Cowper

Cowper

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Cowper, by Goldwin Smith
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Title: Cowper
Author: Goldwin Smith
Release Date: June 29, 2004 [eBook #12772]
Language: English
Character set encoding: US-ASCII
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COWPER***
E-text prepared by Al Haines

COWPER
BY
GOLDWIN SMITH
London, 1880

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I
. Early Life

CHAPTER II
. At Huntingdon--The Unwins

CHAPTER III
. At Olney--Mr. Newton

CHAPTER IV
. Authorship--The Moral Satires

CHAPTER V
. The Task

CHAPTER VI
. Short Poems and Translations

CHAPTER VII
. The Letters

CHAPTER VIII
. Close of Life

COWPER.

CHAPTER I
.
EARLY LIFE.
Cowper is the most important English poet of the period between Pope
and the illustrious group headed by Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley,
which arose out of the intellectual ferment of the European Revolution.
As a reformer of poetry, who called it back from conventionality to
nature, and at the same time as the teacher of a new school of sentiment
which acted as a solvent upon the existing moral and social system, he

may perhaps himself be numbered among the precursors of the
revolution, though he was certainly the mildest of them all. As a
sentimentalist he presents a faint analogy to Rousseau, whom in natural
temperament he somewhat resembled. He was also the great poet of the
religious revival which marked the latter part of the eighteenth century
in England, and which was called Evangelicism within the
establishment and Methodism without. In this way he is associated with
Wesley and Whitefield, as well as with the philanthropists of the
movement, such as Wilberforce, Thornton, and Clarkson. As a poet he
touches, on different sides of his character, Goldsmith, Crabbe, and
Burns. With Goldsmith and Crabbe he shares the honour of improving
English taste in the sense of truthfulness and simplicity. To Burns he
felt his affinity, across a gulf of social circumstance, and in spite of a
dialect not yet made fashionable by Scott. Besides his poetry, he holds
a high, perhaps the highest place, among English letter writers: and the
collection of his letters appended to Southey's biography forms, with
the biographical portions of his poetry, the materials for a sketch of his
life. Southey's biography itself is very helpful, though too prolix and
too much filled out with dissertations for common readers. Had its
author only done for Cowper what he did for Nelson! [Our
acknowledgments are also due to Mr. Benham, the writer of the
Memoir prefixed to the Globe Edition of Cowper.]
William Cowper came of the Whig nobility of the robe. His great-uncle,
after whom he was named, was the Whig Lord Chancellor of Anne and
George I. His grandfather was that Spencer Cowper, judge of the
Common Pleas, for love of whom the pretty Quakeress drowned herself,
and who, by the rancour of party, was indicted for her murder. His
father, the Rev. John Cowper, D.D., was chaplain to George II. His
mother was a Donne, of the race of the poet, and descended by several
lines from Henry III. A Whig and a gentleman he was by birth, a Whig
and a gentleman he remained to the end. He was born on the 15th
November (old style), 1731, in his father's rectory of Berkhampstead.
From nature he received, with a large measure of the gifts of genius, a
still larger measure of its painful sensibilities. In his portrait; by
Romney the brow bespeaks intellect, the features feeling and
refinement, the eye madness. The stronger parts of character, the
combative and propelling forces he evidently lacked from the

beginning. For the battle of life he was totally unfit. His judgment in its
healthy state was, even on practical questions, sound enough, as his
letters abundantly prove; but his sensibility not only rendered him
incapable of wrestling with a rough world, but kept him always on the
verge of madness, and frequently plunged him into it. To the malady
which threw him out of active life we owe not the meanest of English
poets.
At the age of thirty-two, writing of himself, he says, "I am of a very
singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed
with. Certainly I am not an absolute fool, but I have more weakness
than the greatest of all the fools I can recollect at present. In short, if I
was as fit for the next world as I am unfit for this--and God forbid I
should speak it in vanity--I