It is difficult to reckon what a great book does. What did the Pilgrim's Progress do for England? What has been its effect on our language? Could we say that it has done for English Prose what Burns did for Poetry"showed how it may build a princely throne on humble truth?" What has been its influence as the most widely read and translated work of the imagination in English— a book accessible to millions who never read Shakespeare, where they may meet a world of men, men outside their ordinary range and yet intelligible and individual, knowable as one's next-door neighbours are not? What again has the book meant in the religious history of England? What did the eleven editions in cheap type and paper,1 issued before Bunyan's death and William III.'s arrival in 1688, do to keep alive the Puritan spirit in this country, and to keep it happy and bright in places where there. was no tinker-preacher with his "sparkling eyes" 2 and his patience to make things "more moderate?" What has been done for English liberty by the book and its writer together? Those twelve stubborn years in prison, the separation from wife and children and the blind little girl, and the sturdy thinking of it all out, so as not to be taken unawares by whip, pillory, banishment or death (G. A. § 327)—what did these do to nerve men then and thereafter to bear what they could not alter? "Where I cannot obey actively, there I am willing to lie down, and to suffer what they shall do unto me."

And supposing he had been talked round and had agreed no longer "devilishly and perniciously to abstain from coming to church to hear divine service," and to be no longer "an upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventicles to the great disturbance and distraction of

1 Dr Brown says it is computed that 100,000 copies were sold in Bunyan's own lifetime.

2 We learn from a contemporary that Bunyan was "tall of stature, strongboned, though not corpulent, somewhat of a ruddy face, with sparkling eyes”; J. Brown, Bunyan, p. 399.

the good subjects of the kingdom, contrary to the laws of our sovereign lord, the King, etc."? Bedford might have kept a tinker the more-and possibly none of the best at that, for there is nothing to show that renegades make good tinkers-and what would England have lost?

I

COWPER

N 1763 the positions of Reading Clerk and Clerk of
Committees in the House of Lords became vacant.

They were patent offices in the patronage of Major William Cowper, a member of a family brilliant in law and letters. The Major had a first cousin of the same house and the same name, a young barrister, in chambers in the Inner Temple, who had been at the bar for nine years without gaining much celebrity in his profession. He was a young man of great personal charm and a certain natural gaiety. Like nearly all the other members of the family, men and women, he wrote verse, but in a lighter vein than most of them, though his father, the Rev. John Cowper, had set him the example of writing ballads (4 Dec. '81, 4 Aug. '83). Again, like the rest of his family, he was a Whig, and "the son of a staunch Whig" (4 Dec. '81). "How the deuce you came to be a Tory," he wrote in later days to another cousin, "is best known to yourself; you have to answer for this novelty to the shades of your ancestors, who were always Whigs, ever since we had any" (10 Feb. '93).

It was obviously appropriate for the Major to appoint a young man of such claims to both the vacant offices, and he did. Something of the kind had long been the young lawyer's wish, and now he had attained it. Unfortunately he changed his mind, and asked to have instead the Clerkship of the Journals of the House of Lords, an office of less pay but less publicity, which was also vacant and in the Major's gift. With some reluctance 1 Dates given in brackets refer to letters of Cowper written on the days indicated.

the patentee consented, and the transference was made. But now difficulties appeared. The Major's right to present was questioned, and an order was made that the Clerk presented should be examined at the Bar of the House as to his qualifications. To be able to meet this ordeal, William began to attend the office daily and to read the Journals of the House. "My days are spent in reading the Journals," he wrote, "and my nights in dreaming of them " (9 Aug. '63).

Law, poetry, and melancholy ran in his family, and the last had now laid hold upon him. The strain continued until, in November, to escape from the examination and the enmity of men, he made three attempts to destroy himself. The Major, for whom he sent on the third of these occasions, realized the state of the case, asked for the "deputation," and took it away with him; "thus ended all my connection with the Parliament Office."

The poor man was on the verge of insanity. His brother John Cowper, a Fellow of Corpus College, Cambridge, came to him at once, but failed to comfort him. He then asked to see his cousin, the Rev. Martin Madan, an Evangelical clergyman in high repute as a leader of his party and a popular preacher-hitherto suspected by his young relatives of being an "enthusiast." Madan spoke to him of the Gospel and of Christ's righteousness, and he was comforted. But the disease was upon him, and there was nothing for it but to send him to the house of Dr Nathaniel Cotton at St Albans-the Collegium Insanorum, where for a year and a half he remained.

So in humiliation and distress a career was ended. There was no more thought of the bar or of public life. Cowper left his physician's house sane and happy, and full of a new Christian conviction, but in all else a broken man, incapable of action, whose utmost hope might be to reach his grave without relapse. Of more than this there was no prospect. Separated from all his old friends, his only connexions with the world were through the post.

ΤΟ

Cowper was a Whig of the eighteenth century and of the great Whig tradition-a man of aristocratic descent and popular sympathies, who had that ease and lightness of touch which is the peculiar privilege of those in whom culture and humour are finely compounded. The exquisite playfulness of his later years shows itself early; the tenderness and sensibility that invariably go with the profoundest humour are there also, but in this case, as in others, it is not in youth that they reach their perfection. He had at Westminster school, under Vincent Bourne, a sound Classical training, and perhaps, as has been suggested, learnt other things from "Vinny" Bourne beside Latin verse.1 There is an affinity between them in their gifts of observation and fondness for animals, and the pupil amused himself in later years by rendering the master into English-with a certain freedom which stamps the personality of the translator on the rendering. Humour, and the early accomplishment of Latin verse, are his initial equipment; and it has been remarked by John Conington that, in his original poems, Cowper is perhaps the greatest master we have in English of the Horatian style. His ease in metre, and his ease and terseness in thought, suggest the comparison, while the critic goes on to add that he has a deeper and more sustained gravity in his serious poems than Horace ever reached, and, in his lighter verses, as in the Epistle to Joseph Hill, a sprightliness and ease seldom equalled by the Latin poet, who, however, never wrote anything so prosaic as the Colubriad.

Very few of his letters survive from before the first attack of insanity. Those of the time of his recovery have little enough of the quality that tempted his friends later on to preserve whatever he wrote. They are all

1 "Bless him," wrote Lamb of Vincent Bourne, "Latin wasn't good enough for him, why wasn't he content with the language which Gay and Prior wrote in ?" (Letter to Wordsworth, 7 April 1815. Lucas, No. 206. The punctuation in Canon Ainger's edition differs. The text of Lamb's letters seems as difficult as their collection). See Cowper, 23 May '81.