The longer I live here, the better I like the place and the people who belong to it. I am upon very good terms with no less than five families, besides two or three odd scrambling fellows like myself. The last acquaintance I made here is with the race of the Unwins, consisting of father and mother, son and daughter, the most comfortable social folks you ever knew. The father is a clergyman, and the son is designed for orders. The design, however, is quite his own, proceeding merely from his being and having always been sincere in his belief and love of the Gospel.

Cowper soon became an inmate of their house, and the friendship lasted for life. Mrs. Unwin, though only seven years his senior, watched over him with the tenderness and care of a mother. One of Cowper's latest poems is addressed to her when she was enfeebled with sickness.

The twentieth year is well-nigh past,

Since first our sky was overcast ;

Ah, would that this might be the last!
My Mary!

Thy spirits have a fainter flow,

I see thee daily weaker grow;

'Twas my distress that brought thee low,

My Mary!

Thy silver locks, once auburn bright,

Are still more lovely in my sight

Than golden beams of orient light,

My Mary!

Partakers of thy sad decline,

Thy hands their little force resign,

Yet, gently prest, press gently mine,

My Mary!

The home at Huntingdon was broken up in 1768 by the sudden death of Mr. Unwin, and the family moved to Olney, a sleepy little town on the Ouse in Buckinghamshire. The curate of Olney was the Rev. John Newton,

a famed Evangelical preacher of that day, and Cowper became warmly attached to him, and wrote in conjunction with him the Olney Hymns,' several of which are still very popular.

But Newton's influence on Cowper was too exciting, and in 1773 his madness returned for a time. Fortunately Mr. Newton was called to a change in London, and Mrs. Unwin persuaded Cowper to give some attention to general literature, and to try his hand at poetry again. The result was a little volume of poems published in 1781 with the title of Moral Satires.' The poems are of no great merit, and they lack the vivid picturesque force which Cowper afterwards showed in the 'Task.' In the following lines from the first of the Satires,' Cowper describes with nice discrimination the great writers of Queen Anne's reign.

In front of these came Addison. In him
Humour in holiday and sightly trim,
Sublimity and Attic taste combined
To polish, furnish, and delight the mind.
Then Pope, as harmony itself exact,

In verse well disciplined, complete, compact,
Gave virtue and morality a grace,

That, quite eclipsing pleasure's painted face,
Levied a tax of wonder and applause,

Even on the fools that trampled on their laws.
But he (his musical finesse was such,
So nice his ear, so delicate his touch)
Made poetry a mere mechanic art,

And every warbler had his tune by heart.
Nature imparting her satiric gift,

Her serious mirth to Arbuthnot and Swift;

With droll sobriety they raised a smile

At folly's cost, themselves unmoved the while,
That constellation set, the world in vain
Must hope to look upon their like again.

In 1781 Cowper gained a new friend in Lady Austen, a baronet's widow who came to live in the parsonage in Olney. Both Cowper and Mrs. Unwin were charmed with her conversation, and it became a custom with the friends to dine always together alternately in the houses. of the two ladies.' In several of Cowper's playful poems she is spoken of as Sister Anne.'

Lady Austen's conversation had as happy an effect upon the melancholy spirit of Cowper as the harp of David upon Saul. Whenever the cloud seemed to be coming over him, her sprightly powers were exerted to dispel it. One afternoon, when he appeared more than usually depressed, she told him the story of John Gilpin, which had been told to her in her childhood, and which, in her relation, tickled his fancy as much as it has that of thousands and tens of thousands since in his. The next morning he said to her that he had been kept awake during the greater part of the night by thinking of the story and laughing at it; and that he had turned it into a ballad.'

To Lady Austen's inspiration we owe the 'Task.' She urged him to write a poem in blank verse, and when he asked for a subject, she answered, 'Oh, you can never be in want of a subject; you can write upon any; write upon this sofa!' Cowper alludes to this in the opening lines of the poem :

I sing the Sofa. I who lately sang

Truth, Hope, and Charity, and touch'd with awe
The solemn chords, and, with a trembling hand,
Escaped with pain from that adventurous flight,
Now seek repose upon an humbler theme;

The theme though humble, yet august and proud
The occasion, for the Fair commands the song.

The Task is in six books, and a great variety of subjects is dealt with, and the connection between them is often very slight. But there are passages of much beauty in all of them, and the work became popular, as it Southey.

deserved. In the first book there is a fine passage describing the beauty of sounds in nature:

Not rural sights alone, but rural sounds
Exhilarate the spirit, and restore

The tone of languid nature. Mighty winds
That sweep the skirt of some far-spreading wood

Of ancient growth, make music not unlike
The dash of Ocean on his winding shore,
And lull the spirit while they fill the mind;
Unnumber'd branches waving in the blast,
And all their leaves fast fluttering, all at once.

In the second book there are the indignant lines on slavery, but the fourth book, The Winter Evening,' is perhaps the most beautiful of all. There is in it a succession of delightful pictures: the postman laden with news, the waggoner toiling through the snow, the cosy circle round the tea-table, and the fine apostrophe to winter: Oh Winter! ruler of the inverted year,

Thy scatter'd hair with sleet like ashes fill'd;
Thy breath congeal'd upon thy lips; thy cheeks
Fringed with a beard made white with other snows
Than those of age; thy forehead wrapt in clouds ;
A leafless branch thy sceptre; and thy throne

A sliding car indebted to no wheels,

But urged by storms along its slippery way;

I love thee, all unlovely as thou seem'st,

And dreaded as thou art.

The 'Task' was published in 1785, and the next year Lady Hesketh paid him a visit. The cousins had not met for many years, and he writes to her:

My dear, I will not let you come till the end of May or the beginning of June, because, before that time, my greenhouse will not be ready to receive us, and it is the only pleasant room belonging to us. When the plants go out, we go in. I line it with mats, and spread the floor with mats; and there you shall sit, with a bed of mignonnette at your side,

and a hedge of honeysuckles, roses, and jasmine; and I will make you a bouquet of myrtle every day.

One result of Lady Hesketh's visit was their removal from Olney to a house at Weston, not far removed, but in a much healthier situation. Here he wrote a number of his minor poems, and completed his translation of Homer which he had begun as early as 1784. But none of these works added materially to his fame, which rests now upon the 'Task,' 'John Gilpin,' and his charming letters.

Mrs. Unwin's health now began to fail rapidly, and in 1796 she died. Cowper lived a weary three or four years after her, and died in April 1800.

BURKE AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

THE French Revolution in its early stages of progress was hailed with delight by many pure and ardent young minds in England.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!

So sang the poet Wordsworth, and to him and Coleridge and others the fall of the Bastille and the uprising of the French people seemed signs of the dawning of a glorious day of liberty and brotherhood.

But to Edmund Burke this uprising appeared a horrible desecration of liberty and a reckless casting away of all the wisdom of bygone times. With the eye of a prophet he foresaw from the beginning the course of excess and cruelty which the Revolution was to take, and he whose earlier years had been spent in pleading for