nance the modern enthusiasm after a London life, and to recommend rural ease and leisure as friendly to the cause of piety and virtue"."

If the world had not liked his poem, the world must have been worse than it is. But Cowper himself, perhaps, was not aware of what it was that supplied the place of plan, and with happier effect than the most skilful plan could have produced. There are no passages in a poet's works which are more carped at while he lives, than those wherein he speaks of himself; and if he has any readers after his death, there are none then which are perused with greater interest. In the Task there is nothing which could be carped at on that score, even by a supercilious critic, and yet the reader feels that the poet is continually present; he becomes intimately acquainted with him, and this it is which gives to this delightful poem its unity and its peculiar charm.

74 To Mr. Unwin, Oct. 10, 1784.

CHAP. XIII.

TRANSLATION OF HOMER. LADY HESKETH COMES TO OLNEY. REMOVAL TO THE VILLAGE OF WESTON.

In a letter to Lady Hesketh, written soon after the renewal of their correspondence, Cowper says, "Now, my dear, I am going to tell you a secret: it is a great secret, that you must not whisper even to your cat. No creature is at this moment apprized of it, but Mrs. Unwin and her son. I am making a new translation of Homer, and am on the point of finishing the twenty-first book of the Iliad. The reasons upon which I undertake this Herculean labour, and by which I justify an enterprise in which I seem so effectually anticipated by Pope, (although, in fact, he has not anticipated me at all,) I may possibly give you, if you wish for them, when I can find nothing more interesting to say!."

It appears from the same letter, that he began this translation on the 12th of November, 1784, which was as soon as he had completed his labours for the second volume of his Poems, by finishing the piece entitled Tirocinium. So much as a week could not have elapsed between the completion of one undertaking, and the commencement of this most laborious of his works. But he had now learned the art of self-management, and was able steadily to practise it; he knew how necessary it was to have some regular employ1 Nov. 9, 1785.

FROM A PROFILE IN THE POSSESSION OF SIR THOMAS HESKETH, BART.

ment which should occupy his mind, without exciting it.

Some pleasure he took in surprising his friends with his productions, but he had further motives for reticence in this case. "Till I had made," he says, "such a progress in my present undertaking as to put it out of all doubt, that, if I lived, I should proceed in and finish it, I kept the matter to myself. It would have done me little honour to have told my friends that I had an arduous enterprise in hand, if afterwards I must have told them that I had dropped it"." Few men, however, would have been better warranted by experience in relying upon their own perseverance. Tully's rule, Nulla dies sine lined,'" said he, "will make a volume in less time than one would suppose. I adhered to it so rigidly, (in composing the Task,) that though more than once I found three lines as many as I had time to compass, still I wrote; and finding occasionally, and as it might happen, a more fluent vein, the abundance of one day made me amends for the barrenness of another 3." He had worked at it sometimes an hour a day, sometimes half a one, and sometimes two hours. But his translation was performed by piece-work; he set himself forty lines for

4 Oct. 30, 1784.

2 To Mr. Hill, Dec. 24, 1785. 3 To Mr. Newton, Nov. 27, 1784. " Twice the length of an ordinary imposition at Westminster, with the additional difference of translating into blank verse instead of literal prose. Some of my readers will call to mind, as I do, the look, and the tone of voice, and the movement of the head with which Dr. Vincent used to pronounce his ordinary morning sentence of "twenty lines of Homer, and not go to breakfast."