WILLIAM COWPER. BORN at Berkhampstead, 1731. His father was a Church of England clergyman and court chaplain. At the age of six, Cowper lost his mother; his touching little poem On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture out of Norfolk, written many years later, commemorates his emotion on this occasion. He acquired some knowledge of the Latin poets at Westminster School, but did not proceed to the University. Admitted to the bar, success there was interfered with by an attack of insanity under the influence of which he attempted suicide. Eighteen months' medical treatment restored his intellect, but left him with a deep-seated religious melancholia that in a few years brought on another attack of insanity. After his second recovery, while leading a life of intolerable dulness at Olney, he took to writing moral satires for diversion. Only by exceeding charity can this diversion be said to be shared by his readers. To the inspiration of his vivacious friend Lady Austen we owe John Gilpin, perhaps the most humorous ballad in English-written by the most melancholy poet, To her suggestion also we owe The Task (1785), a poem which, though it has neither beginning, middle nor end, has a discernible purpose to sing the praise of retirement and of country life as most friendly to piety and virtue.'! Its still-life descriptions, within their narrow limits, are almost perfect; its asceticism, its sentimentalism and its provincialism are easily discoverableand easily skipped. Cowper's translation of Homer (1791) proved-as might have been expected that the man who found a congenial subject in The Sofa and The Time Piece was not the man to sing of the heroes who drank delight of battle on the plains of windy Troy. His Letters preserve for us charming glimpses of English country life in the last century, and perhaps by these he will be remembered longer than by his more formal works. The declining years of his life were clouded by a third attack of insanity; from this he was mercifully delivered by death in 1800. - BIBLIOGRAPHY. LIFE AND TIMES. — Cowper's Complete Works, comprising his Poems, Correspondence and Translations. Edited with Memoir of the Author, by Robert Southey. 8 vols. (Bohn's Library). This is the standard edition, if we cut out Southey's tedious Memoir. Goldwin Smith's Cowper (E. M. L.) gives all the essential facts in compact form, and succeeds in making really interesting the record of Cowper's uneventful life. 1 Goldwin Smith's Cowper, Cap. V. CRITICISM. Bagehot; Literary Studies, Vol. I.; William Cowper. Contains some good remarks on Society as a proper object for the exercise of the poetic imagination, with a comparison between Pope, the poet of Town Life, and Cowper, the poet of Rural Life. Sainte-Beuve; Causeries du Lundi, Tome Onzième; William Cowper, ou De La Poésie Domestique. The nature of this study is sufficiently indicated by the sub-title. A translation will be found in English Portraits, by C. A. SainteBeuve (Henry Holt & Co., N.Y.). Leslie Stephen; Hours in a Library (Third Series); Cowper and Rousseau. Dwells almost exclusively on the moral sentiments common to Cowper and Rousseau. THE WINTER MORNING WALK. This poem forms the fifth book of The Task. The poet evidently writes with his 'eye on the object;' he sees a good deal and he sees it accurately and minutely. Though occasionally commonplace, he is never insincere either in thought or in diction. 1-40. Spiry. See note on beaked promontory,' Lycidas, 94. bents = stalks of stiff, wiry grass. This word has no etymological connection with bend,' but is cognate with the German Binse,' a rush. With lines 21-32 compare Thomson's Winter, 232-242. deciduous = liable to fall. 41-57. The Woodman and His Dog ; — perhaps the best specimen of Cowper's Naturalism. Homer could hardly have painted this lurcher; a cross between the greychurl. See note on the Bear,' Il Pen vignette with more fidelity. hound and the collie. seroso, 87. 58-76. pale. See note on Il Penseroso, 156. family, race. Thomson has the word in this sense in Winter, 261; also Chaucer, in The Wife of Bath's Tale, 245. 77-95. Compare Thomson's Winter, 242-256. See note on Il Penseroso, 10. pensioners. Modern usage 96-126. Indurated. Cowper accents this word on the second syllable; Goldsmith (Traveller, 232) on the first. prefers the latter. that (106), object of throws. 127-168. Imperial mistress. Anne, Empress of Russia, niece of Peter the Great, erected this ice-palace in St. Petersburg in 1740. It was fifty feet long, with six large windows in front, the frames of which were painted to represent green marble. A balustrade adorned with ice-statues surrounded the building. Orange trees, dolphins and an elephant, all carved from ice, adorned the court thus formed; ice-cannon and mortars defended the approaches. Elaborately carved ice-furniture filled the rooms, and ice-logs were laid ready ROBERT BURNS. ROBERT BURNS, the son of a Scotch peasant-farmer, was born near the town of Ayr in 1759. Inspired by love, he wrote his first song at the age of fifteen; the same passion (though with varying objects) found expression in the profusion of beautiful lyrics he poured out during the next ten years, and relieved for him the monotonous farm-drudgery that was breaking his young manhood. His first volume of poems was published at Kilmarnock in 1786; it immediately attracted the attention of the Edinburgh literati, who received Burns with open arms. Burns' manliness and self-respect did not forsake him when thus suddenly elevated from the society of peasants and smugglers to that of Noblemen, University Professors and Lord-Justices. A couple of winters in Edinburgh seemed to exhaust their interest in the greatest of Scotch poets; a small place in the Excise was thrown to Burns and he was dispatched to the uncongenial tasks of gauging whiskey-barrels and scraping sterile acres at Ellisland. Here he lived from 1788 to 1791, making a manful fight in the struggle for existence that always presses so hard upon the Scotch peasant. 'God help the children of Dependence,' he writes, when abandoning the hopeless attempt to wring a living out of the Scotch soil. Removing to Dumfries, his duties as Exciseman brought him into contact with low convivial company to which he was by nature inclined; much of his magnificent power was frittered away in tavern-songs and political squibs. Penury and despair dogged his few remaining years and sat by his death-bed; when his mighty spirit was at last given surcease of woe, Mr. Pitt- to whose disgrace be it recorded that he had long known of Burns' necessities and could have relieved them with a stroke of his pen- Mr. Pitt condescendingly remarked that since Shakespeare no verse has the appearance of coming so sweetly from nature as Burns'. send him In a letter to Miss Helen Craik written in 1793, Burns has drawn his own character with sad truthfulness: 'Take a being of our kind; give him a stronger imagination and a more delicate sensibility, which between them will ever engender a more ungovernable set of passions than are the usual lot of man; implant in him an irresistible impulse to some idle vagary adrift after some pursuit which shall eternally mislead him from the paths of lucre and yet curse him with a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures that lucre can purchase; lastly, fill up the measure of his woes by bestowing on him a spurning sense of his own dignity; and you have created a wight nearly as miserable as a poet.' BIBLIOGRAPHY. LIFE AND TIMES. Burns' life is best studied in his Letters, now published with any good edition of his works. Of the elaborate biographies, Chambers' (published in 1851) has not been superseded; of the shorter, Shairp's (E. M. L.) is superior in insight and sympathy to Blackie's (Gt. Wr.). A thorough study of Burns carries one back, of course, to Ramsay, Fergusson and the ballads preserved by Scott in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. CRITICISM. Carlyle; Essay on Burns. This famous Essay must stand as the best interpretation of Burns, in spite of some extraordinary literary blunders, such as the statements; (1) that Burns had 'models only of the meanest sort; ' (2) that The Jolly Beggars is 'refined;' (3) that Tam O'Shanter is merely 'a piece of sparkling rhetoric.' But it must be remembered that in Carlyle the ethical so overshadowed the æsthetical that he could see in Keats little but 'weak-eyed maudlin sensibility.' The Hero as Man of Letters. 'Wit, wild laughter, energy, directness, sincerity: these were in both [Mirabeau and Burns].' Christopher North; Essay on The Genius and Character of Burns. Speech at the Burns Festival (1844). These are elaborate and sympathetic studies, tinged with that over-enthusiasm for Burns which may naturally be felt by a fellow-countryman. Classes Burns as a Emerson; Speech at the Burns Centenary (1859). reformer with Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Butler. Longfellow; Poem entitled Robert Burns. Ross; Burnsiana; A Collection of Literary Odds and Ends relating to Robert Burns. In this bushel of chaff will be found a few grains of excellent wheat. THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT. This poem, which appeared in the Kilmarnock edition, owes something to Fergusson's 'Farmer's Ingle.' The person to whom it is dedicated would have died unknown had not Burns preserved him immortal in this inscription. If we had to part with any one poem of Burns, this is the last we should be willing to lose; not because it shows him at his best as a poet, - admirable as it is, — but because it shows him at his best as a man. I-9. For a poet who had 'models only of the meanest sort,' this handling of the Spenserian stanza is a deft performance! = 10-18. Notice with what graceful strength, in the homely passages, Burns drops into his native Ayrshire dialect. sugh sough, a murmuring or rushing sound. moil: drudgery. The verb ' to moil' (from the Latin mollis, soft) means originally 'to wet, to moisten; then, to soil by labor or toil.' morrow. the morn to And weary, etc. This is one of several lines that show the influence of Gray. 19-27. fireplace. stacher stagger. = flichterin fluttering. ingle carking = distressing. * This word has no etymological |