CHAPTER IV.

AUTHORSHIP.  THE MORAL SATIRES.

Since his recovery, Cowper had been looking out for what he most needed, a pleasant occupation.  He tried drawing, carpentering, gardening.  Of gardening he had always been fond; and he understood it as shown by the loving though somewhat “stercoraceous” minuteness of some passages in The Task.  A little greenhouse, used as a parlour in summer, where he sat surrounded by beauty and fragrance, and lulled by pleasant sounds, was another product of the same pursuit, and seems almost Elysian in that dull dark life.  He also found amusement in keeping tame hares, and he fancied that he had reconciled the hare to man and dog.  His three tame hares are among the canonized pets of literature, and they were to his genius what “Sailor” was to the genius of Byron.  But Mrs. Unwin, who had terrible reason for studying his case, saw that the thing most wanted was congenial employment for the mind, and she incited him to try his hand at poetry on a larger scale.  He listened to her advice, and when he was nearly fifty years of age became a poet.  He had acquired the faculty of verse-writing, as we have seen; he had even to some extent formed his manner when he was young.  Age must by this time have quenched his fire, and tamed his imagination, so that the didactic style would suit him best.  In the length of the interval between his early poems and his great work he resembles Milton; but widely different in the two cases had been the current of the intervening years.  Poetry written late in life is of course free from youthful crudity and extravagance.  It also escapes the youthful tendency to imitation.  Cowper’s authorship is ushered in by Southey with a history of English poetry; but this is hardly in place; Cowper had little connexion with anything before him.  Even his knowledge of poetry was not great.  In his youth he had read the great poets, and had studied Milton especially with the ardour of intense admiration.  Nothing ever made him so angry as Johnson’s Life of Milton.  “Oh!” he cries, “I could thrash his old jacket till I made his pension jingle in his pocket.”  Churchill had made a great—­far too great—­an impression on him, when he was a Templar.  Of Churchill, if of anybody, he must be regarded as a follower, though only in his earlier and less successful poems.  In expression he always regarded as a model the neat and gay simplicity of Prior.  But so little had he kept up his reading of anything but sermons and hymns, that he learned for the first time from Johnson’s Lives the existence of Collins.  He is the offspring of the Religious Revival rather than of any school of art.  His most important relation to any of his predecessors is, in fact, one of antagonism to the hard glitter of Pope.