to the literati of both places, brought him the thanks of the Scotch professors for his two volumes. Mr Rose also put into his hands a copy of Burns' Poems, which, although chiefly written in a language that was new to him, he read twice, with feelings, as we may suppose, of no slight admiration. The barba rism of the dialect, however, was, in his opinion, a great disadvantage to the author; and, in reference to the feelings of his own countrymen on this subject, he says very happily, “His candle is bright, but shut up in a dark lantern." Mr Rose appears to have been one of those persons who have a great ambition for cultivating the acquaintance of men of genius, and with Cowper he succeeded so well that he soon admitted him into the number of his most intimate correspondents. Indeed, his future conduct proved him to have been well deserving of this confidence ; for, having afterwards settled in London as a barrister, he found frequent opportunities of serving his poetical friend, and repeatedly visited him at a time when his state of mind rendered the attentions of such an individual peculiarly valuable.* A circumstance which occurred to Cowper about this period, although trivial, deserves to be recorded, for the pleasing light in which it places his modesty and good nature. One morning his faithful servant Sam informed him that there was a plain-looking man in the kitchen who desired to speak with him. The stranger was immediately called in, who announced himself as the parish-clerk of All-Saints, in Northampton. It had been for some time, he told the poet, the custom in his parish to annex a copy of verses to the bill of mortality which was annually published Cowper was a Whig, as appears from the following passage in a letter addressed to Lady Hesketh in March 1790:- I am neither Tory nor High Churchman, but an old Whig, as my father was before me, and an enemy, consequently, to all tyrannical impositions." G at Christmas, and having heard of the fame of his muse, he was desirous of enlisting her in this mortuary service. This undoubtedly was a request calculated to alarm the vanity of even an inferior writer; and the author of "The Task," who could not for his life give a rude or even an angry answer, recommended his visiter to apply to the men of genius of his own town, and pointed out one in particular, a statuary, whom every body knew to be a first-rate maker of verses. But the sapient clerk exclaimed, "Alas! sir, I have heretofore borrowed help from him; but he is a gentleman of so much reading, that the people of our town cannot understand him!" This was making bad worse; and the poet was about to remark, that he was afraid his verses would be undervalued for the same reason, when it occurred to him to inquire of his guest, whether he had travelled all the way from Northampton on so trivial an errand. The man answered in the affirmative; when the relenting author, than whom no man was ever less vain that had so good a right to be so, not only furnished him with a copy of verses for the present occasion, but even acted as his laureate for the five following years. One of these poems has always struck us as being particularly suited to the occasion, and, if we may judge from our own feelings, will be the more admired the oftener it is read. It is as follows: He who sits from day to day Where the prison'd lark is hung, Hardly knows that he has sung. Where the watchman in his round So your verse-man I, and clerk, Duly at my time I come, Soon the grave must be your home, But the monitory strain, Oft repeated in your ears, Can a truth, by all confess'd Pleasure's call attention wins, Death and Judgment, Heaven and Hell- O then, ere the turf or tomb Spirit of Instruction! come, Make us learn, that we must die. On being restored to health, Cowper resumed his translation of Homer, and laboured at this great work with astonishing industry. In his letters to his friends, he makes frequent mention of the pains he had be stowed, and the progress he was making, and as often urges, as an apology for his want of punctu ality as a correspondent, the duty he owed to the old Grecian. With the exception of an occasional visit to his polite and accomplished neighbours, the Throckmortons, he rose as regularly to his task as the village-carpenter, and sometimes laboured nearly as long. When engaged in the composition of his original poems, he had rarely studied, as has already been stated, more than two hours a-day, but he often devoted eight to Homer; and when we compare the indifferent success of the undertaking with the infinite toil it cost him, we are led to regret that he was not advised to engage in some original work in place of wasting his talents upon translation. But he him. self was very confident of success, and, in various passages of his letters, he not only indicates this with a plainness not to be mistaken, but proves that he entertained no high opinion of Pope's translation. We select a few for the satisfaction of the reader. "Knowing it to have been universally the opinion ' of the literati, ever since they have allowed themselves to consider the matter coolly, that a translation, properly so called, of Homer, is, notwithstanding what Pope has done, a desideratum in the English language, it struck me, that an attempt to supply the deficiency would be an honourable one; and having made myself, in former years, somewhat critically a master of the original. I was, by this double consideration, induced to make the attempt myself. I wish that all English readers had your unsophisticated, or rather unadulterated taste, and could relish simplicity like you. But I am well aware that in this respect I am under a disadvantage, and that many, especially many ladies, missing many turns and prettinesses of expression that they have admired in Pope, will account my translation in those particulars defective. But I comfort myself with the thought, that in reality it is no defect; on the contrary, that the want of all such embellishments as do not belong to the original, will be one of its principal merits with persons indeed capable of relishing Homer. He is the best poet that ever lived, for many reasons, but for none more than for that majestic plainness that distinguishes him from all others. As an accomplish. ed person moves gracefully without thinking of it, in like manner the dignity of Homer seems to cost him no labour. It was natural to him to say great things, and to say them well; and little ornaments To say the truth, I were beneath his notice. have no fears now about the success of my translation, though, in time past, I have had many. I knew there was a style somewhere, could I but find it, in which Homer ought to be rendered, and which alone would suit him. Long time I blundered about it, ere I could attain to any decided judgment on the matter. At first I was betrayed, by a desire of accommodating my language to the simplicity of his, into much of the quaintness that belonged to our writers of the fifteenth century. In the course of many revisals, I have delivered myself from this evil, I believe entirely; but I have done it slowly, and as a man separates himself from his mistress when he is going to marry. I had so strong a predilection in favour of this style at first, that I was crazed to find that others were not as much enamoured with it as myself. At every passage of that sort which I obliterated, I groaned bitterly, and said to myself, I am spoiling my work to please those who have no taste for the simple graces of antiquity. But in measure as I adopted a more modern phraseology, I became a convert to their opinion; and in the last revisal, which I am now making, am not sensible of having spared a single expression of the obsolete kind. I see my work so much improved by this alteration, that I am filled with wonder at my own backwardness to assent to the necessity of it; and the more, when I consider, that Milton, with whose manner I account myself intimately acquainted, is never quaint, never twangs through the nose, but is every where grand and elegant, without resorting to musty antiquity for his beauties. On the contrary, he took a long stride forward, left the language of his own day far behind him, and anticipated the expressions of a century yet to come." On the 25th August 1790 he completed his trans |