he humour of Cowper brings me to my main point.
Humour is so essentially a note of sanity, and it is the sanity of Cowper
that I desire to emphasize here. We have heard too much of the insanity
of Cowper, of the "maniac's tongue" to which Mrs. Browning referred, of
the "maniacal Calvinist" of whom Byron wrote somewhat scornfully. Only a
day or two ago I read in a high-class journal that "one fears that
Cowper's despondency and madness are better known to-day than his
poetry." That is not to know the secret of Cowper. It is true that
there were periods of maniacal depression, and these were not always
religious ones. Now, it was from sheer nervousness at the prospect of
meeting his fellows, now it was from a too logical acceptance of the
doctrine of eternal punishment. Had it not been these, it would have
been something else. It might have been politics, or a hundred things
that now and again give a twist to the mind of the wisest. With Cowper
it was generally religion. I am not here to promote a paradox. I accept
the only too well-known story of Cowper's many visitations, but, looking
back a century, for the purpose of asking what was Cowper's contribution
to the world's happiness and why we meet to speak of our love for him to-
day, I insist that these visitations are not essential to our memory of
him as a great figure in our literature--the maker of an epoch.

Cowper lived for some seventy years--sixty-nine, to be exact. Of these
years there was a period longer than the full term of Byron's life, of
Shelley's or of Keats's, of perfect sanity, and it was in this period
that he gave us what is one of the sanest achievements in our literature,
view it as we may.

Let us look backwards over the century--a century which has seen many
changes of which Cowper had scarcely any vision--the wonders of machinery
and of electricity, of commercial enterprise, of the newspaper press, of
book production. The galloping postboy is the most persistent figure in
Cowper's landscape. He has been replaced by the motor car. Nations have
arisen and fallen; a thousand writers have become popular and have ceased
to be remembered. Other writers have sprung up who have made themselves
immortal. Burns and Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Scott and Shelley
among the poets.

We ask ourselves, then, what distinctly differentiates Cowper's life from
that of his brothers in poetry, and I reply--his sanity. He did not
indulge in vul