by eradicating from your mind any little weeds of suspicion that might still remain in it, that any man living is nearer to me than yourself. Had not this consideration forced up the lid of my strong-box like a lever, it would have kept its contents with an invisible closeness to the last; and the first news that either you or any of my friends would have heard of the 'Task' they would have received from the public papers. But you know now that neither as a poet nor a man do I give to any man a precedence in my estimation at your expense.

"The

As Cowper had anticipated, so it proved. moment Mr. Newton knew," he tells Unwin " (and I took care that he should learn it first from me), that I had communicated to you what I had concealed from him, and that you were my authorship's go-between with Johnson on this occasion, he sent me a most friendly letter indeed, but one in every line of which I could hear the soft murmurs of something like mortification, that could not be entirely suppressed. It contained nothing, however, that you yourself would have blamed, or that I had not every reason to consider as evidence of his regard to me. He concluded the subject with desiring to know something of my plan, to be favoured with an extract, by way of specimen, or (which he should like better still) with wishing me to order Johnson to send him a proof as fast as they were printed off. Determining not to accede to this last request for many reasons (but especially because I would no more show my poem piecemeal than I would my house if I had one, the merits of the structure in either case being equally liable to suffer by such a partial view of

it), I have endeavoured to compromise the difference between us, and to satisfy him without disgracing myself. The proof-sheets I have absolutely, though civilly, refused; but I have sent him a copy of the arguments of each book, more dilated and circumstantial than those inserted in the work; and to these I have added an extract as he desired."

By and by Cowper had a letter from Newton "that did not please him," and returned an answer that possibly "may not have pleased Newton." Newton's letter was "fretful and peevish," and Cowper's "if not chargeable with exactly the same qualities, was, however, dry enough." Cowper tells Unwin on the 10th of December "that Newton would have been pleased had the book passed out of his hands into yours, or even out of yours into his, so that he had previously had opportunity to advise a measure which I pursued without his recommendation, and had seen the poems in manuscript. But my design was to pay you a whole compliment, and I have done it. If he says more on the subject I shall speak freely, and perhaps please him less than I have done already."

This show of fight on the part of so mild a man as Cowper is rather amusing, but we are to learn from it that he had a will of his own. To conceal from so close a friend as Newton what had been revealed to Unwin was scarcely in good taste, and Cowper, though he does not say as much, seems to have felt it; but good taste or not, the thing was done, and there was an end of it. This storm in a teacup, however, soon subsided. The friends continued to write to one another, and in April we find Cowper saying: "I was very

Ι

much pleased with a sentence in Mr. Newton's last: 'I am perfectly satisfied with the propriety of your proceeding as to the publication.' Now, therefore, we are friends again. Now he once more inquires after the work, which, till he had disburthened himself of this acknowledgment, neither he nor I in any of our letters to each other ever mentioned. Some side-wind has wafted to him a report of those reasons by which I justified my conduct. I never made a secret of them. Both your mother and I have studiously deposited them with those who we thought were most likely to transmit them to him. They wanted only a hearing, which once obtained, their solidity and cogency were such that they were sure to prevail."

This poem, two hundred lines of which had been written as early as 1782, was resumed in the middle of 1784. "It turns," says Cowper, "on the question whether an education at school or at home be preferable, and I shall give the preference to the latter." Elsewhere he writes:

"I do not know that schools in the gross, and especially public schools, have ever been so pointedly condemned before. But they are become a nuisance, a pest, an abomination; and it is fit that the eyes and noses of mankind should, if possible, be opened to perceive it."

When, in November, the poem was finished, Cowper

explained more fully its raison d'être.

Unwin :

He says to

"It is entitled 'Tirocinium, or a Review of Schools;' the business and purpose of it are to censure the want of discipline, and the scandalous inattention to morals, that obtain in them, especially in the largest ; and to recommend private tuition as a mode of education preferable on all accounts; to call upon fathers to become tutors to their own sons, where that is practicable, to take home a domestic tutor, where it is not, and if neither can be done, to place them under the care of such a man as he to whom I am writing some rural parson, whose attention is limited to a few."

Cowper wished to dedicate the poem to Unwin, but

wrote:

"I can see that you may have very reasonable objections to my dedicatory proposal. You are a clergyman, and I have banged your order. You are a child of Alma Mater, and I have banged her too. Lay yourself, therefore, under no constraints that I do not lay you under, but consider yourself as perfectly free."

The objections, however, were not allowed to stand, consequently to Unwin the poem was dedicated.

It must be admitted that "Tirocinium" is not a very attractive poem; nevertheless, like everything that Cowper wrote, it contains some excellent passages. The tribute in it to John Bunyan, and the pleasant lines about "the play-place of our early days"-the early days, of course, at Westminster-are among the best.

106. The Commencement of Homer.-
November 12, 1784.

On November 12th (1784), about a week after his completion of "Tirocinium," Cowper had commenced another important work, none other than the translation of Homer, for whom, as we have seen, he had always felt the greatest admiration. At Westminster, when he read the Iliad and the Odyssey through with his friend Alston, comparing them with Pope's translation, "his love and admiration of the original had increased in proportion to his distaste of a version which so thoroughly disguises it," and it was the remembrance of these feelings that prompted him to undertake the task of producing a translation himself. The Iliad and the Odyssey he held to be "the two finest poems that ever were composed by man, and composed in the finest language that ever man uttered." languages of which he knew anything he considered "gibberish compared with Greek."

All

"For some weeks," he says, "after I had finished the 'Task,' and sent away the last sheet corrected, I was through necessity idle, and suffered not a little in my spirits for being so. One day, being in such a distress of mind as was hardly supportable, I took up the Iliad, and, merely to divert attention, and with no more preconception of what I was then entering upon than I have at this moment of what I shall be doing this day twenty years hence, translated the twelve first lines of it. The same necessity pressing me again, I