The Press.
London, England, 1854-04-29 00:00:00

STANDARD POETRY.

The Annotated Edition of the English Poets.
Poetical Works of William Cowper, Vol. I.
Edited by Robert Bell. London : J. W.
Parker and Son.
The Poetical Works of William Cowper. With
Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory
Notes, by the Rev. George Gilfillan. Edin-
burgh : Nichol.
LORD BYRON, in his controversy with Lisle
Bowles, positively asserted that " Cowper was
no poet," but the English public holds a very
contrary opinion.

There is an evergreen popularity in the
vigorous style of Cowper that bids defiance to
every vicissitude of sentiment. Nought but
genius could strike such deep-rooted fame as
that belonging to " The Task." Neither his
diction nor the structure of his sentences re-
mind us of that tinselled French prettiness
discernible in some of his predecessors. His
mind, also, was essentially a Saxon one ; and
the fidelity with which he has described its
religious moods, and its tendency to grave
moralising on human life, are amongst the
reasons why his verse has attained such wide-
spread acceptance. It cannot be denied that
certain phases of our popular religionism in
England are portrayed in many of the passages
of " The Task " with extraordinary fidelity.
Christianity in Cowper was no cold assent to
"the evidences" for revelation, no mere ethi-
cal echo of the fundamental principles of reli-
gion : his faith was fearfully real in its inten-
sity, and, we must say, deplorably narrow in
some of its morbid conceptions. Not a few
divines have held that certain exaggerations
of Cowper are as divergent as the monasticism
of Popery itself from the calmness of the
humble and faithful believer in the Glad
Tidings. Contortions of agony, miserable

THE PRESS.

months of nervous wretchedness, are certainly
no necessary concomitants of faith in Him,
from whose lips flowed the sermon on the
Mount.

Yet, it is only by fixing our attention on the
gloom of Cowper's mind that we can perceive
the depth of his genius. How touching must
be those tones, how eloquently emphatic that
anguage, which can arrest our thoughts on sub-
ects that most of us deem too solemn and
painful for our hours of literary recreation !
" The Task " must be held to contravene the
dictum of Johnson that themes of high reli-
gious import are not suitable to poetry. What
else is that singularly original work but the
religious musings, the spiritual aspirations of
a nature pinioned to earth, gazing with longing
eyes upon the heaven over its head, and, with
the pathos of a prolonged dirge, wailing out
its sorrow over the anguish of mankind? Its
gloomy thoughts are forgotten by us while
picturesque descriptions of the world are
vividly brought before us as we read.
Every-day objects, morals trite by repetition,
stereotyped truths, are taken as the poet's
matter, but his idealising intellect robes the
commonest facts with the prismatic hues of
genius. No other poet has so triumphed over
the difficulty of describing common things
without loss of dignity.
We believe it, however, to be true that it is
to the fairer and to the younger portions of
society—to woman and to youth—that Cow-
per's verse is most dear. Men immersed in
worldly toils feel that the author of " The
Task " intrudes upon the preacher, and would
wish to find more of the Muses and less of the
Apostles in their poetical excursions. There
is at times such harshness in his upbraidings of
the world that in place of being pathetic he is
irritating. That sanguine glow of enthusiasm,
which gives vitality to the cumbrous rhetoric
and wordy moralisings of Thomson in " The
Seasons," is never seen in Cowper. Men like
best those poets who either create a new
world, and people it with "beings of the
mind," or who reconcile them to the present
one. Thus Shakspeare dazzles and delights,
but does not cause discontent. Milton awes,
without casting us into the abjectness of the
Slough of Despond. But Cowper, in his
gloomier moods, is apt to produce moral drea-
riness and a sense of aching void. His anguish
wants that plaintive music which charms us
again and again in the pensive verse of " The
Deserted Village." Many of us "in life's
early morn " have in our happiest hours hung
with pleasure over the many-tinted page of
Cowper, with its contrast of bright images
and dark presentation of an awful back-
ground, and in those happy years the gloom
of his song only served to give a romantic
colouring to his pictures of that unknown
world of which we dreamed. But, advanced
on the road of life, we want some more re
freshing founts of sympathy than the eloquent
exaggerations of Calvinism that ever and anon
burst upon us in the poet of Olney. Most of
us must feel,

" While thinking of the days that are no more,"
that we cannot in his poetry dry
" Tears from the depths of a divine despair."
We ask for some more tender dealing with
our shortcomings and errors than is given to
them by gifted, brooding, and miserable
Cowper. Why did he not oftener write in the
thrilling strain of the verses " On the Receipt
of his Mother's Picture "? Would that he
had given vent to his human sorrows more
frequently in that affecting style, and we might
oftener recur to his pages for refreshment in
" this weary work-a-day world " ! And yet,
when we remember all the pleasure that
Cowper must give every fresh and vigorous
mind on early acquaintance with him, we
cannot but think of him but with mingled
feelings. Vain would it be for criticism to
disparage his genius ; and it would be nearly
an impossibility not to feel tenderly for the
memory of one whose name is " linked with
his land's language," at the contemplation
of whose sufferings sophists themselves might
cease to be censorious, while beholding how
much there was of the sublime and the hum-
bling in the richly.endowed and lamentably-
afflicted author of " The Task."

SATURDAY,

Neither of these new editions of Cowper
can be commended. The life prefixed to
" the annotated " one is bald in style and
meagre in matter, and disagreeably contrasts
with the tasteful and elaborate biography by
Southey. It is little more than a cold
epitome of the facts of the poet's life, without
any genial or graceful illustration. Two
original letters have been recovered by Mr.
Bell, and are printed by him from the originals
in the possession of Mr. William Bodham
Donne. They are addressed to the poet's
cousin, Mrs. Balls. The first of them is
written in the charmingly playful vein which
marks all Cowper's letters to women. It is :

My dear Cousin,—l shall love the turkeys the better
for having procured me a letter from you my old friend
and playfellow in other days. We sent for them yesterday
to the waggoner's house in a village five miles off, and
they arrived safe at Weston in the evening ; safe, us I said,
and in perfect health, as they desire me to tell you, and to
thank you for your kind enquiries. They have also had a
good night, have rested well, and feel themselves much re-
freshed; and will shortly be made acquainted with all
our premises,—for it is early at present, and they have not
yet quitted their apartment. Mrs. Unwin, truly grateful
for your kindness in sending them, bids me present you
her very best thanks and acknowledgments. Mine
accompany hers ; and we both long for the spring, that we
may thank you here in person.
_ _

After some desultory remarks he then con-
tinues :

Do you consider, child, that when you call yourself an
old woman you make it impossible for me to be young?
Know you not that it is forty years since we saw each
other ; that I was at that time at least two years older than
you, and that, consequently, I continue to be so still ? How,
then, can you be old, when I who am so much your elder have
still, as Falstaff says, a smatch of my youth, and am almost
as active as ever? Oh, when shall we ride in a whiskum
snivel again, and laugh as we have done heretofore?
Should ever that day come, you must be the driver; for I
have too great a value both for your neck and my own to
aspire to that office myself. I never excelled in it, and
have hardly been in a whiskum since.
You have done wisely, I dare say, in selling your estate
at Catfield ; but I should have been glad would wisdom
have permitted you to keep it: for of all places in the east
I love Catfield, and should then have had a chance of seeing
it again.
Lady Hesketh will not allow that you are unknown to
her, though you call yourself so. Have you forgotten how
she threatened one evening to kill you, and how you verily
believed that she intended it, and were frightened out of
your wits ? She, however, remembers it well ; bids me
present her best compliments to you, and assure you that
she has laid aside all such murtherous intentions.
Adieu, my dear cousin. Let me hear from you as often
as you can : and believe me with much affection yours,
Wm. COWPER.

The second letter is not of an interesting
character. When we recollect that the work
is announced as " annotated," and observe the
paucity of the notes, we cannot but feel disap •
pointment. The edition, however, is very cheap,
and is suited for the pocket ; but until we see
how the volume containing " The Task " is an•
notated we must reserve our final opinion on
its literary merits—a course that we will not
follow in the case of that publication over
which Mr. Gilfillan presides. The titlepage
of the latter one announces " with life, critical
" dissertation, and explanatory notes." The
volume contains four hundred and sixteen
pages, and there are no notes. Of the style
in which the editor writes we give a spe-
cimen :
The genius of Cowper and its fruits we reserve for an
after prefatory essay. Nor need we dwell at length upon
his private character. He was confessedly an amiable,
modest, generous, temperate, honest, upright, and pious
man. He had faults indeed, but they seemed all more or
less related to his dark life•lung companion—disease. He
was somewhat testy in temper, and his feelings were
easily wounded. He had a morbid craving, latterly, for
stimulus, and his excessive use of tea decidedly tended to
increase his melancholy. In his youth he had probably
dipped ha shoe in the prevailing licentiousness of the
London of that age.
An "after prefatory essay" ( ! ). "An amiable,
" modest, generous, temperate, honest, upright,
" and pious man." Verbiage of such kind is
enough to indicate the worth of critical dis-
sertation from Mr. Gilfillan. After telling
us that the poet was " honest, " he records
that he was " upright," lest the reader might
have misunderstood the editor. Having told
us that Cowper was " temperate," he adds that
" he had a morbid craving for atiniulue" (sic.);
and, with an audacity of conjecture that we
think extremely improper in a clerical editor,
Mr. Gilfillan writes of the author of " The
Olney Hymns " that " he had probably dipped
" his shoe in the prevailing licentiousness of
" London." The phrase " dipped his shoe "is
a coarse and offensive mode of insinuating

APRIL 29, 1854.

the charge of secret dissipation in early life
against Cowper, We feel that criticism in
this case is not needed, and that specimens of
Mr. Giltillan's style sufficiently register its
condemnation.

Decimal Numeration and Decimal Coinage. By
William T. Thomson, F.R.S.E., F.I.A. London :
Blackwood.
THE subject of decimals has not lost its attraction,
notwithstanding war and rumours of war—probably
because the select few whom it interests are of a
class not much affected by popular cries. Mr. Thom-
son's pamphlet, or lecture, consists chiefly of extracts
from the evidence taken before last year's committee,
to which, however, are added comments of his own.
He objects to a 1/. unit, and proposes one of 10s. in-
stead ; his chief reason for such preference being
the expediency of retaining the shilling unaltered.
It has also the advantage of allowing of a teal copper
coin representing its I.looth part, the value of which
would be one 1-sth of a penny—whereas the cent
(value 20. nearly) is inconveniently large fora cop-
per coin, and inconveniently small for a silver one.
Against the above merits must be set the drawback
—in our view a very serious one—of an entire
change in all those pecuniary relations which are now
expressed in pounds. There is something to say on
both sides, and Mr. Thomson argues his case well.
The pamphlet, though short, is full of instruction.

England, Turkey, and Russia. By the Rev. George
Croly, LL.D. London : Seele ys.
THIS eloquent discourse is replete with those rheto-
rical graces that characterise the pulpit eloquence of
Doctor Croly. Few divines of the present day rival
this accomplished preacher in the art of clothing high
aspirations in language appropriately vivid, and in
generalising the results of reflection, without losing
influence over a mixed auditory. It is very difficult
to be profound and persuasive, and to mingle the in-
quiry of a philosopher with the ingenuity of an advo-
cate, but both as a preacher and a political
essayist Doctor Croly shows that this difficulty can
be overcome. We have not space at present to dis-
cuss the literary merits of this long-tried and con-
sistent supporter of sound principles in Church and
State, but we have a lively recollection of his im-
portant services in the cause of pure religion and ra
tional liberty. Wide as has been the recognition of
his merits, we doubt whether a perfect appreciation
has ever been given to this eminent person, and
when our columns are less crowded we may be
tempted to notice some of the essential merits of one
who has wielded a luminous pen for many years,
and employed an eloquent tongue with great success
in the most sacred of causes. We may express our
surprise that the works of this brilliant writer have
not been published in a collected form.

The History of England, in Rhyme, from the
Conquest to the Restoration. London : Hope and
Co.

MANY attempts have been made to find a royal road
to learning by the aid of rhyme. One of our novelists
represents a worthy maiden lady intent on writing a
cookery book in rhyme giving a receipt for spiced
beef after this fashion :

" Spice your beef, and make it hot,
Tie, and put it in the pot," Ltc.
Philip Yorke, afterwards the great Chancellor
Hardwicke, in his young days hoaxed Mr. Justice
Powis—famed for his phrase, " Look, do you see "
by pretending that he was about to produce Coke
upon Lyttelton in rhyme. When asked for a speci-
men he glibly repeated :

" He that holdeth his lands in fee,
Need neither to quake nor to shiver,
I humbly conceive, for look, do you see,
They are his and his heirs for ever."
The justice thought the design so good that he
often asked Mr. Yorke subsequently how he was
getting on with his great poem. The writer of this
book may boast that he has actually accomplished a
more arduous task. Three hundred and thirty pages
of rhyme in double columns relate the history of
England from the Conquest,
" When William,
For that's his name,
The Conqueror
Forthwith became,"
to the Restoration,
"When London streets

Were very gay,
By thousands lin d
Throughout the day,
Who came to see
King Charles pasaby,
Salute him as
His Majesty,