Though descended from Donne—­his mother was Anne Donne—­he was apparently more interested in Churchill and Beattie than in him.  His one great poetical master in English was Milton, Johnson’s disparagement of whom he resented with amusing vehemence.  He was probably the least bookish poet who had ever had a classical education.  He described himself in a letter to the Rev. Walter Bagot, in his later years, as “a poor man who has but twenty books in the world, and two of them are your brother Chester’s.”  The passages I have quoted give, no doubt, an exaggerated impression of Cowper’s indifference to literature.  His relish for such books as he enjoyed is proved in many of his letters.  But he was incapable of such enthusiasm for the great things in literature as Keats showed, for instance, in his sonnet on Chapman’s Homer.  Though Cowper, disgusted with Pope, took the extreme step of translating Homer into English verse, he enjoyed even Homer only with certain evangelical reservations.  “I should not have chosen to have been the original author of such a business,” he declared, while he was translating the nineteenth book of the Iliad, “even though all the Nine had stood at my elbow.  Time has wonderful effects.  We admire that in an ancient for which we should send a modern bard to Bedlam.”  It is hardly to be wondered at that his translation of Homer has not survived, while his delightful translation of Vincent Bourne’s Jackdaw has.

Cowper’s poetry, however, is to be praised, if for nothing else, because it played so great a part in giving the world a letter-writer of genius.  It brought him one of the best of his correspondents, his cousin, Lady Hesketh, and it gave various other people a reason for keeping his letters.  Had it not been for his fame as a poet his letters might never have been published, and we should have missed one of the most exquisite histories of small beer to be had outside the pages of Jane Austen.  As a letter-writer he does not, I think, stand in the same rank as Horace Walpole and Charles Lamb.  He has less wit and humour, and he mirrors less of the world.  His letters, however, have an extraordinarily soothing charm.  Cowper’s occupations amuse one, while his nature delights one.  His letters, like Lamb’s, have a soul of goodness—­not of mere virtue, but of goodness—­and we know from his biography that in life he endured the severest test to which a good nature can be subjected.  His treatment of Mrs. Unwin in the imbecile despotism of her old age was as fine in its way as Lamb’s treatment of his sister.  Mrs. Unwin, who had supported Cowper through so many dark and suicidal hours, afterwards became palsied and lost her mental faculties.  “Her character,” as Sir James Frazer writes in the introduction to his charming selection from the letters,[2] “underwent a great change, and she who for years had found all her happiness in ministering to her afflicted friend, and seemed to have no thought