poet, he must have been a great prose writer, that is, he was a
great writer of some sort."

His two volumes of essays, _The Round Table_ (1817) and _Table Talk_
(1821-1822), caused him to be called a "lesser Dr. Samuel Johnson."

While the combative dispositions of Landor and Hazlitt did not make
them ideal critics of their contemporaries, the taste of the age liked
criticism of the slashing type. The newly established periodicals and
reviews, such as _The Edinburgh Review_ (started in 1802), furnished a
new market for critical essays. Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850), editor
of _The Edinburgh Review_, accused Wordsworth of "silliness" in his
_Lyrical Ballads_; and said vehemently of a later volume of the same
poet's verse: "This will never do." _The Quarterly Review_ in 1818
spoke of the "insanity" of the poetry of Keats. In 1819 _Blackwood's
Edinburgh Magazine_ gave a fatherly warning to Shelley that Keats as a
poet was "worthy of sheer and instant contempt," advised him to select
better companions than "Johnny Keats," and promised that compliance
with this advice would secure him "abundance of better praise."

Even the more genial Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), the friend of Shelley
and Keats, and the writer of many pleasant essays, called Carlyle's
style "a jargon got up to confound pretension with performance." We
like Hunt best when he is writing in the vein of the _Spectator_ or as
a "miniature Lamb." In such papers as _An Earth upon Heaven_, Hunt
tells us that in heaven "there can be no clergymen if there are no
official duties for them"; that we shall there enjoy the choicest
books, for "Shakespeare and Spenser should write us _new ones_." He
closes this entertaining paper with the novel assurance: "If we
choose, now and then we shall even have inconveniences."

WILLIAM COWPER, 1731-1800

[Illustration: WILLIAM COWPER. _From the portrait by Sir Thomas
Lawrence_.]

Life.--Cowper's life is a tale of almost continual sadness, caused
by his morbid timidity. He was born at Great Berkhampstead,
Hertfordshire, in 1731. At the age of six, he lost his mother and was
placed in a boarding school. Here his sufferings began. The child was
so especially terrified by one rough boy that he could never raise his
eyes to the bully's face, but knew him unmistakably by his shoe
buckles.

There was some happiness for Cowper at his next school, the
Westminster School, and also during the twelve succeeding years, when
he studied law