of a bishop’s servants”; but his body was dressed in parrot’s colours, and his bald head was bagged or in a white cap.  If he requested one of his friends to send him anything from town, it was usually some little thing, such as a “genteelish toothpick case,” a handsome stock-buckle, a new hat—­“not a round slouch, which I abhor, but a smart well-cocked fashionable affair”—­or a cuckoo-clock.  He seems to have shared Wordsworth’s taste for the last of these.  Are we not told that Wordsworth died as his favourite cuckoo-clock was striking noon?  Cowper may almost be said, so far as his tastes and travels are concerned, to have lived in a cage.  He never ventured outside England, and even of England he knew only a few of the southern counties.  “I have lived much at Southampton,” boasted at the age of sixty, “have slept and caught a sore throat at Lyndhurst, and have swum in the Bay of Weymouth.”  That was his grand tour.  He made a journey to Eastham, near Chichester, about the time of this boast, and confessed that, as he drove with Mrs. Unwin over the downs by moonlight, “I indeed myself was a little daunted by the tremendous height of the Sussex hills in comparison of which all I had seen elsewhere are dwarfs.”  He went on a visit to some relations on the coast of Norfolk a few years later, and, writing to Lady Hesketh, lamented:  “I shall never see Weston more.  I have been tossed like a ball into a far country, from which there is no rebound for me.”  Who but the little recluse of a little world could think of Norfolk as a far country and shake with alarm before the “tremendous height” of the Sussex downs?

“We are strange creatures, my little friend,” Cowper once wrote to Christopher Rowley; “everything that we do is in reality important, though half that we do seems to be push-pin.”  Here we see one of the main reasons of Cowper’s eternal attractiveness.  He played at push-pin during most of his life, but he did so in full consciousness of the background of doom.  He trifled because he knew, if he did not trifle, he would go mad with thinking about Heaven and Hell.  He sought in the infinitesimal a cure for the disease of brooding on the infinite.  His distractions were those not of too light, but of too grave, a mind.  If he picnicked with the ladies, it was in order to divert his thoughts from the wrath to come.  He was gay, but on the edge of the precipice.

I do not mean to suggest that he had no natural inclination to trifling.  Even in the days when he was studying law in the Temple he dined every Thursday with six of his old school-fellows at the Nonsense Club.  His essays in Bonnell Thornton and Coleman’s paper, The Connoisseur, written some time before he went mad and tried to hang himself in a garter, lead one to believe that, if it had not been for his breakdown, he might have equalled or surpassed Addison as a master of light prose.  He was something of the traditional idle apprentice, indeed, during