Conqueror than it is to trace the genealogical tree of Queen
Victoria--it was perhaps, I say, this descent from kings which led him to
be more tolerant of "sport" than was Wordsworth. At any rate, Cowper's
vigorous description of being in at the death of a fox may be contrasted
with Wordsworth's "Heart Leap Well," and you will prefer Cowper or
Wordsworth, as your tastes are for or against our old-fashioned English
sports. But even then, as often, Cowper in his poetry was less tolerant
than in his prose, for he writes in _The Task_ of:

detested sport
That owes its pleasures to another's pain,

We may note in all this the almost entire lack of indebtedness in Cowper
to his predecessors. One of his most famous phrases, indeed, that on
"the cup that cheers, but not inebriates," he borrowed from Berkeley; but
his borrowings were few, far fewer than those of any other great poet,
whereas mine would be a long essay were I to produce by the medium of
parallel columns all that other poets have borrowed from him.

Lastly, among Cowper's many excellencies as a poet let me note his
humour. His pathos, his humanity--many fine qualities he has in common
with others; but what shall we say of his humour? If the ubiquitous Scot
were present, so far from his native heath--and I daresay we have one or
two with us--he might claim that humour was also the prerogative of
Robert Burns. He might claim, also, that certain other great
characteristics of Cowper were to be found almost simultaneously in
Burns. There is virtue in the _almost_. Cowper was born in 1731, Burns
in 1759. At any rate humour has been a rare product among the greater
English poets. It was entirely absent in Wordsworth, in Shelley, in
Keats. Byron possessed a gift of satire and wit, but no humour, Tennyson
only a suspicion of it in "The Northern Farmer." From Cowper to
Browning, who also had it at times, there has been little humour in the
greatest English poetry, although plenty of it in the lesser poets--Hood
and the rest. But there was in Cowper a great sense of humour, as there
was also plenty of what Hazlitt, almost censoriously, calls "elegant
trifling." Not only in the imperishable "John Gilpin," but in the "Case
Between Nose and Eyes," "The Nightingale and Glow-worm," and other pieces
you have examples of humorous verse which will live as long as our
language endures.

Cowper's claims as a poet, then, may be emphasized under four heads