cloud passed away, and he retired to a small country town where his brother resided.

Newton and the Unwins.- While living with his brother he formed an intimacy with the clergyman of the place, Rev. Mr. Unwin, and finally became an inmate of the family. After the death of Mr. Unwin, his widow, Mary Unwin, continued to watch over Cowper with a friendship that never faltered. The family removed, however, to Olney, the residence of the Rev Mr. Newton; and from that time John Newton and Mary Unwin are the main figures in the canvas which contains the pictures of Cowper's life. Here he contributed some Hymns to the volume which Mr. Newton was preparing. His morbid melancholy again returned, and he became once more entirely insane.

On recovering from this second attack, Cowper amused himself with gardening, drawing, rearing hares, and writing poetry. A volume of his poems was published in 1782, but it attracted little attention and had small sales. It brought him pleasant words, however, from his friends and competent critics, and he began to resume his wonted cheerfulness.

Lady Austen - At this time, Lady Austen, a widow, became one of the frequent guests of the household, and it was at her suggestion that Cowper wrote the inimitable poem of John Gilpin, she having given him the outline of the story. The effect of this poem was electrical, not only upon the public, but upon the author. At Lady Austen's suggestion Cowper next tried his hand at blank verse, the result being The Task, the subject as before being assigned by this most wise and judicious adviser. The Task was immediately and universally popular. It opened an altogether new field in English letters. In another poem, Tirocinium, he gave utterance to his opinion of the scandalous practices in the public schools of England. This was followed by no less an undertaking than a new Translation of Homer, which he completed in 1791, after seven years of continued labor.

The Closing Scene.— After this a deepening gloom began to settle on his mind, with occasional bright intervals. His life-long friend, Mary Unwin, died in 1796. "The unhappy poet would not believe that she was actually dead; he went to see the body, and on witnessing the unaltered placidity of death, flung himself to the other side of the room with a passionate expression of feeling, and from that time he never mentioned her name, or spoke of her again." Cowper lingered on for three years or more, when death came at last to his release.

"So sad and strange a destiny has never before or since been that of a man of genius. With wit and humor at will, he was nearly all his life plunged in the darkest melancholy. Innocent, pious, and confiding, he lived in perpetual dread of everlasting punishment: he could only see between him and heaven a high wall, which he despaired of ever being able to scale; yet his intellectual vigor was not subdued by affliction What he wrote for amusement or relief, in the midst of supreme distress,' surpasses the elaborate efforts of others made under the most favorable circumstances; and in the very winter of his days, his fancy was as fresh and blooming as in the spring and morning of existence. That he was constitutionally prone to melancholy and insanity, seems undoubted; but as surely the predisposing causes were aggravated by his strict and secluded mode of life.”— Chambers,

Newton.

REV. JOHN NEWTON, 1725–1807, is indissolubly associated with the history and the writings of Cowper.

Newton was a native of London. He went to sea at the age of eleven; was engaged for some years in the slave-trade, experienced a religious conversion of an extraordinary character, and became afterwards a very zealous preacher. He was for seventeen years curate of the church at Olney, and he is chiefly known by his connection with that church. The Olney Hymns, selected and partly composed by Newton, Cowper, and James Montgomery, are well known, and form a marked feature in the history of English hymnody. Newton's writings are of the extreme evangelical type, and are noted for the rich vein of experimental religion that runs through them. They have been printed in 6 vols., 8vo. The following are some of them: Cardiphonia; Letters to a Wife; Omicron Letters; Sermons, etc. Newton exercised a powerful influence on the mind of Cowper, who was for many years one of his parishioners.

ERASMUS DARWIN, 1731-1802, attracted considerable attention both as a poet and a naturalist.

Darwin was a physician by profession, and was educated at Cambridge. He wrote in a pleasing style, and the novelty and daring of some of his speculations caused his works to be a good deal read. The errors in his theories, however, were exposed by Dugald Stewart, Thomas Brown, and other metaphysicians, and his writings gradually subsided into comparative oblivion. Works: The Botanic Garden, a Poem, in two parts, Economy of Vegetation, and the Loves of Plants; The Temple of Nature, a Poem, with Philosophical Notes; Zoonomia, or The Laws of Organic Life; Phytologia, or The Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening, etc.

Beattie.

JAMES BEATTIE, D. C. L., 1735-1803, Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic in Marischal College, Aberdeen, was a friend and contemporary of Johnson, Goldsmith, Reynolds, Garrick, and others of that class. He is well known as a poet and as a writer on moral and metaphysical subjects.

Beattie's most popular work is The Minstrel, a poem in the Spenserian stanza. Of his prose works, the chief are: Essay on Truth, intended as a reply to Hume; Evidences of the Christian Religion; Elements of Moral Science. The Essay on Truth met with great and immediate favor. It brought him the offer of the chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, which, however, he declined. It gained him also the acquaintance and intimacy of the most distinguished writers of the day, and a substantial token of royal favor in the shape of a pension of £200 per annum. Dr. Beattie gives the following account of his interview with King George III. and the Queen: "They both complimented me in the highest terms on my Essay, which they said was a book they always kept by them; and the King said he had one copy of it at Kew, and another in town, and he immediately went and took it down from the shelf. I never stole a book but once,' said his Majesty, and that was yours. I stole it from the Queen, to give it to Lord Hertford to read.' He had heard that the sale of Hume's Essays had failed since my book was published; and I told him what Mr. Strahan had told me in regard to that matter."

Johnson was a great admirer of Beattie. Bishop Warburton pronounced him "superior to the whole crew of Scotch metaphysicians." Cowper praises him in unmeasured terms. The present current of opinion in regard to his merits is at a much lower

level. The Edinburgh Review speaks of him almost with contempt. "Every one has not the capacity of writing philosophically; but every one may be at least temperate and candid; and Dr. Beattie's work is still more remarkable for being abusive and acrimonious, than for its defects in argument and originality.” — Edinburgh Review.

"Beattie, the most agreeable and amiable writer I ever met with, the only author I have seen whose critical and philosophical researches are diversified and embellished by a poetical imagination, that makes even the driest subject and the leanest a feast for an epicure in books. He is so much at his ease, too, that his own character appears in every page, and which is very rare, we see not only the writer, but the man; and the man so gentle, so well-tempered, so happy in his religion, and so humane in his philosophy, that it is necessary to love him if one has any sense of what is lovely." - Cowper.

The truth lies probably between these two extreme verdicts. A present estimate of Beattie's poetical merits is thus expressed: "The Minstrel is an harmonious and eloquent composition, glowing with poetical sentiment; but its inferiority in the highest poetical qualities may be felt by comparing it with Thomson's Castle of Indolence, which is perhaps the other work in the language which it most nearly resembles, but which yet it resembles much in the same way as gilding does solid gold, or as colored water might be made to resemble wine." — Craik,

THOMAS BLACKLOCK, D. D., 1721-1791, was a poet and divine whose history borders upon the romantic. He was of poor parents, and he lost his sight by small-pox when only six months old; yet by indomitable energy and perseverance he made out to acquire a classical education, became a Doctor of Divinity, and an author of no mean celebrity. His poems were published with a preface by Spence, the Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He published also Paraclesis, or Consolations deduced from Natural and Revealed Religion, and several other works; and he wrote an article, published in the Encyclopædia Britannica, On the Education of the Blind.

Burns.

Robert Burns, 1759-1796, was "by far the greatest poet that ever sprung from the bosom of the people and lived and died in an humble condition." — Wilson.

Career. Burns was a poor ploughboy, with no advantages of education except those afforded by the common country school. His early effusions were circulated at first in manuscript. Finding that they were in demand among his neighbors, he printed a volume of them at an obscure country town, in 1786. His special object in the publication was to get money to enable him to emigrate to Jamaica. The publication yielded him a profit of £20, which seemed a fortune to the young author. He engaged his passage accordingly, sent his chest aboard the yessel, and was just about to set sail, when he received from Dr. Blacklock a letter inviting him to visit Edinburgh. The Doctor had fallen in with a copy of the poems, and encouraged Burns to believe that an edition might be published in the capital.

The poet changed at once his plans, and went to Edinburgh. There his wonderful abilities, in connection with the humbleness of his position, created a great sensation. Dugald Stewart, Robertson the historian, Dr. Hugh Blair, and all that was most aristocratic in either the intellectual or the social circles of that reserved and haughty metropolis, gathered in admiring wonder around this inspired peasant. A new edition of his poems was printed, which brought him at once the handsome sum of £700. He was caressed and fêted on all sides, and being of an ardent temperament, he yielded to the temptation which these social festivities presented. He fell into the habit of drinking to intoxication, from which he never totally recovered, though he made sundry attempts at reform. He died at the early age of thirty-seven.

Reception at Edinburgh.—"It needs no effort of imagination to conceive what the sensations of an isolated set of scholars (almost all either clergymen or professors) must have been in the presence of this big, broad, black-browed, brawny stranger, with his great flashing eyes, who having forced his way among them from the plough-tail, at a single stride, manifested, in the whole strain of his bearing and conversation, a most thorough conviction that in the society of the most eminent men of his nation he was exactly where he was entitled to be: hardly deigned to flatter them by exhibiting even an occasional symptom of being flattered by their notice; by turns calmly measured himself against the most cultivated understandings of his time, in discussion; overpowered the bon-mots of the most brilliant convivialists by broad floods of merriment, impregnated with all the burning life of genius; astounded bosoms habitually enveloped in the thrice-piled folds of social reserve, by compelling them to tremble, nay, to tremble visibly, beneath the fearless tones of natural pathos."- -Lockhart.

Estimate of his Works. —“ All that remains of Burns, the writings he has left, seem to us no more than a poor, mutilated fraction of what was in him; brief broken glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete; that wanted all things for completeness: - culture, leisure, true effect, nay, even length of life. His poems are, with scarcely an exception, mere occasional effusions, poured forth with little premeditation, expressing, by such means as offered, the passion, opinion, or humor of the hour. Never in one instance was it permitted to grapple with any subject with the full collection of his strength, to fuse and mould it in the concentrated fire of his genius." Thomas Carlyle,

Rev. James Grahame, 1765-1811, is favorably known by his poem, The Sabbath.

Grahame was born in Glasgow, and educated at its University. He followed the law for a time, but afterwards entered the ministry of the English Church. He was very acceptable as a preacher, but was obliged to give up his curacy on account of ill health. Ifis poetry is of a very serious cast, and not at all to the taste of such men as Byron, who calls him "sepulchral Grahame.” For all that, he has substan

tial merits and not a few admirers. His best and best known poem is called The Sabbath.

An anecdote is told connected with the publication of his poem which affords an interesting illustration of his character. "He had not prefixed his name to the work, nor acquainted his family with the secret of its composition, and taking a copy of the volume home with him one day, he left it on the table. His wife began reading it, while the sensitive author walked up and down the room; and at length she broke out into praise of the poem, adding, 'Ah, James, if you could but produce a poem like this!' The joyful acknowledgment of his being the author was then made."Chambers.

Grahame's other poems are: Biblical Pictures; Bride of Scotland; British Georgics; Poems on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, etc.

"Grahame in some respects resembles Cowper. He has no humor or satire, it is true, but the same powers of close and happy observation, which the poet of Olney applied to English scenery, were directed by Grahame to that of Scotland, and both were strictly devout and national poets. There is no author, excepting Burns, whom an intelligent Scotsman, resident abroad, would read with more delight than Grahame. The ordinary features of the Scottish landscape he portrays truly and distinctly, without exaggeration, and often imparting to his description a feeling of tenderness and solemnity. He has, however, many poor prosaic lines, and his versification generally wants case and variety. He was content with humble things; but he paints the charms of a retired cottage life, the sacred calm of a Sabbath morning, a walk in the fields, or even a bird's nest, with such unfeigned delight and accurate observation, that the reader is constrained to see and feel with his author, to rejoice in the elements of poetry and meditation that are scattered around him, existing in the humblest objects, and in those humane and pious sentiments which impart to external nature a moral interest and beauty "-Chambers.

RICHARD CUMBERLAND, 1732–1811, was a grandson of Dr. Bentley, and otherwise honorably connected. He was employed by the Government in 1780 on a secret mission to Spain and Portugal, but the mission was unsuccessful and disastrous. He devoted himself afterwards to literary pursuits. His works are numerous, and are of some value, though none of them belonging to the first class. The following are the chief: The Wheel of Fortune, The West Indian, The Jew, and The Fashionable Lover, Comedies; John de Lancaster, Arundel, and Henry, novels; A Version of Fifty Psalms of David; The Exodiad; Calvary, or the Death of Christ; Anecdotes of Spanish Painters in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries; The Observer, a series of Essays like The Spectator, in 5 vols.; lastly, Memoirs, interspersed with anecdotes of the distinguished men of his time. "It is indeed one of the author's most pleasing works, and conveys a very accurate idea of his talents, feelings, and character, with many powerful sketches of the age which has passed away."-Sir Walter Scott.

Peter Pindar.

John Wolcot, 1738-1819, an erratic genius, better known by his pseudonym of Peter Pindar, was a satirical writer of

some note.

Wolcot was educated as a physician, and went to Jamaica to establish himself there. Failing in this profession, he obtained a curacy.