The Works of William Cowper / His life, letters, and poems, now first completed by the introduction of Cowper's private correspondence

by William Cowper

The Test Act is now repealed.

[526] Private correspondence.

[527] A common provincialism in Buckinghamshire, probably a corruption of uncouth.

[528] Mrs. Carter.

[529] Longinus compares the Odyssey to the setting sun, and the Iliad, as more characteristic of the loftiness of Homer's genius, to the splendour of the rising sun.

[530] No man ever possessed a happier exemption, throughout life, from such a title.

[531] The poem on Audley End, alluded to in a former letter to Lady Hesketh.

[532] Cowper is often very sarcastic upon the clergy. We trust that these censures are not so merited in these times of reviving piety.

[533] We subjoin the lines to which Cowper refers:—

"To wear out time in numb'ring to and fro
The studs, that thick emboss his iron door;
Then downward and then upward, then aslant
And then alternate; with a sickly hope
By dint of change to give his tasteless task
Some relish; till the sum, exactly found
In all directions, he begins again."