“Our meadows are covered with a winter-flood in August; the rushes with which our bottomless chairs were to have been bottomed, and much hay, which was not carried, are gone down the river on a voyage to Ely, and it is even uncertain whether they will ever return.  Sic transit gloria mundi!

“I am glad you have found a curate, may he answer!  Am happy in Mrs. Bouverie’s continued approbation; it is worth while to write for such a reader.  Yours,

  “W.  C.”

The power of imparting interest to commonplace incidents is so great that we read with a sort of excitement a minute account of the conversion of an old card-table into a writing and dining-table, with the causes and consequences of that momentous event, curiosity having been first cunningly aroused by the suggestion that the clerical friend to whom the letter is addressed might, if the mystery were not explained, be haunted by it when he was getting into his pulpit, at which time, as he had told Cowper, perplexing questions were apt to come into his mind.

A man who lived by himself could have little but himself to write about.  Yet in these letters there is hardly a touch of offensive egotism.  Nor is there any querulousness, except that of religious despondency.  From those weaknesses Cowper was free.  Of his proneness to self-revelation we have had a specimen already.

The minor antiquities of the generations immediately preceding ours are becoming rare, as compared with those of remote ages, because nobody thinks it worth while to preserve them.  It is almost as easy to get a personal memento of Priam or Nimrod as it is to get a harpsichord, a spinning-wheel, a tinder-box, or a scratch-back.  An Egyptian wig is attainable, a wig of the Georgian era is hardly so, much less a tie of the Regency.  So it is with the scenes of common life a century or two ago.  They are being lost, because they were familiar.  Here are two of them, however, which have limned themselves with the distinctness of the camera obscura on the page of a chronicler of trifles.

  TO THE REV.  JOHN NEWTON.

  “Nov. 17th, 1783.

“MY DEAR FRIEND,—­The country around is much alarmed with apprehensions of fire.  Two have happened since that of Olney.  One at Hitchin, where the damage is said to amount to eleven thousand pounds; and another, at a place not far from Hitchin, of which I have not yet learnt the name.  Letters have been dropped at Bedford, threatening to burn the town; and the inhabitants have been so intimidated as to have placed a guard in many parts of it, several nights past.  Since our conflagration here, we have sent two women and a boy to the justice, for depredation, S. R. for stealing a piece of beef, which, in her excuse, she said she intended to take care of.  This lady, whom you well remember, escaped for want of evidence; not that evidence was wanting, but our men of Gotham judged it unnecessary to send it.