merit which is the main theme of the satires begins to be forgotten in the positive, which is the main theme of the best parts of the "Task." The change may not seem a great one: but there is a world of difference between the man who looks with delight on his own things, and the man who looks with censoriousness upon those of others. So it is with pleasure and gratitude to the new inspirer of his Muse that we see Cowper pass from the vigorous opening passage which describes the universal desire for country repose, to the direct invocation of Nature—

"Be thou the great inspirer of my strains."

That one line, even modified as it is by those that precede, contains in it all the promise of Cowper's future. But a bare statement, such as this, of the subjects of the satires certainly does them less than justice. Undoubtedly there is far too much preaching in them; and undoubtedly Cowper fails altogether to understand that the moral quality of good poetry is an invisible though an invariable accident in its nature. "If a poet has as high a soul as Sophocles," said Goethe, "his influence will always be moral, let him do what he will." That is the truth, but it is one of which Cowper knew nothing. He never had anything of the temper of an artist: and he probably died without realizing that the passages in his work which had really moved people in the direction he wished to move them, were just those in which he made no open effort to influence them at all. But it would be a mistake to suppose that there is nothing in "Table Talk" and its companions but dull sermons. There is a good deal of eloquent and vigorous invective; a good deal of humorous satire, plenty of honest Whig politics, with, however, a curious disbelief in the Rockingham and Fox patriots of his day: some passages of literary criticism, some bits of interesting autobiography, and some short, too short, fragments of descriptive landscape. At least one line has had the honour of becoming a hackneyed quotation. Who remembers that it was Cowper who first said of Pope that he

"Made poetry a mere mechanic art,

And every warbler has his tune by heart."

Of his vigorous eloquence at its best I do not know that there is a better specimen than the passage in "Table Talk" about the poet's mission; which begins

"I know the mind that feels indeed the fire

The Muse imparts, and can command the lyre :”

which contains the proud claim

"A terrible sagacity informs

The poet's heart, he looks to distant storms,

He hears the thunder ere the tempest lowers,

And, armed with strength surpassing human powers,
Seizes events as yet unknown to man,

And darts his soul into the dawning plan,"

but immediately repudiates any such pretensions for himself"But no prophetic fires to me belong,

I play with syllables and sport in song."

Of his invective such a passage as the attack on Lord Chesterfield in the "Progress of Error" might serve as an example :—

"Thou polished and high-finished foe to truth,
Grey-beard corrupter of our listening youth;'

or the apostrophe to the press, a little further on :—

"Thou fountain, at which drink the good and wise,
Thou ever-bubbling spring of endless lies."

His purely religious style never appears to better effect than in the beautiful lines in "Charity:

"

"When one, that holds communion with the skies,
Has filled his urn where those pure waters rise,
And once more mingles with us meaner things,
'Tis even as if an Angel shook his wings;
Immortal fragrance fills the circuit wide,
That tells us whence his treasures are supplied.
So when a ship, well freighted with the stores
The sun matures on India's spicy shores,
Has dropped her anchor, and her canvas furled,
In some safe haven of our western world,
'Twere vain enquiry to what port she went,
The gale informs us, laden with the scent."

No obvious debt to Milton can deprive Cowper of the poet's praise for these beautiful verses. The sentiment is peculiarly his own, more tender than Milton was; and if the simile is less original, at least Cowper must have the credit of that delightful line—

"In some safe haven of our western world.”

For his humour, never at all so perfect in his verse as in his letters, I should refer the inquirer to "Conversation." It is no doubt of a somewhat old-maidish quality, and clings rather close to the parlour; but was not Miss Austen an old maid, and is there not high authority for saying that even she never gets out of the parlour? In such company it is allowed to err. But perhaps none

of the deliberate attempts at humour are so successful as the best of the character sketches, such as that of the politician in "Re-/ tirement," which is thrown off with an almost Horatian felicity and good temper; and with the conclusion Horace would have delighted to give it. And Cowper makes it the opportunity of some pretty landscape work, into which his best poetic self goes. The states

man has resigned:-

"'Tis done; he steps into the welcome chaise,
Lolls at his ease behind four handsome bays,
That whirl away from business and debate
The disencumbered Atlas of the State.

Ask not the boy, who, when the breeze of morn
First shakes the glittering drops from every thorn,
Unfolds his flock, then under bank or bush
Sits linking cherry-stones, or platting rush,
How fair is freedom? he was always free.
To carve his rustic name upon a tree,
To snare the mole, or with ill-fashioned hook
To draw the incautious minnow from the brook,
Are life's prime pleasures in his simple view,
His flock the chief concern he ever knew ;"

but rather, he continues, ask the statesman to whom freedom and nature are alike untasted pleasures,—

"Her hedge-row shrubs, a variegated store,

With woodbine and wild roses mantled o'er,

Green balks and furrowed lands, the stream that spreads

Its cooling vapour o'er the dewy meads,

Downs that almost escape the enquiring eye,

That melt and fade into the distant sky,
Beauties he lately slighted as he passed,

Seem all created since he travelled last.”

Such plain diet, however, as trees and flowers soon proves insipid to one whose palate has been spoilt by power and "the town;

"He sighs,-for, after all, by slow degrees,

The spot he loved has lost the power to please.
To cross his ambling pony day by day
Seems at the best but dreaming life away;
The prospect, such as might enchant despair,
He views it not, or sees no beauty there;
With aching heart and discontented looks
Returns at noon to billiards or to books,
But feels, while grasping at his faded joys,
A secret thirst of his renounced employs.

He chides the tardiness of every post,
Pants to be told of battles won or lost,
Blames his own indolence, observes, though late,
'Tis criminal to leave a sinking state,
Flies to the levée, and, received with grace,

Kneels, kisses hands, and shines again in place."

The business of the satirist is the making of verses, hardly of poetry; and if Cowper had never got beyond these pieces, few would occupy themselves with him or his work to-day. Nor has he any claim to the highest rank in this field. The perfection of its lighter and kindlier sort asks an experience of life he did not possess, and the Juvenalian kind demands an angry energy of soul quite alien to his ease and good nature. (To the fiery quality of mind which in Dryden gave to personal invective a touch of the sublime, he had no pretension; of the unresting malignity of Pope, slowly shaping in the dark his flashing jewels of slander, Cowper's generosity of heart, if there had been nothing else, would have made him incapable. Pope and he were indeed, in every respect, alien natures. No one could write heroic couplets in that day without having Pope's brilliancy in view; but Cowper, the very opposite of Pope, not only in temper, in life and habits, in religious conviction, in mental power, but in literary taste as well, took his own road as he found it, more anxious about what he was saying, for which Pope cared little, than about how he was saying it, for which Pope cared everything One would have expected him to show some trace of the influence of Prior, of whose "easy jingle" he has recorded his liking; but Prior was a successful worldling and Cowper an obscure recluse: or of Young, whose ostensible object was just Cowper's own, to call the world to seriousness and in this life to suggest the next; but Young was a rhetorical Deist and Cowper a simple-minded and single-hearted Christian. Strangely enough, the man he does most resemble as a satirist is perhaps the most unlike him of them all. In his satires, as everywhere, Cowper is the most domestic of our poets, but the comparison of a very few pages will convince any one that his style bears a close resemblance to the schoolfellow whom he so much admired, the very undomestic Churchill. It is only a parallel of style, of course: with Churchill's coarseness and violence Cowper could have nothing to do. But style has subtle influences, and it is just possible that the evidently close and exact, even if unconscious, recollection of Churchill's pieces which remained in Cowper's mind, may have led him, without his knowing it, into a straining after invective and denunciation quite alien to his real nature. The pity is that he did not keep to the lighter manner. No doubt his circumstances

would in any case have limited his range; but no one can tell a story with finer humour than he shows in his letters, and one is

apt to fancy sometimes that, if he had had some good genius to put him in the right path, he might have anticipated some of Crabbe's triumphs in verse or even some of Jane Austen's in prose.

The volume of 1782 was completed by some five and twenty short pieces. The majority are of no importance, and many issue from that phase of Cowper's goodness of heart, where it is only mildness, and does not rise to the delicate sweetness which is its charm and distinction elsewhere. Some are fables conveying rather obvious "lessons to mankind;" one is a Christian reflection on Horace; some are very small jokes, like the "Nose and the Spectacles," and several are mere translations. But there are six or eight things of real interest. The lines which begin, "Sweet stream that winds through yonder glade" are a humble anticipation of the manner which Wordsworth afterwards used to such wonderful effect. "A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye" is only the work of a more concentrated imagination. One may note also that in one of the translations from Vincent Bourne, that of "The Cricket," there is a stanza which good judges might take for Wordsworth

"Though in voice and shape they be
Formed as if akin to thee,
Thou surpassest, happier far,
Happiest grasshoppers that are;
Theirs is but a summer song,
Thine endures the winter long
Unimpaired and shrill and clear,
Melody throughout the year."

Among the other interesting things there are the famous stanzas put into the mouth of Alexander Selkirk : there is the "Shrubbery," a voice of accepted and uncomplaining agony brought from the depth of his despair, too small and quiet to tell all its tale at once, but more moving each time we return to it: there is the pleasing Invitation into the Country," addressed to Newton, which looks back to Milton and Horace, and forward to Tennyson: there is the great "Boadicea" Ode, the strongest thing the poet has yet done, reminding us of one of Horace's sterner and nobler political Odes. With the "Shrubbery" it is the promise and proof of the lyrical gift, which was afterwards to produce splendid fruit, but not the half of what it might have given us if its owner had realized and valued it more. One other curious thing there is to notice. Except in the actually inspired moments, he is, at this time, as much a poet in Latin as in his own language. Only the best of the English pieces here can equal either the beauty or the sincerity of the exquisite Latin lines, "O matutini rores, auræque salubres : his love of rural peace and retirement seldom found finer expression.