The influence of the Nonsense Club is to be traced in all Cowper's life and writings: or, rather, it may be truer to say that the major part of his work reveals in him the same idleness, the same ease of style and disdain for pretentious rhetoric as characterise the five essays in the Connoisseur. In the embarrassed and belated course of his life there were many pieces of good fortune or good guidance; the melancholy that attacked him at the age of 32 was compensated by his extraordinary growth in strength and energy of spirit towards his fiftieth year. At the same time his old ideas and habits of thought were not discarded. There was a deepening of the power of observation which had been already shown in his essays, there was a livelier interest in literary workmanship: but still The Task is, in the main, a leisurely exercise of the faculties that had been tested, slackly enough, in the days of Cowper's residence in the Temple and his association with the wits.

His letters are his principal work in prose, if not the best of all his work. They differ from most of the prose of the time by the same interval as separates the verse of The Task at its best from the verse of The Botanic Garden. The phrase of Landor, in the preface to the Hellenics, "not prismatic but diaphanous," applies more fitly to the style of Cowper in verse and prose, especially prose, than to any other writer. It is not that the style is insipid or tame; it is alive and light; but it escapes notice, like the prose of Southey, by reason of its perfect accommodation to the matter.

The matter in this case is the life and experience of a man who followed consistently his natural bent for the quiet life and the Valley of Humiliation; who believed instinctively and sincerely, and without any parade of philosophy, that it was better to be a spectator than an actor in life (letter to Joseph Hill, 3rd July 1765). The chief part of the letters is a record of the unimportant things of Huntingdon, Olney, and Weston; though there are some heroic matters in them also, as in Cowper's perseverance in work when he had once been roused to it, and the courage with which he protested at last against the officious counsels and rebuke of Mr. Newton. As Cowper's poetry, at its best, is refreshing, because of its command of the object in view, its observance of the right distance, its calmness and simplicity, so the prose of his letters is able to give the aspect of things, and the essence of experience, in clear sentences that insinuate their

meaning into the mind without display or affectation: there is no strain or friction or heat. The prose of Cowper is free from the extraordinary fragments of poetical diction that sometimes interrupt in a glaring manner the even-tempered diction of his poetical work and though his letters are not wanting in literary conceits, these are not characteristic or frequent, as they are in the letters of Gray and Walpole. The excellence of Cowper's style in his letters is its fluency and continuity; he is not, as a rule, epigrammatic.

'Everything that we do is in reality important, though half that we do seems to be pushpin.' This phrase from a letter of the year 1788 might be taken out of its context as a general confession of Cowper's theory of life, and a justification of his want of spirit. Certainly no man with so feeble a hold upon life ever made sɔ much out of an apparently narrow range of experience. The picture in Cowper's letters of his life at Olney and Weston (were it not that he had bad dreams) is one of the brightest in the 18th century. And in so far as it is a memorable picture, the success is due to the writer's faculty of seeing and appreciating things as they came to him, without leaving his own ground. His letters have the distinction of Miss Austen's novels, with which they often seem to have a mysterious affinity; the subjects are so trivial, the value of the record so much out of proportion to the subjects. No letters in English are more absolutely free from the disgrace attaching to the manners of public and professional rhetoric. At the same time, they are good, not as any true account of incidents or people may be good, but good because they are written in the best way. The effect they produce is not that of documents, but of literature. There is no pretence of fine writing, no attempt at historical portraiture of characters, in the letters about the small adventures of Olney, the blue willows, the flooded meadows, the spinnie, the Throckmortons. But the perfect sincerity of the style is more captivating and more inimitable than all the graces and brilliances.

W. P. KER.

MR. VILLAGE TO MR. TOWN

DEAR COUSIN—The country at present, no less than the metropolis, abounding with politicians of every kind, I began to despair of picking up any intelligence that might possibly be entertaining to your readers. However, I have lately visited some of the most distant parts of the kingdom with a clergyman of my acquaintance: I shall not trouble you with an account of the improvements that have been made in the seats we saw according to the modern taste, but proceed to give you some reflections which occurred to us on observing several country churches and the behaviour of their congregations.

The ruinous condition of some of these edifices gave me great offence; and I could not help wishing, that the honest vicar, instead of indulging his genius for improvements, by enclosing his gooseberry-bushes within a Chinese rail, and converting half an acre of his glebe-land into a bowling-green, would have applied part of his income to the more laudable purpose of sheltering his parishioners from the weather during their attendance on divine service. It is no uncommon thing to see the parsonage-house well thatched and in exceeding good repair, while the church perhaps has scarce any other roof than the ivy that grows over it. The noise of owls, bats, and magpies makes the principal part of the church music in many of these ancient edifices; and the walls, like a large map, seem to be portioned out into capes, seas, and promontories, by the various colours by which the damps have stained them. Sometimes, the foundation being too weak to support the steeple any longer, it has been found expedient to pull down that part of the building, and to hang the bells under a wooden shed on the ground beside it. This is the case in a parish in Norfolk, through which I lately passed, and where the clerk and the sexton, like the two figures at St.

Dunstan's, serve the bells in capacity of clappers, by striking them alternately with a hammer.

In other churches I have observed, that nothing unseemly or ruinous is to be found except in the clergymen and the appendages of his person. The squire of the parish, or his ancestors perhaps, to testify their devotion and leave a lasting monument of their magnificence, have adorned the altar-piece with the richest crimson velvet, embroidered with vine leaves and ears of wheat; and have dressed up the pulpit with the same splendour and expense; while the gentleman, who fills it, is exalted, in the midst of all this finery, with a surplice as dirty as a farmer's frock, and a periwig that seems to have transferred its faculty of curling to the band, which appears in full buckle beneath it.

But if I was concerned to see several distressed pastors, as well as many of our country churches in a tottering condition, I was more offended with the indecency of worship in others. I could wish that the clergy would inform their congregations, that there is no occasion to scream themselves hoarse in making the responses; that the town-crier is not the only person qualified to pray with due devotion; and that he who bawls the loudest may, nevertheless, be the wickedest fellow in the parish. The old women too in the aisle might be told that their time would be better employed in attending to the sermon, than in fumbling over their tattered testaments till they have found the text, by which time the discourse is drawing near to a conclusion; while a word or two of instruction might not be thrown away upon the younger part of the congregation, to teach them that making posies in summer time, and cracking nuts in autumn, is no part of the religious ceremony.

The good old practice of psalm-singing is indeed wonderfully improved in many country churches since the days of Sternhold and Hopkins; and there is scarce a parish-clerk, who has so little taste as not to pick his staves out of the New Version. This has occasioned great complaints in some places, where the clerk has been forced to bawl by himself, because the rest of the congregation cannot find the psalm at the end of their prayerbooks; while others are highly disgusted at the innovation, and stick as obstinately to the Old Version as to the old style. The tunes themselves have also been new set to jiggish measures; and the sober drawl, which used to accompany the two first staves of the hundredth psalm, with the Gloria Patri, is now split

into as many quavers as an Italian air. For this purpose there is in every country an itinerant band of vocal musicians, who make it their business to go round to all the churches in their turns, and, after a prelude with the pitch-pipe, astonish the audience with hymns set to the new Winchester measure, and anthems of their own composing. As these new-fashioned psalmodists are necessarily made up of young men and maids, we may naturally suppose that there is a perfect concord and symphony between them; and, indeed, I have known it happen, that these sweet singers have more than once been brought into disgrace, by too close an unison between the thorough-bass and the treble.

It is a difficult matter to decide which is looked upon as the greatest man in a country church, the parson or his clerk. The latter is most certainly held in higher veneration, where the former happens to be only a poor curate, who rides post every Sabbath from village to village, and mounts and dismounts at the church door. The clerk's office is not only to tag the prayers with an amen, or usher in the sermon with a stave; but he is also the universal father to give away the brides, and the standing godfather to all the new-born bantlings. But in many places there is a still greater man belonging to the church than either the parson or the clerk himself. The person I mean is the squire, who, like the king, may be styled head of the church in his own parish. If the benefice be in his own gift, the vicar is his creature, and of consequence entirely at his devotion; or, if the care of the church be left to a curate, the Sunday fees of roast beef and plum pudding, and a liberty to shoot in the manor, will bring him as much under the squire's command as his dogs and horses. For this reason the bell is often kept tolling, and the people waiting in the churchyard, an hour longer than the usual time; nor must the service begin till the squire has strutted up the aisle, and seated himself in the great pew in the chancel. The length of the sermon is also measured by the will of the squire, as formerly by the hour-glass and I know one parish where the preacher has always the complaisance to conclude his discourse, however abruptly, the minute that the squire gives the signal, by rising up after his nap.

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In a village church, the squire's lady, or the vicar's wife are perhaps the only females that are stared at for their finery, but in the larger cities and towns, where the newest fashions are brought