eme for a "letter to the editor" of
_The Baptist Eye-opener_. One cannot imagine, however, its causing a
flutter in the breast of even the meekest of the nine muses.

Cowper, to say truth, had the genius not of a poet but of a letter-writer.
The interest of his verse is chiefly historical. He was a poet of the
transition to Wordsworth and the revolutionists, and was a mouthpiece of
his time. But he has left only a tiny quantity of memorable verse. Lamb
has often been quoted in his favour. "I have," he wrote to Coleridge in
1796, "been reading _The Task_ with fresh delight. I am glad you love
Cowper. I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton, but I would not
call that man my friend who should be offended with the 'divine chit-chat
of Cowper.'" Lamb, it should be remembered, was a youth of twenty-one when
he wrote this, and Cowper's verse had still the attractions of early
blossoms that herald the coming of spring. There is little in _The Task_
to make it worth reading to-day, except to the student of literary
history. Like the Olney Hymns and the moral satires it was a poem written
to order. Lady Austen, the vivacious widow who had meanwhile joined the
Olney group, was anxious that Cowper should show what he could do in blank
verse. He undertook to humour her if she would give him a subject. "Oh,"
she said, "you can never be in want of a subject; you can write upon any;
write upon this sofa!" Cowper, in his more ambitious verse, seems seldom
to have written under the compulsion of the subject as the great poets do.
Even the noble lines _On the Loss of the Royal George_ were written, as he
confessed, "by desire of Lady Austen, who wanted words to the March in
_Scipio_." For this Lady Austen deserves the world's thanks, as she does
for cheering him up in his low spirits with the story of John Gilpin. He
did not write _John Gilpin_ by request, however. He was so delighted on
hearing the story that he lay awake half the night laughing at it, and the
next day he felt compelled to sit down and write it out as a ballad.
"Strange as it may seem," he afterwards said of it, "the most ludicrous
lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood, and but for that
saddest mood, perhaps, had never been written at all." "The grinners at
_John Gilpin_," he said in another letter, "little dream what the author
sometimes suffers. How I hated myself yesterday for having ever wrote it!"
It was the publication of _The Task_ and _John