of the Elizabethan period, poetical observation of nature
had ceased to be just; and, after substituting for justness the wildest
eccentricities of conceit, it went for a long time into another
extreme--that of copying and recopying certain academic
conventionalities, instead of even attempting the natural model. It is
not true, as Wordsworth and others have said, that Dryden himself could
not draw from the life. He could and did; but his genius was not
specially attracted to such drawing, his subjects did not usually call
for it, and his readers did not want it. It is not true that Thomson
could not "see"; nor is it true of all his contemporaries and immediate
followers that they were blind. But the eighteenth century had slipped
into a fault which was at least as fatal as that of the
Idealist-Impressionists of the seventeenth, or as that of the
Realist-Impressionists of our own time. The former neglected
universality in their hunt after personal conceits; the latter neglect
it in the endeavour to add nothing to rigidly elaborated personal
sensation. The one kind outstrips nature; the other comes short of art.
From Dryden to Cowper the fault was different from both of these. It
neglected the personal impression and the attention to nature too much.
It dared not present either without stewing them in a sauce of stock
ideas, stock conventions, stock words and phrases, which equally missed
the universal and the particular. Cowper and the other great men who
were his contemporaries by publication if not by birth, set to work to
cure this fault. Even the weakest of them could never have been guilty
of such a passage as that famous one which Congreve (as clever a man as
any) wrote, and which Johnson (as clever a man as any) admired. The
sentiment which actuated them was, if we may trust Coleridge's account
of Boyer or Bowyer, the famous tyrant of Christ's Hospital, well
diffused. "'Nymph,' boy? You mean your nurse's daughter," puts in a
somewhat brutal and narrow form the correction which the time needed,
and which these four in their different ways applied.

We have already glanced at the way in which Cowper applied it in his
larger poems: he did it equally well, and perhaps more tellingly, in his
smaller. The day on which a poet of no mean pretensions, one belonging
altogether to the upper classes of English society, and one whose lack
of university education mattered the less because the universities were
just then at th