408

COWPER

-INCREASING DEJECTION.

the tender health of him whom she had watched and guarded so long. Imbecility of body and mind must gradually render this tender and heroic woman unfit for the charge which she had so laudably sustained. The signs of such imbecility were beginning to be painfully visible; nor can nature present a spectacle more truly pitiable, than imbecility in such a shape, eagerly grasping for dominion, which it knows not either how to retain, or how to relinquish."-vol. ii. p. 161, 162.

From a part of these evils, however, the poet was relieved, by the generous compassion of Lady Hesketh, who nobly took upon herself the task of superintending this melancholy household. We will not withhold from our readers the encomium she has so well earned from the biographer.

"Those only, who have lived with the superannuated and the melancholy, can properly appreciate the value of such magnanimous friendship; or perfectly apprehend, what personal sufferings it must cost the mortal who exerts it, if that mortal has received from nature a frame of compassionate sensibility. The lady, to whom I allude, has felt but too severely, in her own health, the heavy tax that mortality is forced to pay for a resolute perseverance in such painful duty." vol. ii. p. 177.

It was impossible, however, for any care or attention to arrest the progress of that dreadful depression, by which the faculties of this excellent man were destined to be extinguished. In the beginning of the year 1794, he became utterly incapable of any sort of exertion, and ceased to receive pleasure from the company or conversation of his friends. Neither a visit from Mr. Hayley, nor his Majesty's order for a pension of 300l. a-year, was able to rouse him from that languid and melancholy state into which he had gradually been sinking; and, at length, it was thought necessary to remove him from the village of Weston to Tuddenham in Norfolk, where he could be under the immediate superintendence of his kinsman, the Reverend Mr. Johnson. After a long cessation of all correspondence, he addressed the following very moving lines to the clergyman of the favourite village, to which he was no more to return :

"I will forget, for a moment, that to whomsoever I may address myself, a letter from me can no otherwise be welcome, than as a curiosity. To you, sir, I address this, urged by extreme penury of employment, and the desire I feel to learn something of what is doing, and has been done, at Weston (my beloved Weston!) since I left it?

GRADUAL DECAY AND DEATH.

409

No situation, at least when the weather is clear and bright, can be pleasanter than what we have here; which you will easily credit, when I add, that it imparts something a little resembling pleasure even to me. Gratify me with news of Weston!-If Mr. Gregson and the Courtneys are there, mention me to them in such terms as you see good. Tell me if my poor birds are living! I never see the herbs I used to give them without a recollection of them, and sometimes am ready to gather them, forgetting that I am not at home.— Pardon this intrusion."

In summer 1796, there were some faint glimmerings of returning vigour, and he again applied himself, for some time, to the revisal of his translation of Homer. In December, Mrs. Unwin died; and such was the severe depression under which her companion then laboured, that he seems to have suffered but little on the occasion. He never afterwards mentioned her name! At intervals, in the summer, he continued to work at the revisal of his Homer, which he at length finished in 1799; and afterwards translated some of Gay's Fables into Latin verse, and made English translations of several Greek and Latin Epigrams. This languid exercise of his once-vigorous powers was continued till the month of January 1800, when symptoms of dropsy became visible in his person, and soon assumed a very formidable appearance. After a very rapid but gradual decline, which did not seem to affect the general state of his spirits, he expired, without struggle or agitation, on the 25th of April, 1800.

Of the volumes now before us, we have little more to say. The biography of Cowper naturally terminates with this account of his death; and the posthumous works that are now given to the public, require very few observations. They consist chiefly of short and occasional poems, that do not seem to have been very carefully finished, and will not add much to the reputation of their author. The longest is a sort of ode upon Friendship, in which the language seems to be studiously plain and familiar, and to which Mr. Hayley certainly has not given the highest poetical praise, by saying that it contains the essence of every thing that has been said on the subject, by the best writers of different countries." Some of the occasional songs and sonnets

66

410

COWPER- -YOUTHFUL VERSES BAD.

are good; and the translations from the anthologia, which were the employment of his last melancholy days, have a remarkable closeness and facility of expression. There are two or three little poetical pieces, written by him in the careless days of his youth, while he resided in the Temple, that are, upon the whole, extremely poor and unpromising. It is almost inconceivable, that the author of The Task should ever have been guilty of such verses as the following:

""Tis not with either of these views,

That I presume to address the Muse;
But to divert a fierce banditti,

(Sworn foes to every thing that's witty!)
That, with a black infernal train,
Make cruel inroads in my brain,
And daily threaten to drive thence
My little garrison of sense:

The fierce banditti which I mean,
Are gloomy thoughts, led on by spleen.
Then there's another reason yet,
Which is, that I may fairly quit

The debt which justly became due

The moment when I heard from you:

And you might grumble, crony mine,
If paid in any other coin."

Vol. i.
p. 15.

It is remarkable, however, that his prose was at this time uncommonly easy and elegant. Mr. Hayley has preserved three numbers of the Connoisseur, which were written by him in 1796, and which exhibit a great deal of that point and politeness, which has been aimed at by the best of our periodical essayists since the days of Addison.

The personal character of Cowper is easily estimated, from the writings he has left, and the anecdotes contained in this publication. He seems to have been chiefly remarkable for a certain feminine gentleness, and delicacy of nature, that shrunk back from all that was boisterous, presumptuous, or rude. His secluded life, and awful impressions of religion, concurred in fixing upon his manners something of a saintly purity and decorum, and in cherishing that pensive and contemplative turn of mind, by which he was so much distin

PERSONAL CHARACTER.

411

guished. His temper appears to have been yielding and benevolent; and though sufficiently steady and confident in the opinions he had adopted, he was very little inclined, in general, to force them upon the conviction of others. The warmth of his religious zeal made an occasional exception: but the habitual temper of his mind was toleration and indulgence; and it would be difficult, perhaps, to name a satirical and popular author so entirely free from jealousy and fastidiousness, or so much disposed to make the most liberal and impartial estimate of the merit of others, in literature, in politics, and in the virtues and accomplishments of social life. No angry or uneasy passions, indeed, seem at any time to have found a place in his bosom; and, being incapable of malevolence himself, he probably passed through life, without having once excited that feeling in the breast of another.

As the whole of Cowper's works are now before the public, and as death has finally closed the account of his defects and excellencies, the public voice may soon be expected to proclaim the balance; and to pronounce that impartial and irrevocable sentence which is to assign him his just rank and station in the poetical commonwealth, and to ascertain the value and extent of his future reputation. As the success of his works has, in a great measure, anticipated this sentence, it is the less presumptuous in us to offer our opinion of them.

The great merit of this writer appears to us to consist in the boldness and originality of his composition, and in the fortunate audacity with which he has carried the dominion of poetry into regions that had been considered as inaccessible to her ambition. The gradual refinement of taste had, for nearly a century, been weakening the force of original genius. Our poets had become timid and fastidious, and circumscribed themselves both in the choice and the management of their subjects, by the observance of a limited number of models, who were thought to have exhausted all the legitimate resources of the art. Cowper was one of the first who crossed this enchanted circle; who reclaimed the natural liberty

412 COWPER - THE MODERN LIBERATOR OF OUR POETRY.

of invention, and walked abroad in the open field of observation as freely as those by whom it was originally trodden. He passed from the imitation of poets, to the imitation of nature, and ventured boldly upon the representation of objects that had not been sanctified by the description of any of his predecessors. In the ordinary occupations and duties of domestic life, and the consequences of modern manners, in the common scenery of a rustic situation, and the obvious contemplation of our public institutions, he has found a multitude of subjects for ridicule and reflection, for pathetic and picturesque description, for moral declamation, and devotional rapture, that would have been looked upon with disdain, or with despair, by most of our poetical adventurers. He took as wide a range in language too, as in matter; and, shaking off the tawdry incumbrance of that poetical diction which had nearly reduced the art to the skilful collocation of a set of conventional phrases, he made no scruple to set down in verse every expression that would have been admitted in prose, and to take advantage of all the varieties with which our language could supply him.

But while, by the use of this double licence, he extended the sphere of poetical composition, and communicated a singular character of freedom, force, and originality to his own performances, it must not be dissembled, that the presumption which belongs to most innovators, has betrayed him into many defects. In disdaining to follow the footsteps of others, he has frequently mistaken the way, and has been exasperated, by their blunders, to rush into opposite extremes. In his contempt for their scrupulous selection of topics, he has introduced some that are unquestionably low and uninteresting; and in his zeal to strip off the tinsel and embroidery of their language, he has sometimes torn it (like Jack's coat in the Tale of a Tub) into terrible rents and beggarly tatters. He is a great master of English, and evidently values himself upon his skill and facility in the application of its rich and diversified idioms: but he has indulged himself in this exercise a little too fondly, and has degraded some grave and animated pas