This is lead for gold.  Horace, it is true, must be judged as something more than an inventor of golden tags.  But no man can hope to succeed Horace unless his lines and phrases are of the kind that naturally pass into golden tags.  This, I know, is a matter not only of style but of temper.  But it is in temper as much as in style that Cowper differs from Horace.  Horace mixed on easy terms with the world.  He enjoyed the same pleasures; he paid his respects to the same duties.  He was a man of the world above all other poets.  Cowper was in comparison a man of the parlour.  His sensibilities would, I fancy, have driven him into retreat, even if he had been neither mad nor pious.  He was the very opposite of a worldling.  He was, as he said of himself in his early thirties, “of a very singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed with.”  While claiming that he was not an absolute fool, he added:  “If I was as fit for the next world as I am unfit for this—­and God forbid I should speak it in vanity—­I would not change conditions with any saint in Christendom.”  Had Horace lived in the eighteenth century he would almost certainly have been a Deist.  Cowper was very nearly a Methodist.  The difference, indeed, between them is fundamental.  Horace was a pig, though a charming one; Cowper was a pigeon.

This being so, it seems to me a mistake to regard Cowper as a Horace manque, instead of being content with his miraculous achievement as a letter-writer.  It may well be that his sufferings, so far from destroying his real genius, harrowed and fertilized the soil in which it grew.  He unquestionably was more ambitious for his verse than for his prose.  He wrote his letters without labour, while he was never weary of using the file on his poems.  “To touch and retouch,” he once wrote to the Rev. William Unwin, “is, though some writers boast of negligence, and others would be ashamed to show their foul copies, the secret of almost all good writing, especially in verse.  I am never weary of it myself.”  Even if we count him only a middling poet, however, this does not mean that all his fastidiousness of composition was wasted.  He acquired in the workshop of verse the style that stood him in such good stead in the field of familiar prose.  It is because of this hard-won ease of style that readers of English will never grow weary of that epistolary autobiography in which he recounts his maniacal fear that his food has been poisoned; his open-eyed wonder at balloons; the story of his mouse; the cure of the distention of his stomach by Lady Hesketh’s gingerbread; the pulling out of a tooth at the dinner-table unperceived by the other guests; his desire to thrash Dr. Johnson till his pension jingled in his pocket; and the mildly fascinated tastes to which he confesses in such a paragraph as: