ABSTRACT
In the waning years of the seventeenth century, in his Dedication to the Aeneis, John Dryden looked back at one of the damaged lives of the century’s civil wars as he discussed the failed potential of the royalist poet Abraham Cowley, ‘the darling of his youth’:
For through the Iniquity of his times, he was forc’d to Travel, at an Age, when, instead of Learning Foreign Languages, he should have studied the Beauties of his Mother Tongue […]. Thus by gaining abroad he lost at home: Like the Painter in the Arcadia, who going to see a Skirmish, had his Arms lop’d off: and return’d, says Sir Philip Sidney, well instructed how to draw a Battel, but without a Hand to perform his Work.1
