severest test, and Cowper
does not survive the test. Had _The Task_ been written in couplets he
might have been forced to sharpen his wit by the necessity of rhyme. As it
is, he is merely ponderous--a snail of imagination labouring under a heavy
shell of eloquence. In the fragment called _Yardley Oak_ he undoubtedly
achieved something worthier of a distant disciple of Milton. But I do not
think he was ever sufficiently preoccupied with poetry to be a good poet.
He had even ceased to read poetry by the time he began in earnest to write
it. "I reckon it," he wrote in 1781, "among my principal advantages, as a
composer of verses, that I have not read an English poet these thirteen
years, and but one these thirteen years." So mild was his interest in his
contemporaries that he had never heard Collins's name till he read about
him in Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_. Though descended from Donne--his
mother was Anne Donne--he was apparently more interested in Churchill and
Beattie than in him. His one great poetical master in English was Milton,
Johnson's disparagement of whom he resented with amusing vehemence. He was
probably the least bookish poet who had ever had a classical education. He
described himself in a letter to the Rev. Walter Bagot, in his later
years, as "a poor man who has but twenty books in the world, and two of
them are your brother Chester's." The passages I have quoted give, no
doubt, an exaggerated impression of Cowper's indifference to literature.
His relish for such books as he enjoyed is proved in many of his letters.
But he was incapable of such enthusiasm for the great things in literature
as Keats showed, for instance, in his sonnet on Chapman's Homer. Though
Cowper, disgusted with Pope, took the extreme step of translating Homer
into English verse, he enjoyed even Homer only with certain evangelical
reservations. "I should not have chosen to have been the original author
of such a business," he declared, while he was translating the nineteenth
book of the _Iliad_, "even though all the Nine had stood at my elbow. Time
has wonderful effects. We admire that in an ancient for which we should
send a modern bard to Bedlam." It is hardly to be wondered at that his
translation of Homer has not survived, while his delightful translation of
Vincent Bourne's _Jackdaw_ has.

Cowper's poetry, however, is to be praised, if for nothing else, because
it played so great a part in giving the world a letter-writer of