ened his guest back to his hiding-place in the wilderness:

me silva cavusque

Tutus ab insidiis tenui solabitur ervo!

Cowper, in fact, was the first writer to introduce that intimate union of the home affections with the love of country which, in the works of Miss Austen and a host of others, was to become one of the unique charms and consolations of English literature. And the element of austere gloom in his character, rarely exposed, but always, we know, in the background, is what most of all relieves his letters from insipidity. Lamb strove deliberately by a kind of crackling mirth to drown the sound of the grave inner voice; Cowper listened reverently to its admonitions, even to its threatenings; he spoke little of what he heard, but it tempered his wit and the snug comfort of his life with that profounder consciousness of what, disguise it as we will, lies at the bottom of the world's experience. We call him mad because he believed himself abandoned of God, and shuddered with remorseless conviction. Put aside for a moment the language of the market place, and be honest with ourselves: is there not a little of our fate, of the fate of mankind, in Cowper's desolation? After all, was his melancholy radically different from the state of that great Frenchman, a lover of his letters withal, Sainte-Beuve, who dared not for a day rest from

benumbing labour lest the questionings of his own heart should make themselves heard, and who wrote to a friend that no consolation could reach that settled sadness which was rooted in la grande absence de Dieu ?

It is not strange that the society from which Cowper fled should have seemed to him whimsical and a little mad. "A line of Bourne's," he says, "is very expressive of the spectacle which this world exhibits, tragi-comical as the incidents of it are, absurd in themselves, but terrible in their consequences :

Sunt res humanæ flebile ludibrium."

Nor is it strange that he wondered sometimes at the gayety of his own letters: "It is as if Harlequin should intrude himself into the gloomy chamber, where a corpse is deposited in state. His antic gesticulations would be unseasonable, at any rate, but more especially so if they should distort the features of the mournful attendants into laughter." But it is not the humour of the letters that attracts us so much as their picture of quiet home delights in the midst of a stormy world. We linger most over the account of those still evenings by the fireside, while Mrs. Unwin, and perhaps their friend Lady Austen, was busy with her needles

Thy needles, once a shining store,
For my sake restless heretofore,
Now rust disused, and shine no more,
My Mary!-

and while Cowper read aloud from some book of travels and mingled his comments with the story of the wanderer:

My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions that I seem to partake with the navigators in all the dangers they encountered. I lose my anchor; my mainsail is rent into shreds; I kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from the fireside.

And here I cannot but regret again that we have not an edition of these letters interspersed with the passages of The Task, which describe the same scenes. I confess that two-thirds at least of that poem is indeed a task to-day. The long tirades against vice, and the equally long preaching of virtue, all in blank verse, lack, to my ear, the vivacity and the sustaining power of the earlier rhymed poems, such as Hope (that superb moralising on the poet's own life) and Retirement, to name the best of the series. But the fourth book of The Task, and, indeed, all the exquisite genre pictures of the poem:

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in-

all this intimate correspondence with the world in verse is not only interesting in itself, but gains

a double charm by association with the letters. "We were just sitting down to supper," writes Cowper to Mrs. Unwin's son, "when a hasty rap alarmed us. I ran to the hall window, for the hares being loose, it was impossible to open the door." It is fortunate for the reader if his memory at these words calls up those lines of The Task:

One sheltered hare

Has never heard the sanguinary yell
Of cruel man, exulting in her woes.
Innocent partner of my peaceful home,
Whom ten long years' experience of my care
Has made at last familiar; she has lost
Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,
Not needful here beneath a roof like mine.

Yes-thou mayst eat thy bread, and lick the hand
That feeds thee; thou mayst frolic on the floor
At evening, and at night retire secure

To thy straw couch, and slumber unalarmed;
For I have gained thy confidence, have pledged
All that is human in me, to protect
Thine unsuspecting gratitude and love.
If I survive thee, I will dig thy grave;
And when I place thee in it, sighing say,
I knew at least one hare that had a friend.

How much of the letters could be illustrated in this way—the walks about Olney, the gardening, the greenhouse, the lamentations over the American Rebellion, the tirades against fickle fashions, and a thousand other matters that go to make up their quiet yet variegated substance. For it

must not be supposed that Cowper, in these Olney days at least, was ever dull. I will quote the opening paragraph of one other letter-to his friend the Rev. William Bull, great preacher of Newport Pagnell, and, alas! great smoker,' "smoke-inhaling Bull," "Dear Taureau "-as a change from the more serious theme, and then pass on:

Mon aimable et très cher Ami-It is not in the power of chaises or chariots to carry you where my affections will not follow you; if I heard that you were gone to finish your days in the Moon, I should not love you the

'How refreshing is that whiff of good honest smoke in the abstemious lives of Cowper and John Newton! I have just seen, in W. Tuckwell's Reminiscences of a Radical Parson, a happy allusion to William Bull's pipes: "To Olney, under the auspices of a benevolent Quaker.

I saw all the relics: the parlour where bewitching Lady Austen's shuttlecock flew to and fro; the hole made in the wall for the entrance and exit of the hares; the poet's bedroom; Mrs. Unwin's room, where, as she knelt by the bed in prayer, her clothes caught fire. The garden was in other hands, but I obtained leave to enter it. Of course, I went straight to the summer-house, small, and with not much glass, the wall and ceiling covered with names, Cowper's wig-block on the table, a hole in the floor where that mellow divine, the Reverend Mr. Bull, kept his pipes; outside, the bed of pinks celebrated affectionately in one of his letters to Joseph Hill, pipings from which are still growing in my garden."-The date of the Rev. Mr. Tuckwell's visit to Olney is not indicated, but his Reminiscences were published in the present year, 1905.