he paid his respects to the same duties. He was a man of the
world above all other poets. Cowper was in comparison a man of the
parlour. His sensibilities would, I fancy, have driven him into retreat,
even if he had been neither mad nor pious. He was the very opposite of a
worldling. He was, as he said of himself in his early thirties, "of a very
singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed
with." While claiming that he was not an absolute fool, he added: "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 would not change conditions with any saint in
Christendom." Had Horace lived in the eighteenth century he would almost
certainly have been a Deist. Cowper was very nearly a Methodist. The
difference, indeed, between them is fundamental. Horace was a pig, though
a charming one; Cowper was a pigeon.
This being so, it seems to me a mistake to regard Cowper as a Horace
_manque_, instead of being content with his miraculous achievement as a
letter-writer. It may well be that his sufferings, so far from destroying
his real genius, harrowed and fertilized the soil in which it grew. He
unquestionably was more ambitious for his verse than for his prose. He
wrote his letters without labour, while he was never weary of using the
file on his poems. "To touch and retouch," he once wrote to the Rev.
William Unwin, "is, though some writers boast of negligence, and others
would be ashamed to show their foul copies, the secret of almost all good
writing, especially in verse. I am never weary of it myself." Even if we
count him only a middling poet, however, this does not mean that all his
fastidiousness of composition was wasted. He acquired in the workshop of
verse the style that stood him in such good stead in the field of familiar
prose. It is because of this hard-won ease of style that readers of
English will never grow weary of that epistolary autobiography in which he
recounts his maniacal fear that his food has been poisoned; his open-eyed
wonder at balloons; the story of his mouse; the cure of the distention of
his stomach by Lady Hesketh's gingerbread; the pulling out of a tooth at
the dinner-table unperceived by the other guests; his desire to thrash Dr.
Johnson till his pension jingled in his pocket; and the mildly fascinated
tastes to which he confesses in such a paragraph as:
I know no beast in England whose voice I do not account musica
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