ever have met! Would Cowper have reconsidered the wish made when he
read Johnson's biography of Milton in the _Lives of the Poets_: "Oh! I
could thresh his old jacket till I made his pension jingle in his
pocket!"?

But it is with Cowper only that we have here to do, and when we are
talking of Cowper the difficulty is solely one of compression. So much
has been written about him and his work. The Lives of him form of
themselves a most substantial library. He has been made the subject of
what is surely the very worst biography in the language and of one that
is among the very best. The well-meaning Hayley {38a} wrote the one, in
which the word "tenderness" appears at least twice on every page, and
Southey {38b} the other. Not less fortunate has the poet been in his
critics. Walter Bagehot, James Russell Lowell, Mrs. Oliphant, George
Eliot {38c}--these are but a few of the names that occur to me as having
said something wise and to the point concerning the Poet of Olney.

I somehow feel that it is safer for me to refer to the Poet of Olney than
to speak of William Cowper, because I am not quite sure how you would
wish me to pronounce his name. _Cooper_, he himself pronounced it, as
his family are in the habit of doing. The present Lord Cowper is known
to all the world as Lord Cooper. The derivation of the name and the
family coat-of-arms justify that pronunciation, and it might be said that
a man was, and is, entitled to settle the question of the pronunciation
of his own name. And yet I plead for what I am quite willing to allow is
the incorrect pronunciation. All pronunciation, even of the simplest
words, is settled finally by a consensus of custom. Throughout the
English-speaking world the name is now constantly pronounced Cowper, as
if that most useful and ornamental animal the cow had given it its
origin. Well-read Scotland is peculiarly unanimous in the custom, and
well-read America follows suit. William Shakspere, I doubt not, called
himself Shaxspere, and we decline to imitate him, and so probably many of
us will with a light heart go on speaking of William Cowper to the end of
the chapter. At any rate Shakspere and Cowper, divergent as were their
lives and their work--and one readily recognizes the incomparably greater
position of the former--had alike a keen sense of humour, rare among
poets it would seem, and hugely would they both have enjoyed such a
controversy as this.

This suggestion of t