s's own judgment a passage
from another poem of Cowper's, to be compared with the same writer's
Sylvan Sampler. In the lines to Mary,--

"Thy _needles_, once a shining store,
For my sake restless heretofore,
Now rust disused, and shine no more,
My Mary,"

contain a simple, household, "_indoor_," artificial, and ordinary
image; I refer Mr. Bowles to the stanza, and ask if these three lines
about "_needles_" are not worth all the boasted twaddling about
trees, so triumphantly re-quoted? and yet, in _fact_, what do they
convey? A homely collection of images and ideas, associated with the
darning of stockings, and the hemming of shirts, and the mending of
breeches; but will any one deny that they are eminently poetical and
pathetic as addressed by Cowper to his nurse? The trash of trees
reminds me of a saying of Sheridan's. Soon after the "Rejected
Address" scene in 1812, I met Sheridan. In the course of dinner, he
said, "Lord Byron, did you know that, amongst the writers of
addresses, was Whitbread himself?" I answered by an enquiry of what
sort of an address he had made. "Of that," replied Sheridan, "I
remember little, except that there was a _phoenix_ in it."--"A
phoenix!! Well, how did he describe it?"--"_Like a poulterer_,"
answered Sheridan: "it was green, and yellow, and red, and blue: he
did not let us off for a single feather." And just such as this
poulterer's account of a phoenix is Cowper's stick-picker's detail of
a wood, with all its petty minutiae of this, that, and the other.]

And now that we have heard the Catholic repreached with envy,
duplicity, licentiousness, avarice--what was the Calvinist? He
attempted the most atrocious of crimes in the Christian code, viz.
suicide--and why? because he was to be examined whether he was fit
for an office which he seems to wish to have made a sinecure. His
connection with Mrs. Unwin was pure enough, for the old lady was
devout, and he was deranged; but why then is the infirm and then
elderly Pope to be reproved for his connection with Martha Blount:
Cowper was the almoner of Mrs. Throgmorton; but Pope's charities were
his own, and they were noble and extensive, far beyond his fortune's
warrant. Pope was the tolerant yet steady adherent of the most
bigoted of sects; and Cowper the most bigoted and despondent sectary
that ever anticipated damnation to himself or others. Is this harsh?
I know it is, and I do not assert it as