," the "Anacreontiques" are some of the most agreeable pieces; and no translator or paraphraser of the jocund bard of Teios has better succeeded in imitating the easy gaiety of his strains. Cowley's original ballad, containing the "Chronicle of Mistresses," is, however, more sprightly and pleasant than any of his copies from the Greek. His "Mistress," a series of love verses under a variety of heads or topics, is peculiarly characteristic of his genius. It is full of wit, without a spark of feeling, and certainly had not love for its inspirer. The language and imagery are sometimes a little licentious; but no work of the kind can be more innocent of inflammatory effects. Though his passion was so violent, that when cut into the bark of a flourishing tree, it "burnt and withered up the tree in three days," there is not the least dan ger of its communicating a flame to any human bosom. All the circumstances attending an amorous connection are indeed descanted upon, but merely as vehicles for tropes and similes. The "Pindarique Odes" are in part translations from Pindar, and in part imitations of his style and manner applied to other subjects. Cowley's idea of this species of composition appears to have been that of the most unbridled licence of thought, and irregularity of method and versification. A much sublimer genius than his, with a purer taste, would be requisite to make any thing valuable upon such a faulty plan. There are, indeed, striking lines and images in his odes, but as compositions they are both feeble and extravagant. It is remarkable, that though the art of English versification had made great advances to perfection under Spenser, Fairfax, and others, and though Cowley himself occasionally has very melodious lines, yet he is in common a very slovenly versifier, and abounds in lines which no method of reading can bring to resemble measure of any kind. Such a defect of ear, joined with an apparently nice perception of melody, is very unaccountable. Probably the example of Donne, whose rugged lines have often no trace of measure, vitiated his sensibility in this respect. His " Davideis," an incomplete poem, in four books, on the troubles of David, was chiefly a juvenile performance, and affords no favourable specimen of his qualifications for heroic poetry. It is, however, not without pleasing passages. He seems himself to have valued it, since he thought it worth while to translate the first book into Latin hexameters.. Of his occasional pieces, the Hymn to Light" is the most poetical. It is strongly in his manner, but in his best manner; and the multiplied imagery is for the most part worthy of the subject. As an essayist in prose, Cowley has obtained a character very different from that he bears as a poet; that of a natural, easy, placid, and equable writer. He is full of thought, but without stiffness of affectation. His essays read very pleasantly, and the intermixture of verse makes an agreeable variegation. His only remaining comedy is "The Cutter of Coleman-street,' which possesses humour, though of a local and temporary kind. As a writer of Latin verse, he is differently estimated by modern judges. Johnson places him above Milton in point of originality. Warton seems to hold him cheap, yet praises the felicity with which he has imitated the style of Horace's moral epistles and satires. His principal Latin performance, his six books on plants, is remarkable for the facility with which he accommodates to verse a variety of topics little calculated for poetry. He has shifted his strain between the elegiac, the lyric, and the epic, according to the subject, but he chiefly delights in imitating Ovid. If it could be said in Pope's days, "Who now reads Cowley?" it may be supposed that he is at present almost consigned to oblivion. Yet he has a very good title to keep a place among the British classics, since if not a poet of the first order, he is almost unrivalled as a wit. Few authors afford-so many new thoughts, so many absolutely his own. His works are a His works are a flower-garden run to weeds, but the flowers are numerous and brilliant, and the search after them will repay the pains of a collector who is not too indolent or fastidious. Biogr. Britan. Johnson's Life of Cowley.—A. COWPER, WILLIAM, an eminent English surgeon and anatomist, flourished in the close of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. He resided in London, and distinguished himself as a dissector and injector. He drew well, and employed good artists, and published several splendid works. His "Myotomia Reformata, or a new Administration of all the Muscles of the Human Body," 8vo. appeared in 1694. Though not equal in accuracy to later works, it was an improvement upon those which preceded, and contained several new observations. In 1697 he published "The Anatomy of Human Bodies," folio, with the plates of Bidloo, which had been purchased by an English bookseller. To these he added some explanations, and some anatomical and chirurgical remarks. In a supplement, he gave an introduction to physiology, especially relative to deglutition, with some new figures. Bidloo complained, not without justice, of the use made by Cowper of his plates. Cowper made a reply entitled "Eucharistia, &c. ;" to which he added a description of some newly-discovered glands. These, which are known by the name of Cowper's, are mucous glands, seated near the meck of the bladder. After his death, there appeared, under the care of Dr. Mead, his "Myotomia Reformata, with an Introduction concerning muscular Motion," 1724, fol. which is a very splendid edition of his first work, with some additions. He was also the author of several chirurgical and anatomical papers in the Philosophical Transactions, from No. 208. to No. 299. There are some observations of his in Drake's Anthropologia Nova. Haller Bibl. Anatom. & Chirurg-A. COWPER, WILLIAM, a modern poet of distinguished and original genius, was born in 1732 at Berkhamstead in Hertfordshire. His father, the rector of the parish, was John Cowper, D.D. nephew to lerd chancellor Cowper. Mr. Cowper was educated at Westminster school, and at that seminary he acquired the classical knowledge and correctness of taste for which it is celebrated, but without any portion of the confident and undaunted spirit which is supposed to be one of the most valuable acquisitions derived from great schools to those who are to push their way in the world. It appears, indeed, from his poem, entitled "Tirocinium,' that the impressions made on his mind from what he witnessed, were of the most unfavourable kind, and gave him a permanent dislike to the system of public education. As through family interest the honourable and lucrative place of clerk to the House of Lords had been. provided for him, he was entered at the Temple for the study of the law, in order to qualify him for it. In this situation his manners were amiable and decent; and though it is probable that he did not refuse to indulge in those plea-sures which are usual among young men simi-larly situated, yet there seems no reason to suppose that he had any peculiar causes for selfaccusation. His natural disposition was timid and diffident; his spirits were constitutionally weak, even to the borders of absolute unfitness for worldly concerns; so that when the time came for assuming that post to which he had been destined, he shrunk with such terror from the idea of making his appearance before the most august assembly in the nation, that, after a violent struggle with himself, he actually resigned the employment, and with it all his prospects in life. It appears to have been under the agitation of mind which this circumstance occasioned, and which threw him into a serious illness, that he was led to a deep considera-tion of his state in a religious view; and from the system he had adopted, this course of reflection excited in him the most alarming and distressful apprehensions. In vain did his theological friends set before him those encouraging views which the theory of christian justification is calculated to present, and which to many is the source of a confidence perhaps as excessive as their former fears; the natural dis-position of his mind fitted it to receive all the horrors, without the consolations, of his faith. We are told, that "the terror of eternal judgment overpowered and wholly disordered his faculties; and he remained seven months in a continual expectation of being instantly plunged into final misery." In this shocking condition he became the subject of medical care, and he was placed in the receptacle for lunatics kept by Dr. Cotton of St. Alban's, an amiable and worthy physician, and the author of some wellknown poems. At length he recovered a degree of serenity; but his mind had acquired that indelible tinge of melancholy by which it. |