:--

I. His enthusiasm for humanity.

II. His love of nature.

III. His love of animal life.

IV. His humour.

And in three of these, let it be said emphatically, he stands out as the
creator of a new era.

There is another claim I make for him, and with this I close--his
position as a master of prose, as well as of poetry. Cowper was the
greatest letter-writer in a language which has produced many great letter-
writers--Walpole, Gray, Byron, Scott, FitzGerald, and a long list. But
nearly all these men were men of affairs, of action. Given a good
literary style they could hardly have been other than interesting, they
had so much to say that they gained from external sources. Even
FitzGerald--the one recluse--had all the treasures of literature
constantly passing into his study. Cowper had but eighteen books
altogether during many of his years in Olney, and some of us who have
lent our volumes in the past and are still sighing over gaps in our
shelves find consolation in the fact that six of Cowper's books had been
returned to him after a friend had borrowed for twenty years or so. Now,
it is comparatively easy to write good letters with a library around you;
it is marvellous that Cowper could have done this with so little
material, and his letters are, from this point of view, the best of
all--"divine chit-chat" Coleridge called them. His simple style
captivates us. And here let me say--keeping to my text--that it is the
_sanest_ of styles, a style with no redundancies, no rhetoric, no
straining after effect. The outlook on life is sane--what could be finer
than the chase for the lost hare, or the call of the Parliamentary
candidate, or the flogging of the thief?--and the outlook on literature
is particularly sane.

Cowper was well-nigh the only true poet in the first rank in English
literature who was at the same time a true critic. Literary history
affords a singular revelation of the wild and incoherent judgments of
their fellows on the part of the poets. For praise or blame, there are
few literary judgments of Byron, of Shelley, of Wordsworth that will
stand. Coleridge was a critic first, and his poetry, though good, is
small in quantity, and the same may be said of Matthew Arnold. Tennyson
discreetly kept away from prose, and his letters, be it remembered, lack
distinction as do most letters of the nineteenth century. If, however,
as we are really to believe, he it was who really made the