pated from false Arcadianism, the yoke of which still sits heavily upon Thomson, whose "muse," moreover, is perpetually "wafting" him away from the country and the climate which he knows, to countries and climates which he does not know, and which he describes in the style of a prize poem. Cowper's landscapes, too, are peopled with the peasantry of England; Thomson's with Damons, Palæmons, and Musidoras, tricked out in the sentimental costume of the sham idyl. In Thomson you always find the effort of the artist working up a description; in Cowper you find no effort: the scene is simply mirrored on a mind of great sensibility and high pictorial power.

MACAULAY'S COMPARISON OF COWPER AND ALFIERI.

[See "Johnsonian Age" and "Age of Revolution."—Italy.]

A comparison between Alfieri and Cowper may, at first sight, appear as strange as that which a loyal Presbyterian minister is said to have made, in 1745, between George the Second and Enoch.... But though the private lives of these remarkable men present scarcely any points of resemblance, their literary lives bear a close analogy to each other. They both found poetry in its lowest state of degradation-feeble, artificial, and altogether nerveless; they both possessed precisely the talents which fitted them for the task of raising it from that deep abasement. They cannot in strictness be called great poets; they had not, in any very high degree, the creative power,

"The vision and the faculty divine;"

but they had great vigor of thought, great warmth of feeling, and what, in their circumstances, was above all things important, a manliness of taste which approached to roughness. They did not deal in mechanical versification and conventional phrases; they wrote concerning things the thoughts of which set their hearts on fire; and thus what they wrote, even when it wanted every other grace, had that inimitable grace which sincerity and strong passion impart to the rudest and most homely compositions. Each

of them sought for inspiration in a noble and affecting subject, fertile of images which had not yet been hackneyed. Liberty was the muse of Alfieri; Religion was the muse of Cowper. The same truth is found in their lighter pieces. They were not among those who deprecated the severity or deplored the absence of an unreal mistress in melodious commonplaces. Instead of raving about imaginary Chloes and Sylvias, Cowper wrote of Mrs. Unwin's knitting-needles; the only love-verses of Alfieri were addressed to one whom he truly and passionately loved. These great men were not free from affectation. But their affectation was directly opposed to the affectation which generally prevailed. Each of them expressed, in strong and bitter language, the contempt which he felt for the effeminate poetasters who were in fashion both in England and in Italy.... In their hatred of meretricious ornament, and of what Cowper calls "creamy smoothness," they erred on the opposite side-their style was too austere, their versification too harsh. It is not easy, however, to overrate the service which they rendered to literature. The intrinsic value of their poems is considerable, but the example which they set of mutiny against an absurd system was invaluable. The part which they performed was rather that of Moses than that of Joshua. They opened the house of bondage, but they did not enter the promised land.

[For Mrs. Oliphant's comparison of Burns and Cowper, see Robert Burns.]

BOOKS OF REFERENCE.

Biographies of Cowper: by Thomas | Mrs. Oliphant's Literary History
Taylor, Hayley, Robert Southey,
Mr. Benham, and Goldwin Smith,
edited by Morley in the "English
Men of Letters" Series.
Taine's "English Literature."

of England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" (1882), vol. i. Brooke's " Theology in the English Poets."

ROBERT BURNS,

THE NATIONAL POET OF SCOTLAND,

(1759-1796).

PORTRAITS OF BURNS.

THE earliest, best, and most widely known of Burns's portraits is that painted by Nasmyth when the poet was about twenty-six years of age. The engravings prefixed to editions of his works are almost entirely taken from this. There are also a profile life-size, traced by Miers in 1787, a cast of his skull, and a portrait painted by Taylor; but the last is of doubtful authenticity.

Charles Kingsley's Tribute.-Four faces among the portraits of modern men, great or small, strike us as supremely beautiful-not merely in expression, but in the form and proportion and harmony of features-Shakspeare, Raffaelle, Goethe, Burns. One would expect it to be so, for the mind makes the body, not the body the mind, and the inward beauty seldom fails to express itself in the outward as a visible sign of the invisible grace or disgrace of the wearer. Not that it is so always, ... but in the generality of cases physiognomy is a sound and faithful science, and tells us, if not, alas! what the man might have been, still what he has become. Yet even this former problem, what he might have been, may often be solved for us by youthful portraits, before sin and sorrow and weakness have had their will upon their features; and, therefore, when we speak of these four beautiful faces, we alluded in each case to the earliest portrait of each genius which