Lady Hesketh had her eye on the Laureateship, and probably with that view persuaded her cousin to write loyal verses on the recovery of George III.  He wrote the verses, but to the hint of the Laureateship he said, “Heaven guard my brows from the wreath you mention, whatever wreaths beside may hereafter adorn them.  It would be a leaden extinguisher clapt on my genius, and I should never more produce a line worth reading.”  Besides, was he not already the mortuary poet of All Saints, Northampton?

CHAPTER VII.

THE LETTERS.

Southey, no mean judge in such a matter, calls Cowper the best of English, letter-writers.  If the first place is shared with him by any one it is by Byron, rather than by Gray, whose letters are pieces of fine writing, addressed to literary men, or Horace Walpole, whose letters are memoirs, the English counterpart of St. Simon.  The letters both of Gray and Walpole are manifestly written for publication.  Those of Cowper have the true epistolary charm.  They are conversation, perfectly artless, and at the same time autobiography, perfectly genuine, whereas all formal autobiography is cooked.  They are the vehicles of the writer’s thoughts and feelings, and the mirror of his life.  We have the strongest proofs that they were not written for publication.  In many of them there are outpourings of wretchedness which could not possibly have been intended for any heart but that to which they were addressed, while others contain medical details which no one would have thought of presenting to the public eye.  Some, we know, were answers to letters received but a moment before; and Southey says that the manuscripts are very free from erasures.  Though Cowper kept a note-book for subjects, which no doubt were scarce with him, it is manifest that he did not premeditate.  Grace of form he never lacks, but this was a part of his nature, improved by his classical training.  The character and the thoughts presented are those of a recluse who was sometimes a hypochondriac; the life is life at Olney.  But simple self-revelation is always interesting, and a garrulous playfulness with great happiness of expression can lend a certain charm even to things most trivial and commonplace.  There is also a certain pleasure in being carried back to the quiet days before railways and telegraphs, when people passed their whole lives on the same spot, and life moved always in the same tranquil round.  In truth it is to such days that letter-writing, as a species of literature belongs, telegrams and postal cards have almost killed it now.

The large collection of Cowper’s letters is probably seldom taken from the shelf; and the “Elegant Extracts” select those letters which are most sententious, and therefore least characteristic.  Two or three specimens of the other style may not be unwelcome or needless as elements of a biographical sketch; though specimens hardly do justice to a series of which the charm, such as it is, is evenly diffused, not gathered, into centres of brilliancy like Madame de Sevigne’s letter on the Orleans Marriage.  Here is a letter written, in the highest spirits to Lady Hesketh.