It contains elegies on Wotton, Vandyck, Falkland, William Hervey and Crashaw, the last two being among Cowley's finest poems, brilliant, sonorous and original; the amusing ballad of "The Chronicle", giving a fictitious catalogue of his supposed amours; various gnomic pieces; and some charming paraphrases from Anacreon. The "Pindarique Odes" contain weighty Lines and passages, buried in irregular and inharmonious masses of moral verbiage. Not more than one or two are good throughout, but a full posy of beauties may easily be culled from them. The long cadences of the "Alexandrines" with which most of the strophes close, continued to echo in English poetry from Dryden down to Gray, but the "Odes" themselves, which were found to be obscure by the poet's contemporaries, immediately fell into disesteem. It should also be noted that the 1656 edition includes the notorious passage in which Cowley abjures his loyalty to the crown:"yet when the event of battle, and the unaccountable will of God has determined the controversie, and that we have submitted to the conditions of the Conqueror, we must lay down our Pens as well as Arms, we must march out of our Cause itself, and dismantle that, as well as our own Towns and Castles, of all the Works and Fortifications as Wit and Reason by which we defended it. We ought not sure, to begin ourselves to revive the remembrance of those times, and actions for which we have received a General Amnestie, as a favor from the Victor. The truth is, neither we, nor they, ought by the Representation of Places and Images to make a kind of Artificial Memory of those things, wherein we are bound to desire like Themistocles, the Art of Oblivion."