gardening he had always been fond; and he understood it
as shown by the loving though somewhat "stercoraceous" minuteness of
some passages in _The Task_. A little greenhouse, used as a parlour in
summer, where he sat surrounded by beauty and fragrance, and lulled by
pleasant sounds, was another product of the same pursuit, and seems
almost Elysian in that dull dark life. He also found amusement in
keeping tame hares, and he fancied that he had reconciled the hare to
man and dog. His three tame hares are among the canonized pets of
literature, and they were to his genius what "Sailor" was to the genius
of Byron. But Mrs. Unwin, who had terrible reason for studying his
case, saw that the thing most wanted was congenial employment for the
mind, and she incited him to try his hand at poetry on a larger scale.
He listened to her advice, and when he was nearly fifty years of age
became a poet. He had acquired the faculty of verse-writing, as we
have seen; he had even to some extent formed his manner when he was
young. Age must by this time have quenched his fire, and tamed his
imagination, so that the didactic style would suit him best. In the
length of the interval between his early poems and his great work he
resembles Milton; but widely different in the two cases had been the
current of the intervening years. Poetry written late in life is of
course free from youthful crudity and extravagance. It also escapes
the youthful tendency to imitation. Cowper's authorship is ushered in
by Southey with a history of English poetry; but this is hardly in
place; Cowper had little connexion with anything before him. Even his
knowledge of poetry was not great. In his youth he had read the great
poets, and had studied Milton especially with the ardour of intense
admiration. Nothing ever made him so angry as Johnson's Life of
Milton. "Oh!" he cries, "I could thrash his old jacket till I made his
pension jingle in his pocket." Churchill had made a great--far too
great--an impression on him, when he was a Templar. Of Churchill, if
of anybody, he must be regarded as a follower, though only in his
earlier and less successful poems. In expression he always regarded as
a model the neat and gay simplicity of Prior. But so little had he
kept up his reading of anything but sermons and hymns, that he learned
for the first time from Johnson's Lives the existence of Collins. He
is the offspring of the Religious Revival rather than of