tempt. "The Dutch fleet is hovering about," he wrote, "but it is a pickpocket war, and not a martial one, and I never attend to petty larceny." As for mobs, his attitude to them is to be seen in his comment on the Wilkes riots, when he declares :

I cannot bear to have the name of Liberty profaned to the destruction of the cause; for frantic tumults only lead to that terrible corrective, Arbitrary Power-which cowards call out for as protection, and knaves are so ready to grant.

Not that he feared mobs as he feared Governments. He regarded them with an aristocrat's scorn. The only mob that almost won his tolerance was that which celebrated the acquittal of Admiral Keppel in 1779. It was of the mob at this time that he wrote to the Countess of Ossory: "They were, as George Montagu said of our earthquakes, so tame you might have stroked them." When near the end of his life the September massacres broke out in Paris, his mobhatred revived again, and he denounced the French with the hysterical violence with which many people to-day denounce the Bolshevists. He called them "inferno-human beings," "that atrocious and detestable nation," and declared that "France must be abhorred to latest posterity." His letters on the subject to "Holy Hannah," whatever else may be said against them, are not those of a cold and dilettante gossip. They are the letters of the same excitable Horace Walpole who, at an earlier age, when a row had broken out between the manager and the audience in Drury Lane Theatre, had not been able to restrain himself, but had cried angrily from his box, "He is an impudent rascal!" But his politics never got beyond an angry cry. His conduct in Drury Lane was characteristic of him:

The whole pit huzzaed, and repeated the words. Only think of my being a popular orator! But what was still better, while my shadow of a person was dilating to the consistence of a hero, one of the chief ringleaders of the riot, coming under the box where I sat, and pulling off his hat, said, “Mr. Walpole, what would you please to have us do next?" It is impossible to describe to you the confusion into which this apostrophe threw me. I sank down into the box, and have never since ventured to set my foot into the playhouse.

There you have the fable of Walpole's life. He always in the end sank down into his box or clambered back to his mantelpiece. Other men might save the situation. As for him, he had to look after his squirrels and his friends.

This means no more than that he was not a statesman, but an artist. He was a connoisseur of great actions, not a practiser of them. At Strawberry Hill he could at least keep himself in sufficient health with the aid of iced water and by not wearing a hat when out of doors to compose the greatest works of art of their kind that have appeared in English. Had he written his letters for money we should have praised him as one of the busiest and most devoted of authors, and never have thought of blaming him for abstaining from statesmanship as he did from wine. Possibly he had the constitution for neither. His genius was a genius, not. of Westminster, but of Strawberry Hill. It is in Strawberry Hill that one finally prefers to see him framed, an extraordinarily likeable, charming, and whimsical figure. He himself has suggested his kingdom entrancingly for us in a letter describing his return to Strawberry after a visit to Paris in 1769:

I feel myself here like a swan, that after living six weeks in a nasty pool upon a common, is got back into its own Thames. I do nothing but plume and clean myself, and enjoy the verdure and silent waves. Neatness and greenth are so essential in my opinion to the country, that in France, where I see nothing but chalk and dirty peasants, I seem in a terrestrial purgatory that is neither town or country. The face of England is so beautiful, that I do not believe Tempe or Arcadia were half so rural; for both, lying in hot climates, must have wanted the turf of our lawns. It is unfortunate to have so pastoral a taste, when I want a cane more than a crook. We are absurd creatures; at twenty I loved nothing but London.

Back in Strawberry Hill, he is the Prince Charming among correspondents. One cannot love him as one loves Charles Lamb and men of a deeper and more imaginative tenderness. But how incomparable he is as an acquaintance! How exquisite a specimen-hand-painted-for the collector of the choice creatures of the human race!

VI.-WILLIAM COWPER

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COWPER has the charm of littleness. His life and genius were on the miniature scale, though his tragedy was a burden for Atlas. He left several pictures of himself in his letters, all of which make one see him as a veritable Tom Thumb among Christians. He wrote, he tells us, at Olney, in "a summerhouse not much bigger than a sedan-chair." At an earlier date, when he was living at Huntingdon, he compared himself to "a Thames wherry in a world full of tempest and commotion," and congratulated himself on "the creek I have put into and the snugness it affords me." His very clothes suggested that he was the inhabitant of a plaything world. "Green and buff," he declared, colours in which I am oftener seen than in any others, and are become almost as natural to me as a parrot." 'My thoughts," he informed the Rev. John Newton, in a sober livery, for the most part as grave as that of a bishop's servants"; but his body was dressed in parrot's colours, and his bald head was in a bag or a white cap. If he requested one of his friends to send him anything from town, it was usually some little thing, such as a "genteelish toothpick case," a handsome stock-buckle, a new hat"not a round slouch, which I abhor, but a smart well-cocked fashionable affair"-or a cuckoo-clock. He seems to have shared Wordsworth's taste for the last of these. Are we not told that Wordsworth died as his favourite cuckoo-clock was striking noon? Cowper may almost be said, so far as his tastes and travels are concerned, to have lived in a cage. He never ventured outside England, and even of England he knew only a few of the southern counties. "I have lived much at Southampton," he boasted at the age of sixty, "have slept and caught a sore throat at Lyndhurst, and have swum in the Bay of Weymouth." That was his grand

tour. He made a journey to Eastham, near Chichester, about the time of this boast, and confessed that, as he drove with Mrs. Unwin over the downs by moonlight, "I indeed myself was a little daunted by the tremendous height of the Sussex hills in comparison of which all I had seen elsewhere are dwarfs." He went on a visit to some relations on the coast of Norfolk a few years later, and, writing to Lady Hesketh, lamented: "I shall never see Weston more. I have been tossed like a ball into a far country, from which there is no rebound for me." Who but the little recluse of a little world could think of Norfolk as a far country and shake with alarm before the "tremendous height" of the Sussex downs?

"We are strange creatures, my little friend," Cowper once wrote to Christopher Rowley; "everything that we do is in reality important, though half that we do seems to be push-pin." Here we see one of the main reasons of Cowper's eternal attractiveness. He played at push-pin during most of his life, but he did so in full consciousness of the background of doom. He trifled because he knew, if he did not trifle, he would go mad with thinking about Heaven and Hell. He sought in the infinitesimal a cure for the disease of brooding on the infinite. His distractions were those not of too light, but of too grave, a mind. If he picnicked with the ladies, it was in order to divert his thoughts from the wrath to come. He was gay, but on the edge of a precipice.

I do not mean to suggest that he had no natural inclination to trifling. Even in the days when he was studying law in the Temple he dined every Thursday with six of his old school-fellows at the Nonsense Club. His essays in Bonnell Thornton and Coleman's paper, The Connoisseur, written some time before he went mad and tried to hang himself in a garter, lead one to believe that, if it had not been for his breakdown, he might have equalled or surpassed Addison as a master of light prose. He was something of the traditional idle apprentice, indeed, during his first years in a solicitor's office, as we gather from the letter in which he reminds Lady Hesketh how he and Thurlow used to pass

the time with her and her sister, Theodora, the object of his fruitless love. "There was I, and the future Lord Chancellor," he wrote, "constantly employed from morning to night in giggling and making giggle, instead of studying the law." Such was his life till the first attack of madness came at the age of thirty-two. He had already, it is true, on one occasion, felt an ominous shock as a schoolboy at Westminster, when a skull thrown up by a gravedigger at St. Margaret's rolled towards him and struck him on the leg. Again, in his chambers in the Middle Temple, he suffered for a time from religious melancholy, which he did his best to combat with the aid of the poems of George Herbert. Even at the age of twenty-three he told Robert Lloyd in a rhymed epistle that he "addressed the muse," not in order to show his genius or his wit,

But to divert a fierce banditti

(Sworn foe to everything that's witty)
That, in a black infernal train,
Make cruel inroads in my brain,

And daily threaten to drive thence
My little garrison of sense.

It was not till after his release from the St. Albans madhouse in his thirties, however, that he began to build a little new world of pleasures on the ruins of the old. He now set himself of necessity to the task of creating a refuge within sight of the Cross, where he could live, in his brighter moments, a sort of Epicurean of evangelical piety. He was a damned soul that must occupy itself at all costs and not damn itself still deeper in the process. His round of recreation, it must be admitted, was for the most part such as would make the average modern pleasure-seeker quail more than any inferno of miseries. Only a nature of peculiar sweetness could charm us from the atmosphere of endless sermons and hymns in which Cowper learned to be happy in the Unwins' Huntingdon home. Breakfast, he tells us, was between eight and nine. Then, "till eleven, we read either the Scripture, or the sermons of some faithful preacher of those holy mysteries." Church was at eleven.