worsted”—­we feel that this marionette-show has some second and immortal significance.  On another day, “one of the ladies has been playing a harpsichord, while I, with the other, have been playing at battledore and shuttlecock.”  It is a game of cherubs, though of cherubs slightly unfeathered as a result of belonging to the pious English upper-middle classes.  The poet, inclined to be fat, whose chief occupation in winter is “to walk ten times in a day from the fireside to his cucumber frame and back again,” is busy enough on a heavenly errand.  With his pet hares, his goldfinches, his dog, his carpentry, his greenhouse—­“Is not our greenhouse a cabinet of perfumes?”—­his clergymen, his ladies, and his tasks, he is not only constantly amusing himself, but carrying on a secret battle, with all the terrors of Hell.  He is, indeed, a pilgrim who struggles out of one slough of despond only to fall waist-deep into another.  This strange creature who passed so much of his time writing such things as Verses written at Bath on Finding the Heel of a Shoe, Ode to Apollo on an Ink-glass almost dried in the Sun, Lines sent with Two Cockscombs to Miss Green, and On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton’s Bullfinch, stumbled along under a load of woe and repentance as terrible as any of the sorrows that we read of in the great tragedies.  The last of his original poems, The Castaway, is an image of his utter hopelessness.  As he lay dying in 1880 he was asked how he felt.  He replied, “I feel unutterable despair.”  To face damnation with the sweet unselfishness of William Cowper is a rare and saintly accomplishment.  It gives him a place in the company of the beloved authors with men of far greater genius than himself—­with Shakespeare and Lamb and Dickens.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has, in one of his essays, expressed the opinion that of all the English poets “the one who, but for a stroke of madness, would have become our English Horace was William Cowper.  He had the wit,” he added, “with the underlying moral seriousness.”  As for the wit, I doubt it.  Cowper had not the wit that inevitably hardens into “jewels five words long.”  Laboriously as he sought after perfection in his verse, he was never a master of the Horatian phrase.  Such phrases of his—­and there are not many of them—­as have passed into the common speech flash neither with wit nor with wisdom.  Take the best-known of them: 

                        “The cups
  That cheer but not inebriate;”

  “God made the country and man made the town;”

  “I am monarch of all I survey;”

  “Regions Caesar never knew;” and

  “England, with all thy faults, I love thee still!”