of the first, as well as in some degree from that of all
previous centuries. Among the authors of this generation whose
writings belonged to other departments of thought than pure literature
may be mentioned, in passing, the great historian, Edward Gibbon, whose
_Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ was published from 1776-88, and
Edmund Burke, whose political speeches and pamphlets possess a true
literary quality. The romantic poets had addressed the imagination
rather than the heart. It was reserved for two men--a contrast to one
another in almost every respect--to bring once more into British song a
strong individual feeling, and with it a new warmth and directness of
speech. These were William Cowper (1731-1800) and Robert Burns
(1759-96). Cowper spoke out of his own life experience, his agony, his
love, his worship and despair; and straightway the varnish that had
glittered over all our poetry since the time of Dryden melted away.
Cowper had scribbled verses when he was a young law student at the
Middle Temple in London, and he had contributed to the _Olney Hymns_,
published in 1779 by his friend and pastor, the Rev. John Newton; but
{213} he only began to write poetry in earnest when he was nearly fifty
years old. In 1782, the date of his first volume, he said, in a letter
to a friend, that he had read but one English poet during the past
twenty years. Perhaps, therefore, of all English poets of equal
culture, Cowper owed the least impulse to books and the most to the
need of uttering his inmost thoughts and feelings. Cowper had a most
unhappy life. As a child, he was shy, sensitive, and sickly, and
suffered much from bullying and fagging at a school whither he was sent
after his mother's death. This happened when he was six years old; and
in his affecting lines written _On Receipt of My Mother's Picture_, he
speaks of himself as a

"Wretch even then, life's journey just begun."

In 1763 he became insane and was sent to an asylum, where he spent a
year. Judicious treatment restored him to sanity, but he came out a
broken man and remained for the rest of his life an invalid, unfitted
for any active occupation. His disease took the form of religious
melancholy. He had two recurrences of madness, and both times made
attempts upon his life. At Huntingdon, and afterward at Olney, in
Buckinghamshire, he found a home with the Unwin family, whose kindness
did all which the most soothing and delicate care