piece, are its least agreeable feature; but their harshness is somewhat mellowed in the comparatively playful atmosphere of the general composition.

The Task stands midway between The Seasons and The Excursion. All three poems are animated by an intense love of Nature; but Cowper's verse combines the external painting of Thomson with something of the introspective analysis of Wordsworth. The middle

point in which these qualities meet is the happy egotism of the retiring, but well-bred gentleman, who knows how to talk about himself in such a way as to interest his readers. Cowper's poetic descriptions are as minute as a Dutch picture :

I am in truth (he said) so unaccountably local in the use of my pen, that, like the man in the fable, who could leap well nowhere but at Rhodes, I seem incapable of writing at all except at Weston.1

But, just as is the case with the best Dutch painters, his poetic power made his verbal landscape painting appear typical. No poem reflects so clearly as The Task, the leisurely, aristocratic, social life of the eighteenth century in England, with its shadow of coming individualism cast before. What Englishman of to-day, though he may have never been in Buckinghamshire, does not see his country in the following lines?

Thence with what pleasure have we just discerned
The distant plough slow moving, and beside
His labouring team, that swerved not from the track,
The sturdy swain diminished to a boy.
Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain
Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o'er,
Conducts the eye along his sinuous course
Delighted. There, fast-rooted in their bank,
Stand, never overlooked, our favourite elms,
That screen the herdsman's solitary hut;
While far beyond, and overthwart the stream,
bjec as with molten glass, inlays the vale,
in sloping land recedes into the clouds,
isplaying on its varied side the grace

1 Southey's Works of Cowper, vol. iii. p. 75.

Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square tower,1

Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells
Just undulate upon the listening ear;

Groves, heaths, and smoking villages remote.3

In the humorous painting of the building of the cucumber frame; in the descriptions of the tame hare, of the postman's horn, of the sound of church-bells across the snow; is embodied a love of the country with all its animal and vegetable life, as strong in the Englishman as in the ancient Roman; a habit ingrained in him by centuries of assimilated feudalism, but softened by sentiments of a philosophic civilisation. And this lyrical concentration of thought and feeling is perfectly reflected in Cowper's style. He excels, perhaps, all English poets in the quality of well-bred simplicity. In his truly representative poems his versification is always easy, but never vacuous; choice, but absolutely devoid of pretentiousness and affectation. In expressing pathetic ideas, without the aid of ornament, he is unequalled. Witness such varied

and:

and :

For though thou gladly wouldst fulfil
The same kind office for me still,
Thy sight now seconds not thy will,
My Mary!

But well thou playedst the housewife's part,
And all thy threads with magic art
Have wound themselves about this heart,
My Mary!

The poplars are felled; farewell to the shade,
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade.
The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves,
Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.

My fugitive years are all hasting away,
And I must ere long lie as lowly as they,

With a turf on my breast, and a stone at my head,
Ere another such grove shall arise in its stead.

'Tis a sight to engage me, if anything can,
To muse on the perishing pleasures of man ;
Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments, I see,
Have a being less durable even than he.

I therefore purpose not, or dream,
Descanting on his fate,

To give the melancholy theme
A more enduring date :

But misery still delights to trace

Its semblance in another's case.

No voice divine the storm allayed,
No light propitious shone,

When, snatched from all effectual aid,

We perished, each alone:

But I beneath a rougher sea,

And whelmed in deeper gulf than he.

I have already shown that the classic purity of poetical expression, which was so pre-eminent a quality in Cowper, was also a characteristic of the hymns of Watts and Wesley. From this it may with confidence be inferred that the great undercurrent of religious revival in the eighteenth century, equally devotional and democratic in its tendency, was a powerful factor in bringing about a revolution in English Poetry as well as in English politics.

Methodism produced little effect on the governing classes of the country. The dislike with which they regarded it is made apparent by the constant references to it in the letters of Horace Walpole, and even a Churchman so religious as Bishop Butler looked with suspicion on the field-preaching of Wesley, as being tainted with the always dreaded "enthusiasm." Reason, based on experience, was the standard by which refined society judged of all actions; the atmosphere they breathed was entirely political; and, in proportion as the cause of Constitutional Liberty became part of the assets in the social life of the nation, it lost its power as an ideal; so that the poets of the lettered aristocracy, who had once kindled their imagination with the civic spirit of the great writers of Greece and Rome, satisfied themselves more and more with an insipid imitation of classic forms. On the other hand, the ideal of Christian Liberty tended to turn the imaginations of those who cherished it away from the sphere of politics into that of religion. This necessarily encouraged a mode of expression severe in its simplicity; but, at the same time, the religious poets of the eighteenth century, being scholars and men of refinement, knew that it was necessary for them to curb their enthusiasm by art, and to observe in their compositions the rules of correct taste. Hence arose in practice a more natural mode of poetic diction, which, as opposed to the artificial style cultivated by the degenerate followers of Pope, furnished a starting-point for Wordsworth, when he elaborated his revolutionary theory of metrical composition.

CHAPTER XII

THE EARLY ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH

POETRY

ALLAN RAMSAY; WILLIAM SOMERVILE; WILLIAM SHENSTONE; GEORGE, LORD LYTTELTON; JOSEPH AND THOMAS WARTON ; THOMAS GRAY AND WILLIAM Collins; James MACPHERSON ; THOMAS CHATTERTON.

IF Sir Robert Walpole was the representative Englishman in the sphere of political action during the first half of the eighteenth century, Horace Walpole, during the latter half, was a not less typical exponent of the taste and imagination of society in the sphere of critical reflection. No two persons could have been, superficially, more unlike each other than father and son. Between the robust, fox hunting Minister-the country - loving owner of Houghton, himself the type of a country - gentleman, the object of whose policy was, above all things, to reconcile the country-gentlemen of England to the rule of the House of Brunswick-and the delicate, fastidious petit maître, half a Frenchman, loving "the Town," hating squires and all their ways; the contrast was so striking that it is little wonder the scandal of Society should have hinted, probably unjustly, that the two were not bound together by a true lineal relationship. The one was the ruler, the other the spoiled child, of his time.

Horace

Yet they had certain points in common. inherited and cherished the Whig tradition of his father, distinct as this was from the Whiggism of the great Revolution Houses: he was a Whig in the latitude of his churchmanship and his dislike of religious enthusiasm: