The translations, in blank verse, of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" could not displace those of Pope, who, in Cowper's opinion, had done all that could be done in rhyme. Blank verse, especially that of Cowper, cannot convey, as Pope does, the sense of the speed of the great epic; nor was Cowper's scholarship exempt from curious errors. He was overworked; Mrs. Unwin fell into the condition described in "To Mary," his terrible melancholy returned, but his last original verses, "The Cast-away" (1798), are penned by no "maniac's hand," nor can a poet have written them without pleasure in his own genius. Cowper died in 1800.
His letters are reckoned among the best in our language, and their delightful wit and gaiety fortunately assure us that there was much happiness in a life so blameless.
Literature in Scotland (1550-1790).
Before approaching the great northern contemporary of Cowper, Robert Burns, it is necessary to cast a backward glance at his predecessors in Scottish letters. We left them in the reign of James V, when Sir David Lyndsay was the reigning poet of the Court and of the people. It is not easy to fit some remarks on Scottish literature after Sir David Lyndsay into a chronological sequence parallel with the development of literature in England. The Scottish writers under James VI and I produced no effect on their English contemporaries: the King's "Reulis and Cautelis" in poetical criticism, and his "Basilikon Doron," a treatise on king-craft, with his "Counterblast to Tobacco," and his "Demonology" are the work of a clever general writer, but now only interest the curious. Alexander Scott and Alexander Montgomery continued to practise in Scots, the style of Dunbar, though Scott shone most in love lyrics, often musical, while Montgomery survives in an allegory of the old sort, "The Cherry and the Slae"; and an old-fashioned "flyting". Sir Robert Ayton (1570-1638) lived in London with the wits of the time, and, like the Earl of Stirling (died in 1640) and William Drummond of Hawthornden, deserted for English the Scots vernacular. The most distinguished of these poets William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649) entertained Ben Jonson at his beautiful house, and has left brief notes of Ben's rather crabbed criticisms of his great contemporaries. In the previous year, when James, "with a salmonlike instinct" (1617) revisited his native country, Drummond celebrated the event in "Forth Feasting," a panegyric in fairly regular rhymed heroic couplets. Some of his sonnets have charm and are not forgotten; but the times darkened, and Drummond (who showed common sense and public spirit when Charles I unjustly persecuted Lord Balmerino (1633), advising the King to read George Buchanan's book on the Royal power in Scotland), was unlikely to find an audience for his learned verse during the subsequent troubles. His "Cypress Grove," a meditation in prose on death, is poetic in phrasing and cadences, while the periods are not over-long and over burdened. But the brief years in which Scottish wits might have learned many lessons from the great contemporary literature of England soon went by; and Scottish writers for nearly a century were confined to wranglings over theology and sermons, and to bitter tracts and pamphlets, valuable to the historical but not to the literary student.
The great Marquis of Montrose is credited with one charming Cavalier lyric, "My dear and only love, I pray," and with verses sincere but rugged and full of conceits on his own death and his King's, but he "tuned his elegies to trumpet sounds". The favourite measure of Burns was kept alive by Sempill of Beltrees, in his vernacular elegy over a piper,
On bagpipes now no body blaws
Sen Habbie's dead.
The translation of Rabelais (1653) by the learned, militant, and eccentric Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty (1611?-1660) is an imperishable monument of the author's amazing wealth of strange vocabularies, and vigour of appropriate style. The task of making Rabelais talk in English seemed little fit for a Scottish Cavalier who fought at Worcester, but Urquhart, aided by Rabelais, won a kind of immortality by his success. His translation is final and decisive; in which it stands alone. Of the preachers and controversialists, bitter or humorous, there is no space to speak, but the saintly character and gentle eloquence of Archbishop Leighton (1611-1684) live in his Commentary on the First Epistle of St. Peter and his other expository writings. The historical works of Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), Bishop of Salisbury, are English, except in their occasional Scotticisms, as much of his life was spent in England. He had seen much of the inner wheels and springs of politics, was fond of talking of himself and of his part in great affairs, and, like Leighton, represents the Scottish divine, politician, and author, who has been Anglicized out of the Presbyterian precision and acerbity, and is as English as he can make himself.
His very conceit, and his almost incredible want of tact, make this "Scotch dog," as Swift loves to call him, a most entertaining gossip. His "History of My Own Times" was judiciously kept from publication till after his death. Burnet cannot be relied on as a safe authority either in what he insinuates most basely, against William III, or states, without an atom of corroboration, against James II. In the latter case, however, Macaulay has accepted and given circulation to Burnet's narrative.
By far the greatest man of letters of the Restoration, north of Tweed, is "that noble wit of Scotland," in Dryden's phrase, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh (1636?-1691). Beginning with a "heroic romance," "Aretina," influenced by Sidney's "Arcadia" (1660), and the French school of heroic romances, and with verses, in which he did not shine, Mackenzie, in the "Religio Stoici" (1663) shows that he, like R. L. Stevenson, has been "the sedulous ape" of Sir Thomas Browne. He has many admirably harmonious sentences, a very lively wit, and a becomingly pensive air of disenchantment. "The scuffle of drunken men in the dark," the bloodshed and bitterness of the wars of the Covenant, have saddened him, and left him an enthusiast for Montrose,
At once his country's glory and her shame.