Cowper, to say truth, had the genius not of a poet but of a letter-writer.  The interest of his verse is chiefly historical.  He was a poet of the transition to Wordsworth and the revolutionists, and was a mouthpiece of his time.  But he has left only a tiny quantity of memorable verse.  Lamb has often been quoted in his favour.  “I have,” he wrote to Coleridge in 1796, “been reading The Task with fresh delight.  I am glad you love Cowper.  I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton, but I would not call that man my friend who should be offended with the ’divine chit-chat of Cowper.’” Lamb, it should be remembered, was a youth of twenty-one when he wrote this, and Cowper’s verse had still the attractions of early blossoms that herald the coming of spring.  There is little in The Task to make it worth reading to-day, except to the student of literary history.  Like the Olney Hymns and the moral satires it was a poem written to order.  Lady Austen, the vivacious widow who had meanwhile joined the Olney group, was anxious that Cowper should show what he could do in blank verse.  He undertook to humour her if she would give him a subject.  “Oh,” she said, “you can never be in want of a subject; you can write upon any; write upon this sofa!” Cowper, in his more ambitious verse, seems seldom to have written under the compulsion of the subject as the great poets do.  Even the noble lines On the Loss of the Royal George were written, as he confessed, “by desire of Lady Austen, who wanted words to the March in Scipio.”  For this Lady Austen deserves the world’s thanks, as she does for cheering him up in his low spirits with the story of John Gilpin.  He did not write John Gilpin by request, however.  He was so delighted on hearing the story that he lay awake half the night laughing at it, and the next day he felt compelled to sit down and write it out as a ballad.  “Strange as it may seem,” he afterwards said of it, “the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood, and but for that saddest mood, perhaps, had never been written at all.”  “The grinners at John Gilpin,” he said in another letter, “little dream what the author sometimes suffers.  How I hated myself yesterday for having ever wrote it!” It was the publication of The Task and John Gilpin that made Cowper famous.  It is not The Task that keeps him famous to-day.  There is, it seems to me, more of the divine fire in any half-dozen of his good letters than there is in the entire six books of The Task.  One has only to read the argument at the top of the third book, called The Garden, in order to see in what a dreary didactic spirit it is written.  Here is the argument in full: