BENLOWES, EDWARD (16o3?-76), English poet, son of Andrew Benlowes of Brent Hall, Essex, matriculated at St. John's College, Cambridge, in 162o, and on leaving the university made a prolonged tour on the continent of Europe. He was a Roman Catholic in middle life, but became a convert to Protestantism in his later years. He dissipated his fortune by openhanded gener osity to his friends and relations, and possibly by serving in the Civil War; so that he was in great poverty at the time of his death in Oxford, Dec. 18 1676. The last eight years of his life were passed at Oxford.
Many of his writings are in Latin. His most important work is Theophila, or Love's Sacrifice, a Divine Poem (1652). The poem deals with mystical religion, telling how the soul, represented by Theophila, ascends by humility, zeal and contemplation, and triumphs over the sins of the senses. It is written in a curious stanza of three lines of unequal length rhyming together, and is full of the most far-fetched "conceits." Until his revival by Pro fessor Saintsbury justice had hardly been done to Benlowes's poet ical merits and indisputable piety. Samuel Butler, who satirized him in his "Character of a Small Poet," found abundant matter for ridicule in his eccentricities; and Pope placed him in the Dunciad as "Benlowes, propitious still to blockheads, bows." His Theophila was reprinted by S. W. Singer; and in Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, vol. i. (Igo5), Mr. Saintsbury re printed Theophila and two other poems by Benlowes, "The Summary of Wisedome," and "A Poetic Descant upon a Private Music-Meeting."