le attention in a country where public education has been the
rule of the higher social life. Cowper began the translation of Homer in
1785, from a feeling of the necessity of employment for his mind. His
translations of both Iliad and Odyssey, which occupied him for five years,
and which did not entirely keep off his old enemy, were published in 1791.
They are correct in scholarship and idiom, but lack the nature and the
fire of the old Grecian bard.

The rest of his life was busy, but sad--a constant effort to drive away
madness by incessant labor. The loss of his friend, Mrs. Unwin, in 1796,
affected him deeply, and the clouds settled thicker and thicker upon his
soul. In the year before his death, he published that painfully touching
poem, _The Castaway_, which gives an epitome of his own sufferings in the
similitude of a wretch clinging to a spar in a stormy night upon the
Atlantic.

His minor and fugitive poems are very numerous; and as they were
generally inspired by persons and scenes around him, they are truly
literary types of the age in which he lived. In his _Task_, he resembles
Thomson and Akenside; in his didactic poems, he reminds us of the essays
of Pope; in his hymns he catered successfully to the returning piety of
the age; in his translations of Homer and of Ovid, he presented the
ancients to moderns in a new and acceptable dress; and in his Letters he
sets up an epistolary model, which may be profitably studied by all who
desire to express themselves with energy, simplicity, and delicate taste.

OTHER WRITERS OF THE TRANSITION SCHOOL.

_James Beattie_, 1735-1803: he was the son of a farmer, and was educated
at Marischal College, Aberdeen, where he was afterwards professor of
natural philosophy. For four years he taught a village school. His first
poem, _Retirement_, was not much esteemed; but in 1771 appeared the first
part of _The Minstrel_, a poem at once descriptive, didactic, and
romantic. This was enthusiastically received, and gained for him the favor
of the king, a pension of L200 per annum, and a degree from Oxford. The
second part was published in 1774. _The Minstrel_ is written in the
Spenserian stanza, and abounds in beautiful descriptions of nature,
marking a very decided progress from the artificial to the natural school.
The character of Edwin, the young minstrel, ardent in search for the
beautiful and the true, is admirably portrayed; as is also that of the
hermit who instruct