propelling forces he evidently lacked from the beginning.  For the battle of life he was totally unfit.  His judgment in its healthy state was, even on practical questions, sound enough, as his letters abundantly prove; but his sensibility not only rendered him incapable of wrestling with a rough world, but kept him always on the verge of madness, and frequently plunged him into it.  To the malady which threw him out of active life we owe not the meanest of English poets.

At the age of thirty-two, writing of himself, he says, “I am of a very singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed with.  Certainly I am not an absolute fool, but I have more weakness than the greatest of all the fools I can recollect at present.  In short, if I was as fit for the next world as I am unfit for this—­and God forbid I should speak it in vanity—­I would not change conditions with any saint, in Christendom.”  Folly produces nothing good, and if Cowper had been an absolute fool, he would not have written good poetry.  But he does not exaggerate his own weakness, and that he should have become a power among men is a remarkable triumph of the influences which have given birth to Christian civilization.

The world into which the child came was one very adverse to him, and at the same time very much in need of him.  It was a world from which the spirit of poetry seemed to have fled.  There could be no stronger proof of this than the occupation of the throne of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton by the arch-versifier Pope.  The Revolution of 1688 was glorious, but unlike the Puritan Revolution which it followed, and in the political sphere partly ratified, it was profoundly prosaic.  Spiritual religion, the source of Puritan grandeur and of the poetry of Milton, was almost extinct; there was not much more of it among the Nonconformists, who had now become to a great extent mere Whigs, with a decided Unitarian tendency.  The Church was little better than a political force, cultivated and manipulated by political leaders for their own purposes.  The Bishops were either politicians or theological polemics collecting trophies of victory over free-thinkers as titles to higher preferment.  The inferior clergy as a body were far nearer in character to Trulliber than to Dr. Primrose; coarse, sordid, neglectful of their duties, shamelessly addicted to sinecurism and pluralities, fanatics in their Toryism and in attachment to their corporate privileges, cold, rationalistic and almost heathen in their preachings, if they preached at all.  The society of the day is mirrored in the pictures of Hogarth, in the works of Fielding and Smollett; hard and heartless polish was the best of it; and not a little of it was Marriage a la Mode.  Chesterfield, with his soulless culture, his court graces, and his fashionable immoralities, was about the highest type of an English gentleman; but the Wilkeses, Potters, and Sandwiches, whose mania for