con With regard to Cowper's art of transition, I am disposed to agree with Mr. Hayley, that it was very nice. In his own mind, trivial and solemn subjects were easily associated, and he appears to make no effort in bringing them together. The transition sprang from the peculiar habits of his imagination, and was marked by the delicacy and subtlety of his powers. But the general taste and frame of the human mind is not calculated to receive pleasure from such transitions, however dexterously they may be made. The reader's imagination is never so passively in the hands of an author, as not to compare the different impressions arising from successive passages; and there is no versatility in the writer's own thoughts, that will give an air of natural nexion to subjects, if it does not belong to them. Whatever Cowper's art of transition may be, the effect of it is to crowd into close contiguity his Dutch painting and Divinity. This moment we view him, as if prompted by a disdain of all the gaudy subjects of imagination, sporting agreeably with every trifle that comes in his way; in the next, a recollection of the most awful concerns of the human soul, and a belief that four-fifths of the species are living under the ban of their Creator's displeasure, come across his mind; and we then, in the compass of a page, exchange the facetious satirist, or the poet of the garden or the greenhouse, for one who speaks to us in the name of the Omnipotent, and who announces to us all his terrors. No one, undoubtedly, shall VOL. VI. A A prescribe limits to the association of devout and ordinary thoughts; but still propriety dictates, that the aspect of composition shall not rapidly turn from the smile of levity to a frown that denounces eternal perdition. He not only passes, within a short compass, from the jocose to the awful, but he sometimes blends them intimately together. It is fair that blundering commentators on the Bible should be exposed. The idea of a drunken postilion forgetting to put the linchpin in the wheel of his carriage, may also be very entertaining to those whose safety is not endangered by his negligence; but still the comparison of a false judgment, which a perverse commentator may pass on the Holy Scriptures, with the accident of Tom the driver being in his cups, is somewhat too familiar for so grave a subject. The force, the humour, and picturesqueness of those satirical sketches, which are interspersed with his religious poems on Hope, Truth, Charity, &c. in his first volume, need not be disputed. One should be sorry to lose them, or indeed any thing that Cowper has written, always saving and excepting the story of Misagathus and his horse, which might be mistaken for an interpolation by Mrs. Unwin. But in those satirical sketches there is still a taste of something like comic sermons; whether he describes the antiquated prude going to church, followed by her footboy, with the dew-drop hanging at his nose, or Vinosa, in the military mess-room, thus expounding his religious belief, "Adieu to all morality! if grace "Make works a vain ingredient in the case. "The Christian hope is-Waiter, draw the cork-"If I mistake not-Blockhead! with a fork! "Without good works, whatever some may boast, "Mere folly and delusion-Sir, your toast. "My firm persuasion is, at least sometimes, "That heav'n will weigh man's virtues and his crimes. "I glide and steal along with heav'n in view, "And,-pardon me, the bottle stands with you." The mirth of the above lines consists chiefly in placing the doctrine of the importance of good works to salvation in the mouth of a drunkard. It is a calvinistic poet making game of an anti-calvinistic creed; and is an excellent specimen of pious bantering and evangelical raillery. But Religion, which disdains the hostility of ridicule, ought also to be above its alliance. Against this practice of compounding mirth and godliness, we may quote the poet's own remark upon St. Paul. "So did not Paul. Direct me to a quip, And the Christian poet, by the solemnity of his subject, certainly identifies himself with the Christian preacher; who, as Cowper elsewhere remarks, should be sparing of his smile. The noble effect of one of his religious pieces, in which he has scarcely in any instance descended to the ludicrous, proves the justice of his own advice. His "Expostulation" is a poetical sermon-an eloquent and sublime one. But there is no Hogarth-painting in this brilliant Scripture piece. Lastly, the objects of his satire are sometimes so unskilfully selected, as to attract either a scanty portion of our indignation, or none at all. When he exposes real vice and enormity, it is with a power that makes the heart triumph in their exposure. But we are very little interested by his declamations on such topics as the effeminacy of modern soldiers; the prodigality of poor gentlemen giving cast clothes to their valets; or the finery of a country girl, whose head-dress is "indebted to some smart wig-weaver's hand." There is also much of the querulous laudator temporis acti in reproaching the English youths of his own day, who beat the French in trials of horsemanship, for not being like their forefathers, who beat the same people in contests for crowns; as if there were any thing more laudable in men butchering their fellow creatures, for the purposes of unprincipled ambition, than employing themselves in the rivalship of manly exercise. One would have thought too, that the gentle recluse of Olney, who had so often employed himself in making boxes and bird-cages, might have had a little more indulgence for such as amuse themselves with chess and billiards, than to inveigh so bitterly against those pastimes. In the mean time, while the tone of his satire becomes rigid, that of his poetry is apt to grow relaxed. The saintly and austere artist seems to be so much afraid of making song a mere fascination to the ear, that he casts, now and then, a little roughness into his versification, particularly his rhymes; not from a vicious ear, but merely to shew that he despises being smooth; forgetting that our language has no superfluous harmony to throw away, and that the roughness of verse is not its strength, but its weakness-the stagnation of the stream, and not its forcible current. Apparently, also, from the fear of ostentation in language, he occasionally sinks his expression into flatness. Even in his high-toned poem of "Expostulation," he tells Britain of the time when she was a " puling starv'ling chit." Considering the tenor and circumstances of his life, it is not much to be wondered at, that some asperities and peculiarities should have adhered to the strong stem of his genius, like the moss and fungus that cling to some noble oak of the forest, amidst the damps of its unsunned retirement. It is more surprising that he preserved, in such seclusion, so much genuine power of comic observation. Though he himself acknowledged having written 66 many things with bile" in his first volume, yet his satire has many legitimate objects: and it is not abstracted and declamatory satire; but it places human manners before us in the liveliest attitudes and clearest colours. There is much of the full |