I have seldom left it, and except when I attended my brother in his last illness, never I believe a fortnight together.

Adieu, my beloved cousin, I shall not always be thus nimble in reply, but shall always have great pleasure in answering you when I can. Yours, my dear friend and cousin, W. C.

In her second letter Lady Hesketh inquired into the state of his income, apprehending that it must needs be a straitened one, and offering him such assistance as she was able to afford. He replied thus:

MY DEAREST COUSIN,

TO LADY HESKETH.

Olney, Nov. 9, 1785. Whose last most affectionate letter has run in my head ever since I received it, and which I now sit down to answer two days sooner than the post will serve me; I thank you for it, and with a warmth for which I am sure you will give me credit, though I do not spend many words in describing it. I do not seek new friends, not being altogether sure that I should find them, but have unspeakable pleasure in being still beloved by an old one. I hope that now our correspondence has suffered its last interruption, and that we shall go down together to the grave, chatting and chirping as merrily as such a scene of things as this will permit.

I am happy that my poems have pleased you. My volume has afforded me no such pleasure at any time, either while I was writing it, or since its publication, as I have derived from yours and my uncle's opinion of it. I make certain allowances for partiality, and for that peculiar quickness of taste, with which you both relish what you like, and after all drawbacks upon those accounts duly made, find myself rich in the measure of your approbation that still remains. But above all, I honour John Gilpin, since it was he who first encouraged you to write. I made him on purpose to laugh at, and he served his purpose well; but I am now in debt to him for a more valuable acquisition than all the laughter in the world amounts to, the recovery of my intercourse with you, which is to me inestimable. My benevolent and generous cousin, when I was once asked if I wanted any thing, and given delicately to understand that the inquirer was ready to supply all my occasions, I thankfully and civilly, but positively, declined the favour. I neither sufS. C.-1.

U

fer, nor have suffered, any such inconveniences as I had not much rather endure than come under obligations of that sort to a person comparatively with yourself a stranger to me.

But

to you I answer otherwise. I know you thoroughly, and the

liberality of your disposition, and have that consummate confidence in the sincerity of your wish to serve me, that delivers me from all awkward constraint, and from all fear of trespassing by acceptance. To you, therefore, I reply, yes. Whensoever, and whatsoever, and in what manner-soever you please; and add moreover, that my affection for the giver is such as will increase to me tenfold the satisfaction that I shall have in receiving. It is necessary, however, that I should let you a little into the state of my finances, that you may not suppose them more narrowly circumscribed than they are. Since Mrs. Unwin and I have lived at Olney, we have had but one purse, although during the whole of that time, till lately, her income was nearly double mine. Her revenues indeed are now in some measure reduced, and do not much exceed my own; the worst consequence of this is, that we are forced to deny ourselves some things which hitherto we have been better able to afford, but they are such things as neither life, nor the wellbeing of life, depend upon. My own income has been better than it is, but when it was best, it would not have enabled me to live as my connexions demanded that I should, had it not been combined with a better than itself, at least at this end of the kingdom. Of this I had full proof during three months that I spent in lodgings at Huntingdon, in which time by the help of good management, and a clear notion of economical matters, I contrived to spend the income of a twelvemonth. Now, my beloved cousin, you are in possession of the whole case as it stands. Strain no points to your own inconvenience or hurt, for there is no need of it, but indulge yourself in communicating (no matter what) that you can spare without missing it, since by so doing you will be sure to add to the comforts of my life one of the sweetest that I can enjoy—a token and proof of your affection.

:

I cannot believe but that I should know you, notwithstanding all that time may have done there is not a feature of your face, could I meet it upon the road, by itself, that I should not instantly recollect. I should say, that is my cousin's nose, or those are her lips and her chin, and no woman

upon earth can claim them but herself. As for me, I am a very smart youth of my years; I am not indeed grown gray so much as I am grown bald. No matter: there was more hair in the world than ever had the honour to belong to me; accordingly having found just enough to curl a little at my ears, and to intermix with a little of my own, that still hangs behind, I appear, if you see me in an afternoon, to have a very decent head-dress, not easily distinguished from my natural growth, which being worn with a small bag, and a black riband about my neck, continues to me the charms of my youth, even on the verge of age. Away with the fear of writing too often! W. C.

P. S. That the view I give you of myself may be complete, I add the two following items-That I am in debt to nobody, and that I grow fat.

The happiest state of Cowper's life commenced when the intercourse with this beloved cousin was thus renewed. He compared himself, in the effect produced upon him, to the traveller described in Pope's Messiah 24, who, as he passes through a sandy desert, starts at the sudden and unexpected sound of a waterfall. And the same volume which was the occasion of restoring to him this blessing, at once placed him at the head of the poets of his age.

CHAPTER XII.

SKETCHES OF THE PROGRESS OF ENGLISH POETRY FROM

CHAUCER TO COWPER.

WHEN Dr. Burney, the elder, visited Ferney, in his travels,
Voltaire inquired of him what poets we then had in England?
and was answered, "We have Mason and Gray." They
write but little," he replied, "and you seem to have no one
who lords it over the rest like Dryden, Pope, and Swift."
told him," says Burney, "it was perhaps one of the incon-
veniences of periodical journals, however well executed, that
they often silenced modest men of genius, while impudent

24 The swain in barren deserts with surprise
Sees lilies spring, and sudden verdure rise,
And starts amidst the thirsty wilds to hear
New falls of water murmuring in his ear.

"I

blockheads were impenetrable, and unable to feel the critic's scourge; that Mr. Gray and Mr. Mason had both been illiberally treated by mechanical critics, even in newspapers; and that modesty and love of quiet seemed in these gentlemen to have got the better even of their love of fame1."

Voltaire, who lorded it himself over the literature of his own country, was but superficially acquainted with that of any other. Dryden may rather be said to have at one time deserved the supremacy, than ever by general consent to have possessed it; and it was not by his poetry that Swift attained the high station which he must ever hold among English writers. Pope was our first and only dictator. In specifying Gray and Mason as the most eminent of the then living poets, Dr. Burney spake the just opinion of his contemporaries; but in ascribing so much power to periodical criticism, he was wrong both in the general remark, and in the particular application. Such criticism may do, and has done, much in assisting to corrupt the public taste; but the fear of it never withheld any poet from publishing; nor has its most determined enmity ever succeeded in crushing a poem that deserved to live, nor for any length of time in preventing it from making its

way.

When that visit was paid at Ferney, by a good man to the apostle of licentiousness and impiety, Gray was planning and preparing for great works both in prose and verse; and Mason, in the enjoyment of fair preferment properly bestowed, was amusing himself with anonymous satires, and proceeding leisurely with his didactic and later dramatic works. Before Cowper appeared in the field Gray was dead, and Mason seemed to have retired from it. At any time the Task must have been successful, but at no time could the circumstances have been more favourable for its reception. For the revival of that true English taste, which this poem mainly contributed to promote, had already been begun.

The revolution in our fine literature, which took place upon the Restoration, was as great as the political revolutions which preceded, and in their consequences produced it. There is no other example of so sudden a degradation, nor any of so great a one except where it has coincided with the decay and downfall of a state. It was most apparent in the drama, a high 1 Present State of Music in France and Italy, 1771.

department wherein the English had far excelled all modern nations. The last of that school of dramatists, to whom, far inferior as all, and especially the latter ones, were to their mighty master, no other language has produced any that are either like, or comparable, lived to see a French school introduced in the country of Shakespeare; rhymed tragedies became the fashion of the age; and, which, is the worst system of depravation, men of great and indubitable genius took the lead in this and other perversions of the national taste. The blank verse of our old plays is so perfectly in accord with the genius of our language, and so excellently adapted to its purpose, that no greater proof of degenerated taste has ever been given than in this attempt to supersede it by a fashion imported from France, with the French accompaniments of frippery, tinsel, and false sentiment.

During the great rebellion, when the theatres were closed and plays were contraband, such portions of old stock pieces as were most likely to please the populace were exhibited under the appellation of Drolls, in taverns, in booths at fairs, or on mountebank stages. Yet it was not so derogatory to Shakespeare that the humours of Bottom the Weaver should thus be vulgarized, as that his noblest works should be accommodated to the temper of the times, not alone by authors who, whatever reputation they enjoyed, were botchers at the best, but by men who, when they committed this sacrilege, could not but be conscious that it was sacrilege they were committing. Shadwell boasted that he had made Timon of Athens into a play; the execution was worthy of the attempt, and the attempt was worthy of Shadwell, whose bust in Westminster Abbey ought to have been cast either in lead or in brass, or in an emblematic amalgama of the two metals. Nahum Tate, who of all my predecessors must have ranked lowest of the

2 "When the publique theatres were shut up, and the actors forbidden to present us with any of their tragedies because we had enough of that in earnest, and comedies, because the vices of the age were too lively and smartly represented, then all that we could divert ourselves with were these humours, and pieces of plays, which passing under the name of a merry conceited fellow, called Bottom the Weaver, Simpleton the Smith, John Swabbler, or some such title, were only allowed us, and that but by stealth, and under pretence of rope-dancing, or the like." Francis Kirkman's Preface to the Wits, or Sport upon Sport, being a curious collection of several Drolls and Farces, &c. 1673.