Chapter 6 No.6

We had sight of George III. in our last chapter, and we shall catch sight of him again from time to time; for he was a persistent lingerer, and a most obstinate liver. We had glimpses, too, of that cheery, sunny-faced, eloquent, ill-balanced man, Charles James Fox, whom we ought to remember as a true friend to America, in those critical days when taxation was swelling into tyranny. William Pitt, whom we also saw, and to whom we would have been delighted to listen, would never have won greatly upon American sympathies; too cold, too austere, too classic, too fine.

Sheridan, on the other hand, would, and did, conquer hearts everywhere; but unfortunately spending his forces in great paroxysms of effort; one while the greatest comedist, and again the greatest orator, always the greatest spendthrift; and anon the greatest debtor, who only pays his debts by dying.

Sterne covered better his deficiencies of money and of soul. Who could have put more or truer feeling into the story of the poor ill lieutenant of the inn, whom Corporal Trim (at Uncle Toby's instance) had gone to see, and of whom he makes report? And uncle Toby says he will fetch him home and set him afoot in his regiment.

"Never," says Trim, "can he march."

"But he shall march," says uncle Toby.

"He will die in his tracks," says Trim.

"He shall not die," says Toby, with an oath-which oath, says Sterne, the recording angel washed away, so soon as it was uttered. The Rev. Laurence Sterne, it is to be feared, counted too largely upon the swash of such tender recording angels. Only a host of them, with best lachrymal equipment, could float away poor Sterne's misdeeds!

We touched upon the sad life and fate of the marvellous boy, Chatterton-not a great poet, but with an exuberant poetic glow within him which gave new brightness to old Romanticism, and which kindled in after days many a fancy into flame-up and down the pages of later and bolder poets. Were his forgeries perhaps instigated by the Ossianic mystification?

Macpherson and other Scots.

James Macpherson.

I do not know if you have ever encountered the poems of Ossian. They are out of fashion now; I doubt if fragments even get into the school-books; but some of my readers may remember in a corner of the art-gallery of Yale University a painting, with two life-size figures in it, by Colonel John Trumbull-a limp and bleeding, and somewhat dainty warrior, leaning upon the shoulder of a flax-haired maiden; with a little strain from Ossian's Fingal, in the placard below, to tell the story. The mighty Lamderg (who is the warrior) died: and Gelchossa (the flax-haired young woman) "mourned three days beside her love. The hunters found her dead." The picture is, I suspect, almost the only permanent mark in America of the amazing popularity which once belonged to the strange, weird, monotonous, gloomy, thin poems of Ossian. There are descriptions of mountain crags in them, and of splintered pines, of thunder blasts and of ocean hoar; and there are crags again, and bleeding warriors, and flax-haired women; harps, moonlight, broken clouds, and crags again: I cite a few fragments:

"The oaks of the mountains fall; the ocean shrinks and grows again; the moon herself is lost in heaven; but thou art forever the same, rejoicing in the brightness of thy course. When the world is dark with tempests, when thunder rolls and lightning flies, thou lookest in thy beauty from the clouds and laughest at the storm.

... "Rise, moon, from behind thy clouds! Stars of the night arise, lead me, some light, to the place where my love rests from the chase alone-his bow near him unstrung; his dogs panting around him. The stream and the wind roar aloud, I hear not the voice of my love."

Poems of Ossian.

And yet these poetic flights, which, it would seem might be made up from collective but injudicious use of the Songs of Solomon and the mental exaltations which come from over-indulgence in tea drinking, or other strong waters, were borne, on a swift gale of plaudits in the latter half of the last century all over Europe. Professors of Literature (such as Dr. Hugh Blair) wrote treatises upon their fire and grace; such men as Goethe and Schiller were fast admirers; Napoleon was said to be bewildered by their beauty. Of course they had French translation; and there were versions in German, Greek, Dutch, Spanish, and Latin. The Abbé Cesarotti, besides writing a dissertation in favor of the authenticity of the Gaelic poems, gave an Italian version (the favorite one of Napoleon) which in parts has a rounded play of vocables that makes one forget all poverty of invention. Thus when Ossian says,

"Thy side that is white as the foam of the troubled sea, when dark winds pour it on rocky Cuthon--" it is rounded by the Italian into this pretty bit of mellifluence:-

"Il tuo fianco ch' è candido come la spuma del turbato mare,

Quando gli oscuri venti lo spingono contro la mormorante

Roccia di Cutone--"[1]

And who, pray, was this Macpherson[2] of the Ossian poems, and what was his claim? He was a Scotch school-master; born somewhere in the upper valley of the Spey, beyond the Grampians and in the heart of the Highlands. He had been at Aberdeen University awhile, and again at Edinboro'; but took no degree at either. He wrote and printed some poor verse when twenty; followed it up with some fragments of old Gaelic song, which commanded wide attention; and in 1762 published that poem of Fingal-professedly by Ossian, an old Gaelic bard; and this made him famous. The measure and range were new, and there was a torrent of flame and thunder and love and fury running through it which captivated: he went up to London-was appointed to go with Governor Johnston to Florida,[3] in America; remained there at Pensacola, a year or more; but quarrelled with his chief (he had rare aptitude for quarrelling) and came back in 1766. Some English historical work followed; but with little success or profit. Yet he was a canny Scotchman, and so laid his plans that he became agent for some rich nabob of India (from those pickings winning a great fortune eventually); entered Parliament in 1780; had a country house at Putney, where he entertained lavishly; and at last built a great show place in the Highlands, near to his birth-place-which one may see to-day-with an obelisk to his memory, looking down on the valley of the Spey; and not so far away from the old coach-road, that passes through Killiecrankie, from Blair Athol to Inverness, but the coachman can show it-as he did to me-with his whip.

There were those who questioned from the beginning whether the Ossianic poems did really come from the Gaelic;-Dr. Johnson among them, whose contemptuous doubts infuriated the Macpherson to such a degree that he challenged the doughty Doctor. Johnson replied in what may be called forcible speech:-

"Mr. James Macpherson, I received your foolish and impudent letter. I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat, by the menaces of a ruffian. What would you have me retract? I thought your book an imposture; I think it an imposture still. Your rage I defy. Your abilities, since your Homer,[4] are not so formidable: and what I hear of your morals inclines me to pay regard-not to what you shall say, but to what you shall prove. You may print this if you will."

Dr. Johnson carried a big oaken cudgel with him, when he travelled in Scotland. Hume, on the other hand, was, with Scotch patriotism, inclined to accept at first, Macpherson's story of authenticity:[5] but even he says of this author, with whom he came into altercation-"I have scarce ever known a man more perverse and unamiable." The Highland Society investigated the matter, and reported that while there was no trace of a complete poem in Gaelic corresponding to Macpherson's verse, there were snatches of Highland song and ballads which supported his allegations. The question is not even yet fully settled, and is hardly worth the settlement. Macpherson's own obstinacies and petulancies put unnumbered difficulties in the way; he resented any denial of Gaelic origin for his verse; he resented any denial of his capacity to sing better than the Gael; he promised to show Highland originals, and always made occasions for delay; withal he was as touchy as a bad child, and as virulent as a fish-woman. Nothing satisfied him; one of those men whose steak is always too much done-or too little;-the sermon always too short or too long. He might have been the "Stout Gentleman" of Bracebridge Hall: for he was a big man, and always wore wax-topped boots. Old Mrs. Grant too-who must have been a neighbor of his, when she lived at Laggan-says that he had habits (with theories about social proprieties) which "excluded him from decent society." Mrs. Grant was, however "verra" correct, and a stickler for the minor, as well as the major virtues.

Macpherson left inheritors of his name, and of his estates in that upper valley of the Spey; and a daughter of his became the wife of Sir David Brewster, the eminent scientist. He was buried "by special request" in Westminster Abbey; he had been always covetous of such public testimonials to his consequence. Yet if his book of Ossianic poems was ten-fold better than it is, it would hardly give an enduring, or a brilliant gloss to the memory of James Macpherson.

But whatever may be said for the Gaelic, it is certain that Scotticisms were in those days winning their place in song and in tale. Since the day, in the first quarter of the century (1725), when Allan Ramsay had sent out from his book shop in Edinboro', his rustic eclogue of the Gentle Shepherd, a love had been ripening and growing for those Scottish strains which were to find their last and unsurpassable expression by and by, in the glow and passion of Burns.

Meantime there were hundreds along the Teviot, and the Esk, and by Ettrickdale, who rolled under their tongues delightedly the Scottish bubbles of song, which broke-now from a bookseller, now from a schoolmaster, now from a Jacobite, and now from a "stickit" minister.[6] I will give you one taste of this Scotticism of the borders, were it only to clear your thought of the gloom and crags of Ossian. It is usually attributed to Halket, a Jacobite school-master, not so well known as Ramsay or Robert Ferguson:-

Logie O'Buchan.

"O Logie o' Buchan, O Logie the laird,

They ha'e ta'en awa' Jamie, that delved in the yard,

Wha played on the pipe, and the viol sae sma',

They ha'e ta'en awa' Jamie, the flower o' them a'.

"Tho' Sandy has ousen, has gear and has kye,

A house and a hadden, and siller forbye;

Yet I'd tak' my ain lad, wi' his staff in his hand,

Before I'd ha'e him, wi' the houses and land.

"My Daddie looks sulky, my Minnie looks sour,

They frown upon Jamie because he is poor;

Tho' I lo'e them as weel as a daughter should do

They're nae half sa dear to me, Jamie, as you.

"I sit on my creepie, I spin at my wheel

And think on the laddie that lo'ed me sae weel,

He had but ae saxpence, he brak it in twa

And gied me the hauf o't, when he ga'd awa'."

Yet the poet, from whom we quote, died only three years before Burns was born; but I think we can see from the graces of this modest schoolmaster singer, that taste and accomplishment were both ripening in those north latitudes for the times and the man, in which and in whom, such poetry as that of Burns should be possible.

There was, too, another growth in those days in that northern capital of Great Britain; Dr. Robertson had written his History of America and his History of Charles V. Adam Smith (the friend of Hume) was busy on his Wealth of Nations (published during the year in which Hume died). Hugh Blair, the eloquent doctor, was delivering his lectures on rhetoric. Henry Mackenzie, the amiable Dean of the Edinboro' literati, was writing his Man of Feeling and his Julia de Roubigné,-books of great reputation in the early part of this century, but with graces in them that were only imitative, and sentiment that was dismally affected and over-wrought; and there was Lord Kames, the Gentleman Farmer, with a fine great house in the Canongate, who wrote on criticism, with acuteness and taste. You will not read any of the books of these last-named people; 't were unfair to ask you to do so; but they were preparing the way for that literary development which will find expression before many years in the columns of the Edinburgh Review (established at the beginning of this century), and in the border minstrelsy of Scott.

George Crabbe.

Crabbe.

We step back into England now, to find two poets whose principal work belonged to the closing years of the last century; and with echoes, fresh and strong, trailing over into the beginning of this. Neither their work nor their lives belonged to the noises or to the atmosphere of London. City sounds do not press into their verse; but instead are the sounds of sea-waves or of winds on woods, or of church bells, or of the clink and murmur of the lives of cottagers. The first I name to you of these two is George Crabbe[7]-a name that may sound strangely, being almost unknown and unconsidered now; yet fifty years ago there was not a reading-book in any of the schools, nor an album full of elegant selections, which was not open for the story of Ph?be Dawson, or a glimpse of the noble peasant, Isaac Ashford. But all that is gone:[8]

"I see no more those white locks thinly spread

Round the bald polish of that honored head;

No more that awful glance on playful wight

Compelled to knee and tremble at the sight,

To fold his fingers all in dread the while

Till Mister Ashford softened to a smile."

This gives the manner and strain of Crabbe; it is Pope, but it is Pope muddied and rusticated; Pope in cow-skin shoes, instead of Pope in prunella.

Crabbe was born in the little shore town of Aldborough-looking straight out upon the North Sea; and the rhythmic beat of those waves so stamped itself on his boyish brain, that it came out afterward-when he could manage language, in which he had great gift-very clear and very real; there's nothing better, all up and down his rural tales, than his fashion of putting waves into his rhythmic measures-as you shall see:-

"Upon the billows rising-all the deep

Is restless change: the waves so swelled and steep,

Breaking and sinking, and the sunken swells

Nor one, one moment, in its station dwells.

*****

Curled as they come, they strike with furious force,

And then, renewing, take their grating course,

Raking the rounded flints, which ages past

Rolled by their rage, and shall to ages last.

*****

In shore, their passage tribes of sea-gulls urge,

And drop for prey within the sweeping surge,

Oft in the rough opposing blast they fly

Far back, then turn and all their force apply,

While to the storm they give their weak complaining cry,

Or clap the sleek white pinion on the breast,

And in the restless ocean dip for rest."

Fashions of poets and of poetry may go by, but such scenes on those North Sea shores will never go by. Crabbe was son of a customs' man, of small, turbulent character, and the boy had starveling education; he picked up so much as qualified him at length for surgeon (or doctor, as we say) in that small shore town, but gained little: so, threw all behind him-a girl he loved, and a town he did not love-and with three guineas in his pocket, and a few manuscript poems, set off for London. He was there, indeed, in the very times we have talked of; when wits met at the Turk's Head, when Fox thundered in Parliament, when Sterne was just dead; but who should care for this stout young fellow from the shore? One man-one only, does care; it is the warm Irish-hearted Edmund Burke, who being appealed to and having read the verses which the adventurer brought to his notice, befriends him, takes him to his house, makes him know old Dr. Johnson; and his first book is launched and talked of under their patronage. Then this great friend Burke conspires religiously with the Bishop of Norwich to plant the poet in the Church. Why not? He has some Latin; he means well, and can write a sermon. So we find him returned to that wild North Sea shore with a little church to feed, and the church people, in their turn, to feed him. But the arrangement does not run smoothly; those verses of his, unlike most rural verse, have shown all the darker colors of peasant life; if full of sympathy, they were full of bitter, homely truth. The muck, the mire, the griefs, the crimes, the unthrift, the desolation, have given sombre tint to his village pictures; perhaps those shore people resent it; perhaps he is incapable of the cheeriness which should brighten charity; at any rate he goes away under private preferment to a private chaplaincy at Belvoir Castle, the seat of the Duke of Rutland.

There is not a more princely house among the baronial homes of England. It sits among wooded hills-which to the eye of a Suffolk man would be mountains-where Lincolnshire and Leicestershire join: the towers of Lincoln Cathedral are in sight at the north, and Nottingham Castle in the west: and there is a glitter in some near valley of an affluent of the Trent, shining amid billows of foliage; while within the stately home,[9] the Suffolk doctor could have regaled himself with examples of Rubens and of Murillo, of Teniers, Poussin, and Vandyke.

The Duke of Rutland was a kindly man, a sentimental lover of literature, enjoying the verse of Crabbe, and proud of patronizing him, but lacking the supreme art of putting him at ease among his titled visitors; perhaps enjoying from his high poise, the disturbing embarrassments with which the good-natured poet was beset under the bewildering attentions of some butler, who outshone the host in his trappings, and in his lordly condescension to the level of an apothecary's apprentice.

It was not altogether pleasant for Crabbe; and when afterward he had married his old flame of Aldborough, and by invitation of the Duke (who was absent in Ireland) was allowed to partake of the hospitalities of the castle, the ironical obsequience of the flunkeys all, drove him away from the baronial roof. Through the influence of friends he secures livings,-first in Dorset, and afterward in Leicestershire (1789), almost within sight of Belvoir towers. Hereabout, or in near counties, where he has parochial duties, he vegetates slumberously, for twenty years or more. He preaches, practises his old apothecary craft, drives (his wife holding the reins), idles, writes books and burns them, grows old, has children, loves flowers, and on one occasion, mounts his horse and gallops sixty miles for a scent of the salt air which he had snuffed as a boy. Meanwhile the old haunts in London, which he knew for so brief a day, know him no more; his old friends are dead, his hair is snowy, his purposes wavering.

But his children are of an age now to spur him to further literary effort; with the opening of the present century he rallies his power for new songs; and thereafter the slowly succeeding issues of the Parish Register, The Borough, and the Tales of the Hall, pave a new way for him into the courts of Fame. He secures another and more valuable living in the South of England (Wiltshire), where the incense of London praises can reach him more directly. One day in 1819 he goes away from his publishers with bills for ￡3,000[10] in his pocket; must take them home to show them to his boy, John; he loves that boy and other children over much-more, it is to be feared, than he had ever done that mother, the old flame of Aldborough, in respect of whom there had been intimations of incompatibility; hence, perhaps, the interjection of that sixty-mile ride for a snuff of the freedom of the waves. He died at last down in Trowbridge (his new living), a little way southward of Bradford in Wiltshire; and his remains lie in the chancel of the pretty church there.

We must think of him, I believe, as a good, honest-minded, well-meaning man; dull, I dare say as a preacher; diffuse, meandering, homely and lumbering as a poet; yet touching with raw and lively colors the griefs of England's country-poor; and with a realism that is hard to match, painting the flight of petrels and of the curlew, and the great sea waves that gather and roll and break along his lines.

William Cowper.

Cowper.

The other poet, to whom allusion has been made, living beside him, in that country of England, yet not near him nor known to him, was William Cowper. You know him better: you ought to know him better. Yet he would have managed a church-if a parish had been his-worse than Crabbe did. I fear he would not have managed children so prudently; and if he had ever married, I feel quite sure that his wife would have managed him.

Cowper was of an excellent family, being the son[11] of a church rector, and was born at the rectory (now destroyed), which once stood under the wing of the pretty church that, with its new decorations, still dominates the picturesque valley town of Great-Berkhamsted, on the line of the London and Birmingham Railway. He studied at Westminster-being school-fellow with Churchill, the poet, and with Warren Hastings-of whose Trial we have had somewhat to say: afterward he entered a solicitor's office at the Temple, where Thurlow (later, Lord Chancellor) chanced to be clerk at the same time. He had fair amount of money, good prospect of a place under Government-his uncle, Ashley Cowper, being a man of position and influence.

This uncle had two daughters, to one of whom this young gentleman said tender things;-too tender to be altogether cousinly-in which regard she proved as over-cousinly as he. But the Papa stamped out that little fire of love before it had grown into great flame. There is reason, however, to believe that the smouldering of it had its influences upon Miss Theodora all through her life; and who shall say that it did not touch the great melancholy of the future poet with a sting of tenderness? There was, however, no outspoken lamentation; the feminine nature of the man accepted the decision of the uncle as a decree of fate; there was never any great capacity in him for struggle or for controversy, either with men, or with untoward circumstance.

Meantime, the expected preferment came to young Cowper-a place, or places of value and of permanence, which he had need only to take with a bold hand and purpose; but the bold hand was lacking; and his hesitancy multiplied difficulties which could only be met by examination for fitness before the Lords; that examination stares him awfully in the face; he wilts under the bare prospect; is hedged by doubts; palters with his weakness; falls into a wretched state of melancholy, and-buys laudanum to make an end of it all;-then, he has flashes of light, and waves of a redeeming firmness chase over his mind; but finally, on the very day on which the examination was to take place, he makes a miserable effort at self-destruction. Was ever a man, before or since, who would commit suicide to avoid lucrative office? William Cowper, with only an ordinary share of average common sense, and unhampered by the trappings of genius that belonged to him, would have "gone on" for this place; secured it; made his easy fortune; lived a good humdrum life; died lamented, and never heard of. The poet's fine brain, however-which had been exercised already in musical verse-built up mountains of difficulty; he told in after years, with a curious sincerity, all the details of his struggle-how he held the phial of laudanum to his lips and how he flung it away; how he held a knife at his heart; and finally, how he threw his garter, which served for a gallows-rope, over the chamber door, and hung "till the bitterness of temporal death was past." Righteously enough, after all these weakly resolves, which a man of energy would have made strong, he falls into utter distraction; religious doubts and fears racking him, and lunacy throttling him; and so this young Templar of the bright prospects goes away to the care of a mad-doctor. But long curative processes are needful; and he emerges at last-the blush of his youth all gone, and he lighted up and a-flame with tempestuous religious exhilaration. He would go into orders, but he can never face a congregation; so he plants himself, by the advice of friends, who prop up his waning income, in the flats of Huntingdon, where the river Ouse winds round and round amid the low lands, and sighs among its sedges. He seems like a castaway; what he has written has been little-a boy's pastime; what he has purposed has been weak; and I daresay that his uncle Ashley Cowper, and his cousin Theodora, and his fellow-clerk Thurlow, thought they would never hear of him more, until, on some far-off day, a funeral invitation might come.

But Cowper was presently domesticated in the home of a Rev. Mr. Unwin-an old gentleman, who has a youngish wife (though eight or ten years Cowper's senior) and a son, who is also a preacher. These take kindly to the invalid; they relish his religious exuberance; they pity his frailties; and then and there begins an intimate friendship between Mrs. Unwin and our poet, which for its purity, its strength, its constancy, is without a parallel, I think, in English literary annals. It was about the year 1765 that he first fell in with Mrs. Unwin, and he was never thereafter separated from her-for any considerable time, counting by days-up to the year of her death in 1796.

For the first sixteen years of this exile upon the flats along the Ouse-whether at Huntingdon or at Olney (where they removed after the death of the elder Unwin) there must have been, what most men-whether poets or not-would count a weary and monotonous succession of weeks and days and months. There were few neighbors of culture; no village growth or stir; lands all tamely level; streams all sluggish; industries of the smallest; no shooting-no fishing-no cards-no visitors-no driving; sermon reading in the morning; sermon reading in the evening; walks in the garden; digging in the garden (mild insanity intervening); petting the tame hares; feeding the doves; reading Mistress More; singing hymns; drinking tea; listening for the larks; listening to Mrs. Unwin; drowsing-sleeping-dreaming! Only contrast that dreary trail of days with those passed by Goldsmith, or by Johnson, or by Hume!

But good Mrs. Unwin, who is not only kindly, but has some dormant literary tastes, does rouse him to some poetic labors; she does have faith in his talent; and it was in 1782, I think, that his book containing Table-talk and other verse, first appeared, and by its quiet graces and naturalness provoked inquiry in London, and amongst cultured readers everywhere-as to who this "William Cowper of the Inner Temple" might possibly be? The Rev. John Newton of Olney knew, for the poet had assisted him in the preparation of a certain Olney Hymn Book, published not long before: and then and thereafter this John Newton--a good-hearted, well-meaning divine of an old-fashioned stamp, was pounding, as occasion served, with the hard hammer of his unblinking Calvinism upon the quivering sensibilities of the distraught poet.

But on the breezes of this new reputation which Cowper had wrought came in these times (1782) a fresh bird, in fine feathers, floating into the domestic aviary of Olney. This was Lady Austen, the widow of a baronet-who planted herself there-not without due graces of previous introduction (1781)-between the Unwin and the Cowper for three years, giving a new stir to the poet's brain. Out of that quickening came, after a night of travail, that ever-fresh ballad of John Gilpin's Ride; it was popular from the first; and some two years later-it was publicly recited by Henderson-a famous Falstaffian actor of that epoch, it ran like wild-fire through the journals of the day, while the shops along Fleet Street showed in their windows a great jolly picture of Gilpin and his intractable nag cantering past the Bell at Edmonton.

The shy poet, however, did not go to London to reap any honors which might have accrued; he stayed at Olney, working at a new Task, toward the conception and accomplishment of which he was led by the witty sallies and engaging devices of the new favorite-Lady Austen. This piquant woman, with her charming vivacities, her alluring airs, her dazzling chat, had wrapped the quiet, melancholy poet all around with a witchery to which he was unused and which tempted him to his best powers of song. He was proud of his fresh successes, and grateful to that new and fascinating member of their little household who had provoked and prompted them. What should disturb this cheery party of three-save the ever-lasting unfitness of the odd number? Perhaps the thought of this came first through some tender reproachful look of good Mrs. Unwin; perhaps the poet, stirred to some new wrestle with his withered heart, found out its emptiness; perhaps the gay, enchanting new-comer grew weary of the song she had provoked-or weary of a welcome that stayed so calm. At any rate she took wing;[12] there was a little flurry of correspondence to mark the parting, which, I dare say, both may have wished should be forgotten.

Meanwhile the new, and much-loved poem which had grown out of this intimacy did worthily, and very largely, extend Cowper's fame. Miss Hannah More was enchanted by it; "such an original and philosophic thinker," she says; "such genuine Christianity, and such a divine simplicity!" Even Corsica Boswell calls him "a genius;" and Lord Thurlow (whose favors to the poet never went beyond words) says of his old chum, "If there is a good man on earth, it is William Cowper!"

But the waves of applause break only with a low dolorous murmur upon the threshold of that Olney home. A cruel sense of his own undeservings weighs upon his spirits; he cannot ask a blessing at his meals, for who would listen? he cannot pray, for it would be mockery; and he consoles himself with the poor satisfaction of not being a mocker. He discusses village and public affairs with his barber, Wilson (who had conscientiously refused to dress Lady Austen's hair upon a Sunday). Alluding to American affairs, in that crisis when a treaty of peace was discussed at Versailles (1783) between France and America, he speaks of the "thirteen pitiful colonies which the king of England chose to keep and the king of France to obtain-if he could." A little later, at the same crisis, he says:

"I may be prejudiced against these [Americans], but I do not think them equal to the task of establishing an empire.... 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 important subject."[13]

His Later Life.

It was only in the latter part of his career that the poet made the acquaintance of William Hayley,[14] his future biographer, who had been drawn toward Cowper by the charms of his verse and who came to visit him: this friend, through his wide familiarity with the outer world, had suborned bishops and clergy and public men to write to this melancholy exile of Olney and cheer him with their praises-all which praises fell like hail upon Cowper's window pane. And there had been a little trip devised, to divert that weakened and fatigued mind, down to Eartham in Sussex, where his friend Hayley has a beautiful place, and where he brings the artist Romney, to paint the well-known portrait; but there is no long stay away from the old covert on the flats of Buckinghamshire; indeed this covert had taken new life within a few years by the advent of a cousin, the Lady Hesketh, the widowed sister of his old lost Theodora; she had come with her carriage and trappings, and taken a fine house, and sought to revive pleasantly all the mundane influences of Lady Austen.

From Olney there had come about in those times-at the wise suggestion of Lady Hesketh-a move over to the near village of Weston, which thereafter became the poet's home. [On an April day many years ago-moved by an old New England cleaving to the poems and the poet-I strolled down from Newport Pagnell-to which place I had taken coach from Northampton-following all the windings of the sluggish Ouse, to Weston; stopping at the "Cowper's Oak" inn, I found next door his old home-its front overgrown with roses-and strolled into his old garden; and thence, by a door the gardener unlocked, into the "Wilderness;" the usher regaling me with stories of the crazy poet whom he had seen in his boyhood, and who loved the birds, and who wore a white tasselled night-cap as he wandered in the garden alleys at noon.]

It was at Weston, I think, that the translation of Homer was-if not undertaken-most largely wrought upon. The regular occupation involved counted largely in the dispersion of those despondent mists that were gathering round him. He brought scholarly tastes and a quick conscience to the work; a boy would be helped more to the thieving of the proper English by Cowper's Homer, than by Pope's; but there was not "gallop" enough in his nature for a live rendering; and he was too far in-shore for the rhythmic beat of the multitudinous waves and too far from the "hollow" ships.

In the intervals of this important labor-which was only fairly successful, and gave him no such clutch upon the publisher's guineas as Crabbe gained at a later day-only chance things were written. But some of these chances were brimful of suggestion and of most beautiful issues. That relating to his mother's picture-sent to him by some cousinly hand-a flashing from the embers of his life, as it were, the reader must know; who knows it too well?

"Oh that those lips had language! Life has passed

With me but roughly since I heard thee last.

Those lips are thine-thy own sweet smile I see,

The same that oft in childhood solaced me.

Voice only fails, else how distinct they say,

Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!"

But it is a poem from which quotation will no way serve. After the death of Warton, poet Laureate (1790), Lady Hesketh, and other friends were anxious that the Olney poet should succeed to that honor; Southey says, he might have secured it; but Cowper can never, never go up to court for a kissing of the king's hand.

And now there are coming fast drearier days and months to these good people of the Weston home. The poet's mind, staggered perhaps by those later Homeric labors, but more likely by the grievous religious doubts which overhang him, loses from time to time its poise; and he goes maundering, or silent, and with no smile for days, into the deserts of melancholy.

Death of Cowper.

Mrs. Unwin, worn down by long fatigues, is at last smitten by paralysis; and she whose life has been spent in serving must herself be served; the poor poet bringing to that service all the instincts of affection, and the wavering purpose of a shattered mind. Yet out of this new gloom and these terrors of the home comes that faultless little poem inscribed to "My Mary."

"Thy silver locks, once auburn bright,

Are still more lovely in my sight

Than golden beams of Orient light,

My Mary.

"For could I view-nor them-nor thee

What sight worth seeing could I see?

The sun would rise in vain for me,

My Mary.

"Partakers of thy sad decline

Thy hands their little force resign,

Yet gently prest, press gently mine,

My Mary."

But here, as before, quotation counts for nothing; it cannot bring to mind the mellowness and the tenderness which lurk in so many of the lines and in all the flowing measure of the little poem. Mrs. Unwin has embalmment in it that will keep her memory alive, longer than would any tomb in Westminster.

Well, Mrs. Unwin dies at last in the town of East Dereham, Norfolk, where they had taken her for "diversion"; and the poor poet died there three years later and was buried beside her. They were three dreary years-which followed upon her death-for him and for those about him. From time to time he touched a little bit of old work, but put no joy in it; distraught-weary-smileless-only waiting.

Cowper's poetry.

Critics are agreed that we shall not rank him among the great poets; but he comes nearer to their rank than anybody in his day believed possible. He is so true; he is so tender; he is so natural. If in his longer poems there is sometimes a lack of last finish, and an overplus of language-there is a frankness of utterance and a billowy undulation of movement that have compensating charms. He loves Nature as a boy loves his play; his humanities are wakened by all her voices. He not only seizes upon exterior effects with a painter's eye and hand, but he has a touch which steals deeper meanings and influences and transfers them into verse that flows softly and quietly as summer brooks. He cannot speak or rhyme but the odors of the country cling to his words. There is no crazy whirl of expletives which would apply to a hundred scenes, but clear, forceful epithet, full of singleness of story:-

Far spires lifting over stretches of yellow grass-grown plain; marsh birds trailing their flight by sluggish rivers; boats dragged slumberously at noon-tide with seething bubbles in their wake; great banks of woodland, wading through snows, or throwing shadows by morning, and counter-shadows at evening, over the flanks of low hills on which they stand in leafy platoons. And for sounds-far off church-bells waking solitudes with their tremulous beat and jangle; birds chasing the echoes of their own songs; bees murmurous over banks of thyme; cattle lowing in the meadows; or the bay of some hound-breaking full and clear, and lost again-as he follows, far off, some cold trail amongst the hills.

Above all-he is English; the household has for him the sanctity of an altar; firesides are lighted and glow with a sacred warmth; home interests are always golden. Prone to idleness he is perhaps-mental and physical; much femininity in him; his thought wavering and riding on his rhyme. But he is good, kind; crudest to himself-sticking the John Newton darts of Calvinism into his conscience, and loving the pain of them.

I think we must always respect the name and the work of William Cowper. In our next chapter we shall listen to the music of a different singer, and to the story of a jollier, and yet of a far sadder life.

[1] As a matter of curiosity I give what appears to be the corresponding Gaelic in a couplet of lines, from the version in Rev. Archibald Clerk's Ossian:-

"A's gile na 'n cobhar,' tha sgavilte

Air muir o ghaillinn nan sian."

l. 75, Duan 1, Fionnghal.

[2] James Macpherson: b. 1736; d. 1796.

[3] Mr. Mackenzie (Diss. lxxxvii., Edit. Highland Soc., London, 1807) says that he (Macpherson) took some of his Gaelic MSS. to Florida with him and many were lost there.

[4] Macpherson had translated and published the Iliad in 1773. It will interest my readers to know that a copy of this letter in Johnson's hand-writing, was sold in 1875 for ￡50-five times the sum which he received for the tale of Rasselas!

[5] Sir John Sinclair, a voluminous agricultural writer of Scotland, was strenuous supporter of Macpherson's claims-respecting Ossianic origin, etc. The best exhibit, however, of the Gaelic side of the question may be found in the prefatory Dissertation by Rev. Archibald Clerk, to the beautiful edition of Ossian published by Blackwood & Sons in 1870.

[6] George Halket, a Jacobite schoolmaster, d. 1756; Alexander Ross, minister, b. 1699; d. 1784; John Skinner, Episcopal clergyman, b. 1721; d. 1807.

[7] George Crabbe: b. 1754; d. 1832. The Village, The Borough, and Tales of the Hall, are his best-known works. Life, by his son (1834), is a very full and filially devout book of interesting reading.

[8] So late as 1808, the Edinburgh Review, after speaking of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, etc., continues in language which I suppose is Jeffery's own:-

"From these childish and absurd affectations we turn with pleasure to the manly sense and correct picturing of Mr. Crabbe; and after being dazzled and made giddy with the elaborate raptures and obscure originalities of these new artists, it is refreshing to meet again with the spirit and nature of our old masters in the nervous pages of the author [Crabbe] now before us." Vol. xii., p. 131, Edinboro' Edition.

[9] The old castle was burned in 1816, but has been rebuilt with more than its old splendor.

[10] Smiles, in his Memoirs of John Murray-the publisher in question-intimates, however, that the sum was far too large, and Murray a loser by the bargain. Chap. xxii., p. 72, vol. ii. See also Murray's own statement to that effect, p. 385, vol. ii.

[11] William Cowper, b. 1731; d. 1800. Life by Hayley, 1804; another, by Southey (regarded as standard), published with edition of his works in 1833-37. A recent life by Thomas Wright, chiefly valuable for its local details.

[12] Lady Austen married some years later a French gentleman, M. de Tardif, and died in Paris in 1802. She may be counted almost joint-author (with Cowper) of The Task.

[13] P. 325, Life, etc., by Thomas Wright, London, 1892.

[14] William Hayley, b. 1745; d. 1820. Life of Cowper, 1803.