wisely followed Coleridge in calling--his "divine chit-chat." As with
Walpole--though with that difference of idiosyncrasy which all the best
things have from one another--it does not in the least matter what,
among mundane affairs at least, Cowper was talking about. If his
conversation--and some of the few _habitues_ of Olney say it was--was
anything like his letter-writing, it is no wonder that people sat over
even breakfast for an hour to "satisfy sentiment not appetite" as they
said with that slight touch of priggishness which has been visited upon
them heavily, but which perhaps had more to do with their merits than
more mannerless periods will allow.

And not even Walpole's show to quite the same degree, that extraordinary
power of making anything interesting--of entirely transcending the
subject--which belongs to the letter-writer in probably a greater
measure than to any man-of-letters in the other sense, except the poet.
The matter which these letters have to chronicle is often the very
smallest of small beer. The price, conveyance and condition of the fish
his correspondents buy for him or give him (Cowper was very fond of fish
and lived, before railways, in the heart of the Midlands); one of the
most uneventful of picnics; hares and hair (one of his most
characteristic pieces of quietly ironic humour is a brief descant on
wigs with a suggestion that fashion should decree the cutting off of
people's own legs and the substitution of artificial ones); the height
of chairs and candlesticks--anything will do. He remarks gravely
somewhere, "What nature expressly designed me for, I have never been
able to conjecture; I seem to myself so universally disqualified for the
common and customary occupations and amusements of mankind." Perhaps
poetry--at least poetry of the calibre of "Yardley Oak," and "The
Castaway," of "Boadicea" and the "Royal George" in one division; of
"John Gilpin" in the other, may not be quite properly classed among the
"common and customary occupations of mankind." But letter-writing might
without great impropriety be so classed: and there cannot be the
slightest doubt that Nature intended Cowper for a letter-writer. Whether
he writes "The passages and events of the day as well as of the night
are little better than dreams" or "An almost general cessation of
egg-laying among the hens has made it impossible for Mrs. Unwin to
enterprise a cake" one has (but perhaps a little more vividly) that
agree