the work. At another time he connected himself with the fantastic religionist Teedon; a vagary in which again the taint of insanity is to be surmised.

In this same year, 1776, and after Cowper's recovery, Mr. Newton quitted Olney: one of the mainstays of the poet's activity and cheerfulness was thus removed. At Mrs. Unwin's solicitation, he now began his poem on The Progress of Error; followed by three others—Truth, Table-talk, and Expostulation. These, along with Error, Hope, Charity, Conversation, Retirement, and some shorter pieces, were published in one volume in 1782, without exciting particular notice. Though no longer a young man, he entered with youthful ardour and impulse on the poetic career; for it is said that the contents of this volume, about 6000 lines of verse, were the production of a quarter of a year. It was followed in 1785 by The Task and Tirocinium; and now at last, at the age of fifty-three, Cowper became a man of renown. The book was greatly admired, and raised him, in public estimation, to a level with any contemporary writer of poetry. The lady who (as intimated at the opening of The Task) pressed Cowper to undertake the writing of that work, was Lady Austen, a clever and lively widow whose society at this period possessed great attractions for him: gradually, however, her hold upon him weakened— whether through a change in his own feelings, or, as has sometimes been said, through the influence of Mrs. Unwin, who apprehended that Lady Austen might be preferred even to herself. The sprightly widow was the suggester also of John Gilpin-which endlessly popular effusion, the delight of succeeding generations of the juvenile, and not of the juvenile only, was first published anonymously, in 1783, in a collection named The Repository. Thus Lady Austen is entitled to a considerable royalty on the gratitude which all are so ready to pay to Cowper for his poetic performances. In 1784 he began-partly in the hope of banishing his hypochondriacal distresses-the formidable work of translating Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into blank verse. This occupied him during six years. The book was at last published in

1791, and afterwards, in deference to the views of some of his critics, remodelled to a considerable extent in respect of poetic manner and diction, and reissued in its revised form. We all know that Cowper was (as he resolved to be, both in letter and in spirit) a much more faithful translator of Homer than Pope, who, in his successor's opinion, had had no real relish for the Grecian poet-whatever may be the ultimate balance of merit on a comparison of the two works. His version therefore deserved a very respectful reception, and holds its own to this day against the many subsequent adventures which have been made in the same field-some of them not much unlike Cowper's own in range of attempt, others markedly dissimilar. In the way of original work, the only other leading performance by Cowper which remains to be mentioned is the Anti-Thelyphthora, written to confute the opponents of marriage: this was not published till after his death.

While his translation of Homer was in progress, the poet removed from Olney to the neighbouring village of Weston, at the recommendation of his cousin Lady Hesketh, with whom he had recently renewed a long-suspended correspondence, and who actively co-operated with Mrs. Unwin in comforting his later years. Hardly was the Homer completed when he undertook to superintend a new edition of Milton's works; this included the translating of his Latin and Italian poems.* In 1792 a great affliction befell him: Mrs. Unwin was affected by a paralytic seizure, and the mournful wane of her faculties bespoke but too surely the approaches of death. Her end was delayed, however, for some while, and did not ensue till the 17th of December 1796. When this occurred, Cowper was himself already worse than dead-he was finally and without recovery insane.

His mental malady had re-appeared for about six months in 1787 in 1794 it again set in-not unconnected probably

:

In the present series of reprints, these translations from Milton by Cowner will be found included, not among the works of Cowper, but among those of Milton-to which they form a useful, and I conceive almost a necessary, adjunct. As far as I know, there had not as yet been any edition of Milton published, supplying a translation of these poems.

In the same

with his dejection on Mrs. Unwin's account.
year, his services to poetical and religious literature were
recognized by a pension of £300 per annum. He was now
living with Lady Hesketh, and a young relative named
Johnson paid much attention to the sufferer.
He was
removed, for change of scene, to North Tuddenham in
Norfolk; then to Mundsley; then to East Dereham, in the
same county. Absolute darkness did not as yet close in
upon him: there were intervals of lumour, in which he com-
posed some small pieces, and attended to the revision of
his Homer. The end was gloomy: religious despair was
busy in tormenting his mind, and dropsy his body. He
died on the 25th of April 1800.

The eager, sudden-looking, large-eyed, shaven face of Cowper is familiar to us in his portraits-a face sharp-cut and sufficiently well-moulded, without being handsome, nor particularly sympathetic. It is a high-strung, excitable face; as of a man too susceptible and touchy to put himself forward willingly among his fellows, but who, feeling a "vocation" upon him, would be more than merely earnestself-asserting, aggressive, and unyielding. This is in fact.

He was an en

very much the character of his writings.
thusiastic lover of nature, and full of gentle kindliness, and
of quiet pleasant good-humour,-and all these loveable
qualities appear in ample proportion and measure in pas-
sages of his writings: but at the same time his narrow,
exclusive, severe, and arbitrary religious creed-a creed
which made him as sure that other people were wicked and
marked out for damnation as that himself was elected and
saved (and even as regards himself this confidence gave way
sometimes to utter desperation)—this creed speaks out in his
poems in unmistakeable tones of harsh judgment and un-
qualified denunciation. Few writers are more steadily
unsparing of the lash than the shrinkingly sensitive Cowper.
It may be that he does not lay it on with the sense of personal
power, and indignant paying-off of old scores, which one
finds in a Juvenal or a Pope; but the conviction that he is
the mouthpiece of Providence, and that, when William

#

Cowper has pronounced a man reprobate, the smoke of his burning is certain to ascend up for ever and ever, stands in stead of much, and lends unction to the hallowed strain. In conformity with this inspiration, his writing is nervous and terse, well stored with vigorous stinging single lines; and his power of expressive characterization, whether in moral declaiming or in descriptive work, is very considerable —and was at any rate in the latter class of passages) even more noticeable in his own day than it is in ours. Apart from his religion, Cowper (as has just been said) was eminently humane and gentle-hearted; the interest which he took in his tame hares will perhaps be remembered when much of his wielding of the divine thunderbolts against the profane shall have been forgotten. It was in 1774, during one of his periods of great mental depression, that the first of his leverets was presented to him, in the hope of diverting his mind from more moody thoughts: two others followed afterwards; and the diverse characters and manners of the three formed an engaging study to him for years. Puss, the latest to survive, expired in March 1785.

:

In point of literary or poetic style, Cowper was mainly independent, and the pioneer of a simpler and more natural method than he found prevailing his didactic or censorial poems may be regarded as formed on the writings of Churchill rather than of any other predecessor. Besides his merits as a poet, his excellences as a letter-writer have deserved and received very high praise. His correspondence is unaffected, facile, and often playful. Religion of course forms a substantial part of this, as it so conspicuously did of the author's mind: but it has been noticed, and has been made matter of some reproach from certain quarters, that the religious tone of the letters diminishes very observably after 1785, when Cowper had become an eminent man in literature, and more open consequently to the entanglements of "the world."

W. M. ROSSETTI.

A. You told me, I remember, glory built
On selfish principles is shame and guilt;
The deeds that men admire as half divine,
Stark naught, because corrupt in their design.
Strange doctrine this! that without scruple tears
The laurel that the very lightning spares,
Brings down the warrior's trophy to the dust,
And eats into his bloody sword like rust.

B. I grant, that men continuing what they are,
Fierce, avaricious, proud, there must be war;
And never meant the rule should be applied
To him that fights with justice on his side.

Let laurels, drenched in pure Parnassian dews,
Reward his memory, dear to every muse,
Who, with a courage of unshaken root,
In honour's field, advancing his firm foot,
Plants it upon the line that justice draws,
And will prevail or perish in her cause.
'Tis to the virtues of such men, man owes
His portion in the good that heaven bestows;
And when recording history displays
Feats of renown, though wrought in ancient days,
Tells of a few stout hearts that fought and died
Where duty placed them, at their country's side,
The man that is not moved with what he reads,
That takes not fire at their heroic deeds,
Unworthy of the blessings of the brave,
Is base in kind, and born to be a slave.
But let eternal infamy pursue

The wretch to nought but his ambition true,

A