God to Sin and of fallen Man in general, proves moral Necessity and Inability to be consistent with blameworthiness." Good Dr. Holmes has said somewhere in his jaunty way that it was only decent for a man who believed in this doctrine to go mad. Well, Cowper believed in it; there was no insulating pad of worldly indifference between his faith and his nerves, and he went mad.

And he was in another way the victim of his age. We have heard him comparing his days at Huntingdon with Rousseau's description of an English morning. Unfortunately, the malady also which came into the world with Rousseau, the morbid exaggeration of personal consciousness, had laid hold of Cowper. Even when suffering from the earlier stroke he had written these words to his cousin: "I am of a very singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed with"; and this sense of his singularity follows him through life. During the Huntingdon days it takes the form of a magnified confidence that Heaven is peculiarly concerned in his rescue from the fires of affliction; after the overthrow at Olney it is reversed, and fills him with the certainty that God has marked him out among all mankind for the special display of vengeance:

Writing to his mentor, John Newton (who had left Olney), he declares that there is a mystery in his destruction; and again to Lady Hesketh: "Mine has been a life of wonders for many years, and a life of wonders I in my heart believe it will be to the end." More than once in reply to those who would console him he avers that there is a singularity in his case which marks it off from that of all other men, that Providence has chosen him as a special object of its hostility. In Rousseau, whose mission was to preach the essential goodness of mankind, the union of aggravated egotism with his humanitarian doctrine brought about the conviction that the whole human race was plotting his ruin. In Cowper, whose mind dwelt on the power and mercies of Providence, this self-consciousness united with his Calvinism to produce the belief that God had determined to ensnare and destroy his soul. Such was the strange twist that accompanied the birth of romanticism in France and in England.

The conviction came upon Cowper through the agency of dreams and imaginary voices. The depression first seized him on the 24th of January, 1773. About a month later a vision of the night troubled his sleep, so distinct and terrible that the effect on his brain could never be wholly dispelled. Years afterwards he wrote to a friend:

That apparently was the sentence which sounded his doom on the night of dreams: Actum est de te; periisti—it is done with thee, thou hast perished! and no domestic happiness, or worldly success, or wise counsel could ever, save for a little while, lull him to forgetfulness. He might have said to his friends, as Socrates replied to one who came to offer him deliverance from jail: "Such words I seem to hear, as the mystic worshippers seem to hear the piping of flutes; and the sound of this voice so murmurs in my ears that I can hear no other."

But it must not be supposed from all this that Cowper's letters are morbid in tone or filled with the dejection of melancholia. Their merit, on the contrary, lies primarily in their dignity and restraint, in a certain high-bred ease, which is equally manifest in the language and the thought. Curiously enough, after the fatal visitation religion becomes entirely subordinate in his correspondence, and only at rare intervals does he allude to his peculiar experience. He writes for the most part like a man of the world who has seen the fashions of life and has sought refuge from their vanity. If I were seeking for a comparison to relieve the quality of these Olney letters (and it is these that form the real charm of Cowper's correspondence), I would turn to Charles Lamb. The fact that both men wrote under the shadow of insanity brings them together immediately, and there are other points of resemblance. Both are notable among English letter-writers for the exquisite grace of their language, but if I had to choose between the two the one whose style possessed the most enduring charm, a charm that appealed to the heart most equally at all seasons and left the reader always in that state of quiet satisfaction which is the office of the purest taste, I should name Cowper. The wit is keener in Lamb and above all more artful; there is a certain petulance of humour in him which surprises us oftener into laughter, the pathos at times is more poignant; but the effort to be entertaining is also more apparent, and the continual holding up of the mind by the unexpected word or phrase becomes a little wearisome in the end. The attraction of Cowper's style is in the perfect balance of the members, an art which has become almost lost since the eighteenth century, and in the spirit of repose which awakens in the reader such a feeling of easy elevation as remains for a while after the book is laid down. Lamb is of the city, Cowper of the fields. Both were admirers of Vincent Bourne; Lamb chose naturally for translation the poems of city life—The Ballad Singers, The Rival Bells, the Epitaph on a Dog:

Cowper just as inevitably selected the fables and country-pieces—The Glowworm, The Jackdaw, The Cricket: