"You will suppose me a politician; but in truth I am nothing less. These are the thoughts that occur to me while I read the newspaper; and, when I have laid it down, I feel myself more interested in the success of my early cucumbers than in any part of this great and important subject. If I see them droop a little, I forget that we have been many years at war; that we have made an humiliating peace; that we are deeply in debt, and unable to pay. All these reflections are absorbed at once in the anxiety I feel for a plant, the fruit of which I cannot eat when I have procured it. How wise, how consistent, how respectable a creature is man !"

CHAPTER XIV.

THE WRITING OF THE "TASK."

(July, 1783-June, 1785.)

"A la démande de Lady Austen, il composa la poëme didactique 'La Tache' en 1783, rempli d'admirables descriptions, de nobles pensées, d'un sentiment profond."-L'Encyclopédie des Gens du Monde, Paris, 1836.

C

93. "The Sofa."-July, 1783.

OWPER'S great poem, the immortal "Task," was commenced probably in July, 1783. The story of its origin has been told again and again. Lady Austen had often urged him to try his powers in blank verse-a species of composition he had hitherto not attempted. At last he promised to comply with her request if she would give him a subject. "Oh," she replied, "you can never be in want of a subject; you can write upon any write upon this sofa!" Consequently upon that sofa he wrote.

Whilst he was engaged on the first book of the "Task," the Rev. John Newton made a second visit to the scene of his former labours. Writing to him in September, Cowper says: "You know not what I suffered while you were here. . . . The friend of my

heart, the person with whom I had formerly taken sweet counsel, no longer useful to me as a minister, no longer pleasant to me as a Christian, was a spectacle that must necessarily add the bitterness of mortification to the sadness of despair.' Mr. Newton, who was accompanied by his wife, stayed at Olney three weeks, but Cowper did not mention to him what he was engaged upon, and curiously enough he said nothing to Newton about it till May of the next year (1784), when the poem was nearly completed. Mr. Bull, however, was let into the secret very early. On the 3rd of August Cowper writes to that gentleman : "The

Sofa' is ended, but not finished ;—a paradox, which your natural acumen, sharpened by habits of logical attention, will enable you to reconcile in a moment. Do not imagine, however, that I lounge over it; on the contrary, I find it severe exercise to mould and fashion it to my mind!"

Cowper, as was his way, continued to revise this poem and interpolate passages right up to the time when the whole book was sent to the press. For example, late in the year he inserted the reference to Mrs. Unwin :

"Whose arm this twentieth winter I perceive
Fast locked in mine."

Whilst the compliment to Mr. Throckmorton

"Thanks to Benevolus, he spares me yet," &c.,

could not have been paid till the following spring. Cowper did not by any means write with uniform speed. Commenting on what he had done at a later

date, he says: "Tully's rule- Nulla dies sine linea' -will make a volume in less time than one would suppose. I adhered to it so rigidly that, though more than once I found three lines as many as I had time to compass, still I wrote; and, finding occasionally, and as it might happen, a more fluent vein, the abundance of one day made me amends for the barrenness of another."

Though Lady Austen had suggested the "Task," Cowper now found that she was a hindrance to its progress.

He had got into the habit of paying his "devoirs to her ladyship every morning at eleven." "Customs," says he, "very soon become laws. I began the Task.' Being once engaged in the work, I began to feel the inconvenience of my morning attendance. We had seldom breakfasted ourselves till ten; and the intervening hour was all the time that I could find in the whole day for writing; and occasionally it would happen that the half of that hour was all that I could secure for the purpose. But there was no remedy. Long usage had made that which at first was optional a point of good manners, and consequently of necessity, and I was forced to neglect the Task' to attend upon the Muse who had inspired the subject.”

94. Reading Aloud.

Cowper found the evenings the most agreeable portion of the day. When not amusing himself with his hares he was generally employed in reading aloud. "My