TO SAMUEL ROSE, ESQ.
Weston, August 8, 1789.
My dear Friend,—Come when you will, or when you can, you cannot come at a wrong time; but we shall expect you on the day mentioned.
If you have any book that you think will make pleasant evening reading, bring it with you. I now read Mrs. Piozzi's[491] Travels to the ladies after supper, and shall probably have finished them before we shall have the pleasure of seeing you. It is the fashion, I understand, to condemn them. But we, who make books ourselves, are more merciful to book-makers. I would that every fastidious judge of authors were himself obliged to write: there goes more to the composition of a volume than many critics imagine.[492] I have often wondered that the same poet who wrote the "Dunciad," should have written these lines,
The mercy I to others show,
That mercy show to me.
Alas! for Pope, if the mercy he showed to others, was the measure of mercy he received! He was the less pardonable too, because experienced in all the difficulties of composition.
I scratch this between dinner and tea: a time when I cannot write much without disordering my noddle and bringing a flush into my face. You will excuse me therefore, if, through respect for the two important considerations of health and beauty, I conclude myself.
Ever yours,
W. C.
TO JOSEPH HILL, ESQ.[493]
August 12, 1789.
My dear Friend,—I rejoice that you and Mrs. Hill are so agreeably occupied in your retreat.[494] August, I hope, will make us amends for the gloom of its many wintry predecessors. We are now gathering from our meadows, not hay, but muck; such stuff as deserves not the carriage, which yet it must have, that the after-crop may have leave to grow. The Ouse has hardly deigned to run in his channel since the summer began.
My Muse were a vixen if she were not always ready to fly in obedience to your commands. But what can be done? I can write nothing in the few hours that remain to me of this day that will be fit for your purpose, and unless I could despatch what I write by to-morrow's post, it would not reach you in time. I must add, too, that my friend, the vicar of the next parish,[495] engaged me, the day before yesterday, to furnish him by next Sunday with a hymn, to be sung on the occasion of his preaching to the children of the Sunday-school:[496] of which hymn I have not yet produced a syllable. I am somewhat in the case of lawyer Dowling, in "Tom Jones;" and, could I split myself into as many poets as there are muses, could find employment for them all.
Adieu, my dear friend.
I am ever yours,
W. C.
TO THE REV. JOHN NEWTON.[497]
August 16, 1789.
My dear Friend,—Mrs. Newton and you are both kind and just in believing that I do not love you less when I am long silent. Perhaps a friend of mine, who wishes me to have him always in my thoughts, is never so effectually possessed of the accomplishment of that wish as when I have been long his debtor; for then I think of him not only every day, but day and night, and all day long. But I confess at the same time that my thoughts of you will be more pleasant to myself when I shall have exonerated my conscience by giving you the letter so long your due. Therefore, here it comes: little worth your having, but payment, such as it is, that you have a right to expect, and that is essential to my own tranquillity.
That the Iliad and the Odyssey should have proved the occasion of my suspending my correspondence with you, is a proof how little we foresee the consequences of what we publish. Homer, I dare say, hardly at all suspected that at the fag-end of time two personages would appear, the one ycleped Sir Newton and the other Sir Cowper, who, loving each other heartily, would nevertheless suffer the pains of an interrupted intercourse, his poems the cause. So, however, it has happened; and though it would not, I suppose, extort from the old bard a single sigh, if he knew it, yet to me it suggests the serious reflection above-mentioned. An author by profession had need narrowly to watch his pen, lest a line should escape it which by possibility may do mischief, when he has been long dead and buried. What we have done, when we have written a book, will never be known till the day of judgment: then the account will be liquidated, and all the good that it has occasioned, and all the evil, will witness either for or against us.
I am now in the last book of the Odyssey, yet have still, I suppose, half a year's work before me. The accurate revisal of two such voluminous poems can hardly cost me less. I rejoice, however, that the goal is in prospect; for, though it has cost me years to run this race, it is only now that I begin to have a glimpse of it. That I shall never receive any proportionable pecuniary recompence for my long labours is pretty certain; and as to any fame that I may possibly gain by it, that is a commodity that daily sinks in value, in measure as the consummation of all things approaches. In the day when the lion shall dandle the kid, and a little child shall lead them, the world will have lost all relish for the fabulous legends of antiquity, and Homer and his translator may budge off the stage together.
Ever yours,
W. C.
Cowper's remarks on the subject of authors, in the above letter, are truly impressive and demand attention. If it indeed be true, that authors are responsible for their writings, as well as for their personal conduct, (of which we presume there can be no reasonable doubt,) how would the tone of literature be raised, and the pen often be arrested in its course, if this conviction were fully realized to the conscience! Their writings are, in fact, the record of the operations of their minds, and are destined to survive, so far as metallic types and literary talent can ensure durability and success. Nor is it less true that the character of a nation will generally be moulded by the spirit of its authors. Allowing, therefore, the extent of this powerful influence, we can conceive the possibility of authors, at the last great day, undergoing the ordeal of a solemn judicial inquiry, when the subject for investigation will be, how far their writings have enlarged the bounds of useful knowledge, or subserved the cause of piety and truth. If, instead of those great ends being answered, it shall appear that the foundations of religion have been undermined, the cause of virtue weakened, and the heart made more accessible to error; if, too, a dread array of witnesses shall stand forth, tracing the guilt of their lives and the ruin of their hopes to the fatal influence of the books which they had read, what image of horror can equal the sensation of such a moment, save the despair of hearing the irrevocable sentence, "Depart from me, ye workers of iniquity; I never knew you!"