Thomas Warton 1728-1790. There Honour comes, a pilgrim gray, To dwell a weeping hermit there." Had Collins written nothing beyond the two odes I have quoted, his fame as a poet would be secure. It is strange that Gray, his contemporary and rival, should have failed to discern his supremacy as a lyrist. He classes him with Thomas Warton, a minor poet of some merit, and a critic of high reputation, and writes as if the two men occupied the same platform. This opinion was not due to any feeling of jealousy. Gray was a modest man, and if he was mistaken in his judgment of Collins, he was equally mistaken in the estimate of his own powers. He died, said his friend Bonstetten, without a suspicion of the high rank he was destined to hold amongst the poets of his country. The genius of Collins is distinct from that of Gray. The least known is the greater lyric poet, but will never be the best beloved. They are alike in learning, in their sensibility to the beauties of nature-a feeling unknown to Pope; in the art with which they built up their lofty rhyme; in the aspirations which lifted them into a region never to be reached by the poetical moralists of the age. [The biographies of Gray and Collins should be read in Johnson's "Lives." Johnson knew Collins, and appreciated him as a man if not as a poet. He had no personal intercourse with Gray, and is unjust to his poetry; but Johnson, even at his worst—and his life of Gray is the least satisfactory of the series--has always something to say that is worth reading. Gray's poems are to be met with in every variety of form. His works, including the letters, and edited by the Rev. John Mitford, were published in five volumes by the late Mr. Pickering, who knew better than any publisher of his day how to produce the poets in an edition worthy of their merit. The poems, apart from the prose, can be obtained in the cheap but beautiful Aldine series now published by Messrs. Bell and Sons, in which series the student can also secure a Collins. Mr. Gosse, whose competency for such a task is beyond question, has written a masterly account of Gray in the series of "English Men of Letters; " and Mr. Matthew Arnold (in Ward's "English Poets") writes an interesting essay on the poet, taking for his text four words written by Gray's executor a fortnight after his death-" He never spoke out." I may add that Gray's "Odes" and "Elegy," with introduction and notes, can be bought for a few pence in Chambers's cheap reprints of English classics.] CHAPTER XI. THE GEORGIAN POETS (Continued). WILLIAM COWPER. IN 1761, Charles Churchill was the most popular poet in England. In 1764 he died, and the satires which gave him such sudden popularity were as speedily forgotten. He appealed, it has been well said, “to the passion of the moment," and when that passion passed his fame died with it. His name, however, will always have some attraction for the student, since his schoolfellow, William Cowper, formed his style as a satirist upon that of the "great Churchill." Churchill was never great, although Cowper deemed him so; but there is a vigour and boldness in his lines which give them a special character, and their roughness was attractive at a time when, instead of the fine grain of poetry, the public were forced to be satisfied with the polish of veneer.* 66 *"A critic of the present day," says Cowper, serves a poem as a cook serves a dead turkey, when she fastens the legs of it to William Cowper, 1731-1800. When this "comet of a season disappeared, Cowper was thirty-three years old, and was suffering under the madness-cloud which made his life so pathetic. No one who knew him in that time of anguish could have imagined that he was destined to become one of the most popular of English poets. He was born at Great Berkhampstead, in 1731, of which parish his father was rector. His mother, a descendant of the poet Donne, died when William was six years old, but the memory of her love clung to him through life, and fifty-three years after her death the receipt of her portrait called forth what has been well termed the most touching elegy in the language. The boy's early life was far from happy, or possibly the after-gloom coloured his remembrance of it. From a private school he was sent to Westminster, and placed under Vincent Bourne, whose Latin verses he afterwards translated. Among his schoolfellows was Warren Hastings, and when, at eighteen, he was articled to an attorney, his fellow-clerk was Thurlow, the future Lord Chancellor. "Cowper felt that Thurlow. would reach the summit of ambition, while he would remain below, and made his friend promise, a post and draws out all the sinews. For this we may thank Pope; but unless we could imitate him in the closeness and compactness of his expression, as well as in the smoothness of his numbers, we had better drop the imitation, which serves no other purpose than to emasculate and weaken all we write. Give me a manly rough line, with a deal of meaning in it, rather than a whole poem full of musical periods that have nothing but their oily smoothness to recommend them." R when he was chancellor, to give him something. When Thurlow was chancellor, he gave Cowper his advice in translating Homer." Cowper says that he spent those days in giggling and making giggle with his cousins Theodora and Harriet Cowper; but if he neglected law, he devoted himself to literature, and the study bore good fruit in after years. His earliest verses were written to Theodora. The two appear to have been warmly attached, but their marriage, which was forbidden by the girl's father, soon became impossible on other grounds. The affectionate Theodora remained single, probably for the sake of her first love, in whom she never ceased to be interested. At thirtytwo Cowper lost his reason, and was removed to an asylum kept by the good Dr. Cotton, who had himself considerable popularity as a verse-maker. There he remained several months, and left, not only in apparent sanity, but believing that he had undergone a great spiritual change, or, in the language of Scripture, had "passed from death unto life." He settled for a time in Huntingdon, where he made the acquaintance of the Unwins, "the most agreeable people imaginable," whose names. are destined to live as long as Cowper is remembered. Under their roof the future poet lived happily for some time, and on the death of Mr. Unwin remained with his widow, whose behaviour "had always been that of a mother to a son." They resolved, unfortunately for Cowper's health and spirits, to live at Olney, in the least healthy part |