sided at his living of Stock, in Essex. Her daughter had married in 1774 a worthy clergyman, Mr. Powley, and was settled in Yorkshire. The winter of 1780 arrived, and the melancholy recluse was without a sufficient expedient to kill time and care, when Mrs. Unwin suggested to him to turn poet in earnest.

He had previously been accustomed to compose short pieces on occasional subjects -such as his old friend Thurlow's promotion to the Chancellorship, the burning of Lord Mansfield's library, and the starvation of a goldfinch in the adjoining house. It is not,' he said, 'when I will, or upon what I will, but as a thought happens to occur to me, and then I versify whether I will or not.' He states that he wrote solely for amusement, as a gentleman performer takes up his fiddle, and found so much pleasure in the employment that he often wished he possessed the 'faculty divine,' and could be more than a trifler in the art. When Mrs. Unwin urged him to attempt something of greater moment, she gave him the Progress of Error' for a subject. He completed it in December, and in the three following months produced "Truth,' 'Table-Talk,' and 'Expostulation' -about two thousand five hundred lines in all. He would gladly have sent them straight into the world, but the publishing season was past, and it was arranged that his book should be printed in the summer and autumn of 1781, to be ready against the succeeding winter. The stimulus supplied by the prospect, and the gratification of seeing his productions in type, set him rhyming afresh in spite of the sunny weather, which usually put a stop to his mental employments, and between May and August he more than doubled the quantity of his verse, and composed 'Hope, Charity,' 'Conversation,' and Retirement.' He wrote with less rapidity at the end than at the beginning. Time was,' he says, 'when I could with ease produce fifty, sixty, or seventy lines in a morning; now I generally fall short of thirty, and am sometimes forced to be content with a dozen.' The facility acquired by practice was not in his case an equivalent for the activity of mind which is generated by novelty. His patience was tried by the dilatoriness of the printer, but his work was fairly launched in March, 1782, and the man who attempted suicide from the dread of facing a few matter-of-fact questions at the bar of the House of Lords, stood forth a voluntary and eager candidate for general applause. He subsequently confessed to Lady Hesketh that he had in his nature an infinite share of ambition,' with an equal share of diffidence.' The balance of these

qualities had hitherto kept him inactive, and he imagined, when his book was on the eve of publication, that his innate bashfulness would still have rendered it impossible for him to commence author by name,' if he had not been nearly indifferent whether he was praised or abused. There did not, he protested, live the being who would be less annoyed by being chronicled as a dunce. In this idea, as he afterwards acknowledged, he was completely deceived. Except in the periods when the pangs of despair swallowed up all his other emotions, everything,' to use his own words, affected him nearly, which threatened to disappoint his favourite purpose of working his way through obscurity into notice.' However apathetic he might fancy himself before the die was cast, he really published because he thought well of his verse, and had an inward persuasion that it would procure him the distinction he coveted. His retirement, no doubt, assisted his courage. He could address the world from the loopholes of his retreat,' and as he did not mingle in the crowd he had little to fear from personal humiliation in the eyes of associates. The influence of this consideration appeared in his especial anxiety for a favourable judgment upon his labours in the Monthly Review,' on account of its being read by a carpenter, a baker, a village schoolmaster, and a watchmaker, in the place where he lived. Wherever else,' he exclaimed, 'I am accounted dull, let me pass for a genius at Olney. So much was he deluded when he sometimes fancied that he only cared for the commendations of the judicious.

Cowper was fifty years old when he completed his first published volume of poems, The pieces he had composed in the preceding decade-a period of life when most men are in the maturity of their understandings-still gave little, and often no indication of the power which lurked within him. There is neither felicity of thought nor language in the copies of verses that he circulated among his friends, and what renders his failure more extraordinary is, that he endeavoured to put the whole of his strength into his work, and elaborated these trifles with the utmost care. Whatever was short he justly held should be nervous, masculine, and compact, and he was never weary of touching and retouching, that he might fulfil his theory of excellence. 'Nervous, masculine, and compact' are, however, the last epithets which could be applied to the feeble and jejune produce of all this toil. Even the rhymes, about which there could be no deception, are frequently wretched. He talked of a false rhyme disgracing a stanza, and in the first stanza of his first Olney hymn makes God rhyme to road, and

a letter-writer, and to have been made a poet.

Nothing in the workings of his mind revealed to Cowper the true bent of his poetic faculty: he learnt it by accident. His lively friend, Lady Austen, whose acquaintance he had made in 1781, was an enthusiastic admirer of blank verse. She urged him to attempt it, and he promised to comply if she would furnish the subject. Oh!' she exclaimed, 'you can never be in want of a sub

All other sorrows Virtue may endure,
And find submission more than half a cure;
But slav'ry!-Virtue dreads it as her grave;
Patience itself is meanness in a slave.'

As the feebler parts preponderated, the volume had only a moderate success, nor is there any reason to think, if he had stopped at this point, that his reputation would have increased with time. His case is curious. He had been a versifier nearly all his life. By his own confession he had spared no pains to do his best. At the age of fifty, when further improvement was unlikely, he put forth several thousand lines, which by turns were grave and gay, and which seemed to reflect every quality of his mind. Had he died at this period, nobody could have suspected that an undeveloped genius had been taken prematurely from the world, and that he possessed a poetical power of a far different stamp from anything which he had hitherto exhibited. His letters indeed, if they had been published, would have ensured his celebrity. They have never the air of being composed, and yet are as elegant and classic as the most finished compositions. His humour, like his style, was spontaneous, and imparts a flavour to an infinity of trifles which in themselves would have been insipid. He never exaggerates for the sake of effect. Every word bears the impress of truth. He did not aim at conciseness, nor does he deal much in reflections, opinions, and criticisms. He confines himself mainly to the little incidents and feelings of the hour, and these he tells with a charm and distinctness which are unequalled in any other familiar correspondence. With all the beauty of these graceful effusions, he had no expectation that they would contribute to his fame; for he begged his correspondents to burn them, and would have been dismayed at the idea of exposing the confidences of friendship to the eye of the world. His earliest epistles are as perfect as his latest, and he would almost seem to have been born

upon this sofa.' The conversation passed in the summer of 1783, and in October, 1784, 'The Task,' which took its name from the incident which gave rise to it, was in the hands of the printer. Neither the author nor the muse who suggested the topic could have foreseen to what it was to lead. It was a blind and lucky hit. Cowper was not one of the poets who drew his ideas from the realms of imagination. He rarely attempted to conjure up situations which he had not experienced, nor did he ransack his mind for images and sentiments which did not make part of his common thoughts. His works were the counterpart of the ordinary, everyday man. In Table-Talk' and its companion pieces he had made, he said, his confession of faith. He had poured out in them the theological and moral opinions which had governed him for years, and he seemed to have nothing to add. If he had been reminded that half the story was untold, and that to complete the portraiture he might follow up the promulgation of his creed, with a description of his in-door and out-door occupations, of the walks he habitually trod, and the scenes upon which he incessantly gazed, interspersed with such reflections as they were wont to excite, he would probably have shrunk from so personal a theme. He was insensibly led to execute a plan which he would not have framed upon deliberation by the happy chance that he was set versifying upon an object which plunged him into the midst of his home pursuits. He commenced by treating of the 'Sofa' in a playful, mock-heroic strain. The use of the sofa as a couch for invalids suggested to him the pleasures of health, exercise, and activity. This at once set him dilating upon the beauties of nature, which no man regarded with a more observant eye, or enjoyed with a more intelligent delight. He was fairly engaged in depicting the ordinary tenor of his life at Olney, and he did not stop till he had traversed the entire round. The apparent dulness of his existence, its narrow range, its unbroken uniformity, the absence of events, and the unromantic character of the neighbouring scenery, appeared to pre

now

sent no very promising field for poetry to a man whose habit was to describe things as they were, without any embellishment from fancy. But, in fact, the commonness of the materials rendered the sympathies associated with them only the more universal. Fireside enjoyments, domestic happiness, English landscapes, and English winters, were subjects which, when touched by the hand of a master, appealed to the experience of millions. It added to the charm that the author spoke in his own name, and thus gave life and reality to the whole-a biographic as well as a poetic interest. My descriptions,' he said, are all from nature: not one of them second-hand. My delineations of the heart are from my own experience: not one of them borrowed from books, or in the least degree conjectural.' The religious, social, and political opinions interspersed were all upon the side of truth, goodness, and humanity, and were such opinions as might be expected from an amiable recluse, whose judgment was not warped by the prepossessions which are generated by self-interest or by party and personal ties. The execution of the delightful design is for the most part nearly perfect. He has displayed one quality in a stronger degree than it was ever possessed by any other describer of nature-the capacity of painting scenes with a distinctness which makes them like visible objects to the mind. They are not more vivid than true, and he has blended the accuracy of the topographer with the picturesqueness of the poet. The language is no longer of the commonplace character which is so often found in his previous works, but is as choice as it is simple. Nothing in 'The Task' is more remarkable than the skill with which he constantly picks out the one felicitous word in the tongue which conveys his meaning with the happiest effect. The sketch he gives in 'The Winter Evening' of the appearance of the landscape before snow, and of the fall of the 'fleecy shower' itself, is one instance out of many of his wonderful faculty for picturesque delineation. The whole indeed of the fourth book, which is his masterpiece, abounds both in out-door and in-door scenes of magical power. Like all works of consummate excellence, the impression of its greatness increases with prolonged acquaintance. The beauties are of the tranquil and not of the exciting kind, and the exquisiteness of the workmanship is easily overlooked by hasty eyes. His reprobation of the vices and follies of his age is sometimes admirable, but sometimes declamatory, flat, and tedious; and where he aspires to be sublime, as in the description of the Earthquake in Sicily, he is grandiloquent without true force or

spirit. His ear for blank verse was much finer than for the heroic measure; and though it has not the swelling fulness nor the variety of Milton, it is limpid and harmonious, and suited to the subjects of which he treats. As 'The Task' is one of the most charming poems in the world, so it is also among the most original. Mimicry, Cowper said, was his abhorrence, and he at one time avoided reading verse for fear he should be betrayed into unconscious imitation. He states, however, that the poets of established reputation remained as fresh in his memory as when they were the companions of his youth; and nobody can fail to perceive how much he had been influenced in his descriptions of nature by The Seasons' of Thomson. He outstrips his predecessor. The proportion in him of what is good is larger, and his good passages are in general of a higher grade of excellence. His language is more select and felicitous, his metre is more musical, his scenes are more picturesque, and his topics are more various. The Winter' of Thomson, which is his noblest production, will not stand a comparison as a whole with the Winter Evening' of Cowper.

It speaks well for the taste of the day that The Task' became immediately popular. In the same volume appeared another piece which was already famous. This was the History of John Gilpin,' which was printed for the first time in the Public Advertiser' towards the close of 1782. It was here again Lady Austen who prompted him. She had known the story from her childhood, and related it to him one evening when he was suffering under more than ordinary dejection. He continued to break out into convulsions of laughter after he retired to bed, and his merriment not permitting him to sleep, he turned the incidents into verse. From the effect which the tale had upon him, it may be presumed that he owed the comical details as well as the outline to his friend, and that he did little more than supply the language and the metre. Nothing can be happier than the manner in which he has dressed up the diverting mishaps which befall the London shopkeeper, who, with all the confidence of inexperience unconscious of the difficulty, attempts to ride on horseback when he has never ridden before. The goodhumour with which Cowper has endowed his knight of the stone bottles' imparts an additional air of hilarity to the ballad.

'When Betty, screaming, came down stairs, "The wine is left behind,"

a less amiable man would have broken out into angry exclamations at the dreadful neglect of his wife.