more doubt about the qualifications of the fifth of our
selected eighteenth-century letter-writers. Cowper's poetry has gone
through not very strongly marked but rather curious variations of
critical estimate. Like all transition writers he was a little too much
in front of the prevailing taste of his own time, and a little too much
behind that of the time immediately succeeding. There may have been a
very brief period, before the great romantic poets of the early
nineteenth century became known, when he "drove" young persons like
Marianne Dashwood "wild": but Marianne Dashwoods and their periods
succeed and do not resemble each other.[22] He had probably less hold on
this time--when he had the best chance of popularity--than Crabbe, one
of his own group, while he was destitute of the extraordinary
appeals--which might be altogether unrecognised for a time but when felt
are unmistakable--of the other two, Burns and Blake, of the poets of the
seventeen-eighties. His religiosity was a doubtful "asset" as people say
nowadays: and even his pathetic personal history had its awkward side.
But as to his letters there has hardly at any time, since they became
known, existed a difference of opinion among competent judges. There may
be some unfortunates for whom they are too "mild": but we hardly reckon
as arbiters of taste the people for whom even brandy is too mild unless
you empty the cayenne cruet into it. Moreover the "tea-pot pieties" (as
a poet-critic who ought to have known better once scornfully called
them) make no importunate appearance in the bulk of the correspondence:
while as regards the madness this supplies one of the most puzzling and
perhaps not the least disquieting of "human documents." A reader may
say--by no means in his haste, but after consideration--not merely
"Where is the slightest sign of insanity in these?" but "How on earth
did it happen that the writer of these _ever_ went mad?" even with the
assistance of Newton, and Teedon, and, one has to say, Mrs. Unwin.

For among the characteristics of Cowper's letters at their frequent and
pretty voluminous best, are some that seem not merely inconsistent with
insanity, but likely to be positive antidotes to and preservatives from
it. There is a quiet humour--not of the fantastic kind which, as in
Charles Lamb, forces us to admit the possibility of near alliance to
_over_-balance of mind--but _counter_-balancing, antiseptic, _salt_.
There is abundant if not