The overlapping of styles in poetry and of tastes in poetry is pleasantly illustrated in the case of Cowper. He was born in 1731, Scott was born in 1771, and in Miss Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" we find the sensible Marianne Dashwood hesitating between the rival charms of Cowper and Scott; Byron, it appears, had not yet reached her fair hands. Cowper is a bridge between Thomson and Wordsworth. He was averse to the Popeian couplet; in his translation of Homer he preferred a blank verse which, at best, is not rapid. In writing of Nature he "had his eye on the object". His exit from the triumphant common sense of the eighteenth century was by way of spiritual religion, the Evangelical Revival promoted by Wesley, Whitefield, and their followers. They made appeal to the souls, not to the passions, of the populace; and Cowper's own sympathy with their bodies, with their poverty, like his love of retirement, and of newspapers, makes him akin to Wordsworth.
Born of the powerful Whig family of Cowper, the poet was the son of the rector of Great Berkhampstead; his mother, whom he lost when he was 6 years of age, yet ever remembered daily with intense affection, was of the name and lineage of Donne. He was cruelly bullied in childhood at a preparatory school. The innate savagery of boys of fifteen sometimes wreaks itself on a single small child, and we might think that his sufferings had their share in depressing the spirits of Cowper, did he not tell us that, at his public school, Westminster, he was eminent in cricket, which Horace Walpole and Gray despised at Eton. His master, "Vinny" Bourne, a Latin poet, was dear to him; he made many clever and lively friends, and, despite his attack on public schools in "Tirocinium" (1784), he seems to have been reasonably happy at Westminster, though he learned no more in one way than to write "lady's Greek without the accents
"Tirocinium" is a vigorous satire in Pope's metre. But Cowper, despite the vices and brutalities of school life, confesses his affection for the old place. The clergy at large come under Cowper's birch,
The parson knows enough who knows a Duke!
Behold your Bishop I well he plays his part,
Christian in name and infidel in heart.
In denouncing emulation for prizes, Cowper hit a blot that seems to have vanished, for anything like ungenerous emulation of this kind appears to be a lost vice. No boy studies
Less for improvement than to tickle spite.
Macaulay's victims, Warren Hastings and Elijah Impey, were at school with Cowper. He went to no University, but was articled to a solicitor; and idly "giggled and made giggle" with his cousins, Theodora and Harriet. He was in love with Theodora, but was disappointed, Harriet (Lady Hesketh) was one of his best friends. At the age of 32 (1763) hypochondria or hysteria shattered' his life; in a private asylum he was suddenly converted, and recovered, and religion was henceforth, now his joy and happiness, now, when the black cloud came over him, the cause of his despair. At Huntingdon, and later, at the uninviting village of Olney, he lived retired, the friend of Mrs. Unwin ("My Mary") and of a clerical ex-slave-trader, the Rev. John Newton. With Newton, Cowper wrote hymns, the ladies encouraged him to occupy himself with moral poems, "Table Talk," "Truth," "The Progress of Error," "Retirement," "Charity," "Hope," all in the metre of Pope; and all more or less satirical. Kings, in "Table Talk," are the first to suffer: one of the speakers in the dialogue is rather revolutionary. Indeed the mild tea-drinking Cowper, with his denunciations of "the great," the clergy, and the unthinking squires, preludes to the French Revolution, which he took very calmly. After politics comes talk of poetry: and the well-known lines on Pope occur; he
Made poetry a mere mechanic art,
And every warbler has his tune by heart.
Of poets in his own age Cowper prefers the reckless satirist, Churchill; of Gray and Collins nothing is said. In "The Progress of Error" the much-enduring Nimrod is attacked, in company with the well-graced popular preacher; and novelists are assailed as "flesh-flies of the land," while men who study art in Italy come home worse dunces than they went, and finally the deist and atheist are publicly birched.
It is not for his satires that Cowper is remembered: they were suggested to him, in the interests of religion and morals, by Mrs. Unwin, while Lady Austen, a lively person of quality, appointed to Cowper "The Task," or rather gave him the subject of "The Sofa," out of which grew "The Task". The poet ambles, in an essay in blank verse, as much at his ease and as fond of digressions as Montaigne, from the days when man squatted on the ground, to his invention of a three-legged stool, the addition of a fourth leg, cushions, arm-chairs, the settee, finally the sofa. The sofa pleases the gouty; never may the poet have gout; he has done nothing to deserve it; in boyhood he