too, and rid our hands o' the care on 'em." I cannot say I admired the woman's untutored philosophy, any more than I do that of its prototype in the letter of Sir Roger.

You have formerly seen me acknowledging that, from the common-life variety of the subjects in Cowper's Task; from the familiarity of its style, frequently dignified by poetic strength; from its satire, which gratifies human malignance, and from its threats, which interest human fears, it must prove a much more popular work than the Botanic Garden; that it will be much more generally understood and felt. So will it be than Homer's Iliad. Is Cowper, therefore, a greater poet than Homer ?-is he, therefore, a greater poet than Darwin ?—Yes, about as much as he is a greater poet than Milton, to whom you prefer him.

Previous to the first germ of the Botanic Garden arising in the mind of its author, the ingenious and learned Dr Aikin had observed, in his dissertation on the subject, that the union of natural history and of modern philosophic science with poetry, was the desideratum in the fanes of the muses.

Darwin's great and splendid poem supplies this desideratum. In the train of Urania and her eight sisters, he has enlisted all the elementary

properties; the recently discovered arcana of ve getation; the leading points of astronomic science; the mechanic arts, from their first embryon existence, to their present maturity.

These are his materials, shaped by his luminous, glowing, and creative imagination, into countless, beautiful, and varied forms, floating onwards upon a full rich stream of melodious verse. How much injustice do you do to such a composition, when you call it the gaudy and transient tulip-bed of poesy, while you pronounce Cowper's verses a cluster of roses. Roses let them be, so these so much more splendid flowers of poetic fancy are deemed amaranths, unfading and co-existent, through successive ages, with all true taste for the higher orders of the delightful science.

Adieu. It is fortunate for us both that such voluminous scrolls as this are scarcely more than annual !

LETTER XXVII.

WILLIAM HAYLEY, ESQ.

Lichfield, May 10, 1804.

I THANK you for your third volume of Cowper, which arrived the first of this month. Its contents perused with deliberate attention, still deeper impress my conviction, that far indeed from perfect was Cowper's character, his judg ment, or his epistolary style ;-that his character was sullied by want of charity to the failings of others, and by an unsocial exclusion of all except a few worshippers, whose attention himself and his writings wholly engrossed-his judgment perverted by jealous prejudice against the compositions of contemporary genius; his epistolary style, by a dearth of imagination and eloquence, inconceivable to me from the pen which gave us the Task.

Aware as you were how little I thought his style in letter-writing deserved the superiority you allot to it, it seems strange that in this plementary volume you should boast of universal concurrence in that attested pre-eminence; and

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add, that every intelligent reader must be sensible of its peculiar grace, ease, and harmony. So you sweep into the lumber of unintelligent readers that friend, to whose keen sensibility of the genuine emanations of genius of every species, and to whose ardour in prasing them your pen has borne frequent testimony.

It is a great mistake that your appreciation of these same letters is even general, much less universal; several of my literary friends have expressed opinions on their subject similar to mine.

I believe, however, that your echoers are numerous; all whose malignity the ungenerous and bitter satires of Cowper's pen have gratified; all whose religious terrors their presumptuous anathemas have alarmed; the swarms who, as Swift observes, "delight to hear each other damned;" -all whose self-partiality exults to see a style so nearly on a level with their own, exalted by the editorial fiat of a man of genius and learning above compositions to whose eloquence, wit, and grace they feel their own powers so hopelessly unequal; and all who think his truly estimable compassion for the suffering poor, his fondness for animals, and for five or six devoted admirers of himself and his writings, gave him a right to despise and abuse all the rest of the world; to level our schools and universities with bagnios

and brothels; to degrade the poetic literature of his country; to annihilate the high claims of Spencer, and those of the first poet the world has produced, our mighty Shakespeare, by asserting, as he does in the poem Table Talk, that poetry first rose in Britain with their successor Milton; that all before, and since he appeared, are but wandering lights, and, in comparison of Milton, but as stars and meteors to the sun.

Thus is this clamour of popularity almost exclusively in favour of Cowper, not rational; and irrational popularity always fades before the slowly-accumulating edicts of the impartially ingenious. Justly does he himself say, "One age blows bubbles and the next breaks them." The mania which has gone forth about him resembles that which once prevailed concerning Glover and his Leonidas; and, like that, it will melt away. Pass a few years, and Cowper also will find his level; be esteemed as a writer of genius, who has given one charming work to the world, though seldom, in any thing else he has written, rising above mediocrity.

Ah! yes, this will be so, in despite of all the pains you have taken "to buckram out his memory;" to put corks and bladders of indiscriminate praise under every thing he has written, to