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MONTHLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE. 



The Works of William C^wper. Edited by the Rev. T. GRIM- 

 SHAWE, A. M. ; with an Essay on the Genius and Poetry of 

 Cowper, by the Rev. J. W. CUNNINGHAM, A.M. Vols. I. to VII. 

 Saunders and Otley. 



THE name of Cowper is every where a household word. Supposing he had 

 never written any thing else than his " John Gilpin," that singularly happy 

 and humorous effusion must have conferred immortality upon him. But he 

 has extensively traversed the illimitable regions of poetry. His muse has 

 touched on a vast variety of topics, and on each and all of them he has 

 written well. He is a poet of the good old English school, not diluting and 

 disfiguring his native language by the infusion of a mass of verbiage, which 

 is the besetting sin of the great majority of our poets of the present day, but 

 expressing his ideas in the terse and nervous, though not quaint or anti- 

 quated style, of the English poets of the Elizabethan age. Cowper is always 

 clear : there is no mistaking what he says. He is never common-place ; not 

 even when compelled to touch on the most common-place topics. It is 

 impossible to read any dozen lines he ever wrote without being struck with 

 some original and felicitous idea. Every page sparkles with brilliant con- 

 ceptions. So rapidly do they follow each other that the reader has not time 

 sufficiently to admire one, when another equally happy and striking forces 

 itself on his attention, and equally challenges his admiration. One very 

 marked feature in the poetry of Cowper is the impression it leaves on the 

 mind. We read Milton, Pope, Thomson, and others, and as we read we 

 admire their lofty or beautiful conceptions, and their well-chosen phraseology ; 

 but when we have shut the book we remember not a word of what we Were 

 reading about. Not so with the poetry of Cowper. It leaves a deep and 

 lasting impression on the mind. We feel, as it were, a personal interest in 

 the topics on which he touches ; and we feel, moreover, that those topics have 

 been presented to us in the strongest possible light. Cowper may be said, in 

 a pre-eminent sense, to be the poet of humanity, virtue, and religion. In the 

 wide range of English poetry, we know of no author of whom it could be 

 said with so much truth, that he never wrote " a line which, dying, he could 

 wish to blot." All this tends to give an interest to the poetical writings of 

 Cowper, and to invest them with a charm in a great measure peculiar to 

 themselves. 



Of his prose works, consisting almost exclusively of letters, we need say 

 nothing. They can never cease to be admired, while purity and elegance of 

 composition are held in estimation. His letters are, perhaps, the most perfect 

 models of epistolary writing in the English or any other language. 



It was often a matter of surprise that the works of Cowper, when so 

 popular among all classes, were never brought out in the same cheap and 

 elegant form as those of Scott, Byron, &c. Happily, the idea at length 

 occurred to Messrs. Saunders and Otley ; and the way in which they have 

 carried it into effect leaves us no room to regret that the task was not under- 

 taken sooner. This edition is got up in the first style of excellence. We 

 have not seen a more perfect specimen of tasteful and accurate typography. 

 The illustrations are also good ; while the two hundred letters furnished by 



