This means no more than that he was not a statesman, but an artist.  He was a connoisseur of great actions, not a practicer of them.  At Strawberry Hill he could at least keep himself in sufficient health with the aid of iced water and by not wearing a hat when out of doors to compose the greatest works of art of their kind that have appeared in English.  Had he written his letters for money we should have praised him as one of the busiest and most devoted of authors, and never have thought of blaming him for abstaining from statesmanship as he did from wine.  Possibly he had the constitution for neither.  His genius was a genius, not of Westminster, but of Strawberry Hill.  It is in Strawberry Hill that one finally prefers to see him framed, an extraordinarily likeable, charming, and whimsical figure.  He himself has suggested his kingdom entrancingly for us in a letter describing his return to Strawberry after a visit to Paris in 1769: 

I feel myself here like a swan, that after living six weeks in a nasty pool upon a common, is got back into its own Thames.  I do nothing but plume and clean myself, and enjoy the verdure and silent waves.  Neatness and greenth are so essential in my opinion to the country, that in France, where I see nothing but chalk and dirty peasants, I seem in a terrestrial purgatory that is neither town or country.  The face of England is so beautiful, that I do not believe Tempe or Arcadia were half so rural; for both lying in hot climates, must have wanted the turf of our lawns.  It is unfortunate to have so pastoral a taste, when I want a cane more than a crook.  We are absurd creatures; at twenty I loved nothing but London.

Back in Strawberry Hill, he is the Prince Charming among correspondents.  One cannot love him as one loves Charles Lamb and men of a deeper and more imaginative tenderness.  But how incomparable he is as an acquaintance!  How exquisite a specimen—­hand-painted—­for the collector of the choice creatures of the human race!

VI.—­WILLIAM COWPER

Cowper has the charm of littleness.  His life and genius were on the miniature scale, though his tragedy was a burden for Atlas.  He left several pictures of himself in his letters, all of which make one see him as a veritable Tom Thumb among Christians.  He wrote, he tells us, at Olney, in “a summerhouse not much bigger than a sedan-chair.”  At an earlier date, when he was living at Huntingdon, he compared himself to “a Thames wherry in a world full of tempest and commotion,” and congratulated himself on “the creek I have put into and the snugness it affords me.”  His very clothes suggested that he was the inhabitant of a plaything world.  “Green and buff,” he declared, “are colours in which I am oftener seen than in any others, and are become almost as natural to me as a parrot.”  “My thoughts,” he informed the Rev. John Newton, “are clad in a sober livery, for the most part as grave as that