rom happiness through
great tribulation. Misfortunes, which are said never to come singly, appear
in this case in flocks; but through poverty, sorrow, imprisonment, and the
unspeakable loss of his daughters, the Vicar's faith in God and man emerges
triumphant. To the very end he is like one of the old martyrs, who sings
_Alleluia_ while the lions roar about him and his children in the arena.
Goldsmith's optimism, it must be confessed, is here stretched to the
breaking point. The reader is sometimes offered fine Johnsonian phrases
where he would naturally expect homely and vigorous language; and he is
continually haunted by the suspicion that, even in this best of all
possible worlds, the Vicar's clouds of affliction were somewhat too easily
converted into showers of blessing; yet he is forced to read on, and at the
end he confesses gladly that Goldsmith has succeeded in making a most
interesting story out of material that, in other hands, would have
developed either a burlesque or a brutal tragedy. Laying aside all romantic
passion, intrigue, and adventure, upon which other novelists depended,
Goldsmith, in this simple story of common life, has accomplished three
noteworthy results: he has made human fatherhood almost a divine thing; he
has glorified the moral sentiments which cluster about the family life as
the center of civilization; and he has given us, in Dr. Primrose, a
striking and enduring figure, which seems more like a personal acquaintance
than a character in a book.

WILLIAM COWPER (1731--1800)

In Cowper we have another interesting poet, who, like Gray and Goldsmith,
shows the struggle between romantic and classic ideals. In his first volume
of poems, Cowper is more hampered by literary fashions than was Goldsmith
in his _Traveller_ and his _Deserted Village_. In his second period,
however, Cowper uses blank verse freely; and his delight in nature and in
homely characters, like the teamster and the mail carrier of _The Task_,
shows that his classicism is being rapidly thawed out by romantic feeling.
In his later work, especially his immortal "John Gilpin," Cowper flings
fashions aside, gives Pegasus the reins, takes to the open road, and so
proves himself a worthy predecessor of Burns, who is the most spontaneous
and the most interesting of all the early romanticists.

LIFE. Cowper's life is a pathetic story of a shy and timid genius, who
found the world of men too rough, and who withdrew to nature like