gar amours, as did Burns and Byron; he did not ruin his
moral fibre by opium, as did Coleridge; he did not shock his best friends
by an over-weening egotism, as did Wordsworth; he did not spoil his life
by reckless financial complications, as did Scott; or by too great an
enthusiasm to beat down the world's conventions, as did Shelley. I do
not here condemn any one or other of these later poets. Their lives
cannot be summed up in the mistakes they made. I only urge that, as it
is not good to be at warfare with your fellows, to be burdened with debts
that you have to kill yourself to pay, to alienate your friends by
distressing mannerisms, to cease to be on speaking terms with your
family--therefore Cowper, who avoided these things, and, out of
threescore years and more allotted to him, lived for some forty or fifty
years at least a quiet, idyllic life, surrounded by loyal and loving
friends, had chosen the saner and safer path. That, it may be granted,
was very much a matter of temperament, and for it one does not need to
praise him. The appeal to us of Robert Burns to gently scan our brother
man will necessarily find a ready acceptance to-day, and a plea on behalf
of kindly toleration for any great writer who has inspired his fellows is
natural and honourable. But Cowper does not require any such kindly
toleration. His temperament led him to a placid life, where there were
few temptations, and that life with its quiet walks, its occasional
drives, its simple recreations, has stood for a whole century as our
English ideal. It is what, amid the strain of the severest commercialism
in our great cities, we look forward to for our declining years as a
haven on this side of the grave.

But I have undertaken to plead for Cowper's sanity. I desire, therefore,
to beg you to look not at this or that episode in his life, when, as we
know, Cowper was in the clutches of evil spirits, but at his life as a
whole--a life of serene contentment in the company of his friends, his
hares Puss, Tiny and Bess, his "eight pair of tame pigeons," his
correspondents; and then I ask you to turn to his work, and to note the
essential sanity of that work also.

First there is his poetry. When after the Bastille had fallen Charles
James Fox quoted in one of his speeches Cowper's lines--written long
years before--praying that that event might occur, he paid an unconscious
tribute to the sanity of Cowper's genius. {44} Few poets who have le