Cowper's merits have been summed up by Mr. Southey in the words—" the most popular poet of his generation, and the hest of English His letters are written in a genuine unaffected English style, and are marked for the most part by a playfulness and humour which effectually prevent the weary feeling that usually attends a continuous reading of epistolary correspondence. Absence of is again a chief characteristic of his poems. They are free from all sickly sentimentality or mannerism in language. As regards freedom from the first, the manliness of the poet presents a striking contrast to the feminine character of the man; while, with reference to the second point, Cowper has the merit of having done much towards that improvement in poetic diction which subsequently received so great an impulse through the poems of Wordsworth. He was an enthusiastic lover of natnre ; and some of his descriptions of natural objects are such as Wordsworth himself might be proud to own. His poems contain also, as it is not too strongly expressed by Hazlitt, "a number of pictures of domestic comfort and social refine ment which can hardly be forgotten but with the language itself." (' Lectures on the English Poets,' p. 182.) There is a striking amount of variety in his poems, or, taking but one of them, in the ' Task' alone. Some of his smaller pieces, as for instance the 'Lines on receiving his Mother's Portrait,' and those addressed To Mary,' are exquisitely pathetic.
His translation of Homer is unequal in execution, as be expected in the case of a work of such length, and of an author sub ject to attacks of melancholy as Cowper was. But taken as a whole, and judged by those rules which should be applied to translations, it must be pronounced the best translation of Homer which we pos sess. He set out with a determination to seize, so far as he could, the real spirit of Homer ; and if he bas not always succeeded, his failure may be partly attributed to his failing health and the circumstances under which it was written.
There are numerous lives of Cowper. The first is that by Hayley, and as such, and the work of Cowper's friend, it ought to be men tioned, though it was never of much value, and has been long super seded. The best life of Cowper, in every respect, is that of Southey : an edition of it in Bohn's ' Standard Library' includes the 'Private Correspondence,' which Southey was not able to publish in the edition, though he embodied nearly all that was essential in it. A poem entitled Anti Thelyphthora,' being a satire against those who would do away with the institution of marriage, appears among Cowper's poems for the first timo in Southey's edition.