rs appended to Southey's biography
forms, with the biographical portions of his poetry, the materials for
a sketch of his life. Southey's biography itself is very helpful,
though too prolix and too much filled out with dissertations for common
readers. Had its author only done for Cowper what he did for Nelson!
[Our acknowledgments are also due to Mr. Benham, the writer of the
Memoir prefixed to the Globe Edition of Cowper.]

William Cowper came of the Whig nobility of the robe. His great-uncle,
after whom he was named, was the Whig Lord Chancellor of Anne and
George I. His grandfather was that Spencer Cowper, judge of the Common
Pleas, for love of whom the pretty Quakeress drowned herself, and who,
by the rancour of party, was indicted for her murder. His father, the
Rev. John Cowper, D.D., was chaplain to George II. His mother was a
Donne, of the race of the poet, and descended by several lines from
Henry III. A Whig and a gentleman he was by birth, a Whig and a
gentleman he remained to the end. He was born on the 15th November
(old style), 1731, in his father's rectory of Berkhampstead. From
nature he received, with a large measure of the gifts of genius, a
still larger measure of its painful sensibilities. In his portrait; by
Romney the brow bespeaks intellect, the features feeling and
refinement, the eye madness. The stronger parts of character, the
combative and propelling forces he evidently lacked from the beginning.
For the battle of life he was totally unfit. His judgment in its
healthy state was, even on practical questions, sound enough, as his
letters abundantly prove; but his sensibility not only rendered him
incapable of wrestling with a rough world, but kept him always on the
verge of madness, and frequently plunged him into it. To the malady
which threw him out of active life we owe not the meanest of English
poets.

At the age of thirty-two, writing of himself, he says, "I am of a very
singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed
with. Certainly I am not an absolute fool, but I have more weakness
than the greatest of all the fools I can recollect at present. In
short, if I was as fit for the next world as I am unfit for this--and
God forbid I should speak it in vanity--I would not change conditions
with any saint, in Christendom." Folly produces nothing good, and if
Cowper had been an absolute fool, he would not have written good
poetry. But he does not exa