Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/135

 NOTES BY THE WAY.

��66

��On the 22nd of October, 1853, Mr. Yeowell, in a note on ' Pope and Cowper,' states :

" Prefixed to a copy of Hay ley's ' Life and Letters of William Cowper, Esq.,' in the British Museum, is an extract in MS. of a letter from the late Samuel Rose, Esq., to his favourite sister, Hiss Harriet Rose, written in the year before his marriage, at the age of twenty-two, and which, I believe, has never been printed."

The letter, which is dated " Weston Lodge, Sept. 9th, 1789," commences :

" Last week Mr. Cowper finished the ' Odyssey,' and we drank an unreluctant bumper to its success .... You will most probably find it at first less pleasing than Pope's versification, owing to the difference subsisting between blank verse and rhyme. . . .You will find Mr. Pope more refined : Mr. Cowper more simple, grand, and majestic ; and, indeed, insomuch as Mr. Pope is more refined than Mr. Cowper, he is more refined than his original, and in the same proportion departs from Homer himself .... Pope possesses the gentle and amiable graces of a Guido ; Cowper is endowed with the bold sublime genius of a Raphael. .... I hope to refute your second assertion, which was, that women, in the opinion of men, have little to do with literature. I may inform you, that the ' Iliad ' is to be dedicated to Earl Cowper, and the ' Odyssey ' to the Dowager Lady Spencer."

On the 6th of May, 1854, Mr. W. P. Storer asks whether the two additional volumes under the title of ' Cowperiana,' promised by Southey in his preface to the last volume of his edition of Cowper, have ever been published.

J. B. notes on June 21st, 1856, that Bishop Berkeley, in ' Siris,' paragraph 217, forestalls Cowper's well-known reference to tea :

"The luminous spirit lodged and detained in the native balsam of pines and firs (the Bishop's pet 'Tar Water') is of a nature so mild and benign, and proportioned to the human constitution, as to warm without heating, to cheer, but not inebriate."

The revived interest in Southey's edition of Cowper consequent upon Bohn's reprint is the subject of a note on the 8th of August, 1857, in which it is mentioned that some thirty years earlier a Phila- delphia bookseller of repute in his day sent forth in compact octavo reprints several of the most popular English writers, including Cowper. Mr. S. R. Maitland, on the 22nd, expresses his satisfaction that Cowper and his works are more highly appreciated in America than in his own country :

" It is, indeed, lamentable that the work of biography and editing should have been undertaken or meddled with by men like Hayley and Southey bookmakers who, whatever pretensions they might have to criticise the poet, were so void of sympathy with the man, that they could not be expected to form a true opinion, or deliver a just view, of his thoughts, language, and circumstances."

��Mr. Yeowell

on Pope and

Cowper.

��The cup that

cheers :

Cowper

anticipated.

��Mr. Maitland

on Cowper's

works in

America.

�� �