75 
‘The Task,” was written, at Lady Austen’s Suggestion, in blank 
verse. This poem occupied fifteen months in composition. He 
left the well-worn track of conventional phrases and mechanical 
versification. The Daphnes and the Chloes of Waller and the 
rest were discarded, and in their place we have “the knitting- 
needles of Mary Unwin.” The trim Dutch flower-beds of Pope 
were replaced by the ‘Italian garden”’ of Cowper. Burke’s 
eloquent lament for the decay of chivalry was applicable to the 
poesy of his time. Under the voluptuous régime of Charles II. 
women lost caste, and French gallantry replaced the noble 
chivalry of Queen Elizabeth’s day. Then came the Augustan 
age, when the cynical poet maintained that women had “no 
characters at all.” But in the closing years of the eighteenth 
century, when Cowper, in writing respecting them, seemed to 
dwell in an infinitude of tenderness, women began to be accorded 
something of their true position, leading up to the true conception 
of woman given by Wordsworth. The finished picture will be 
found in ‘‘ The Princess” of Tennyson. The higher education 
of women was preached by our poets long before it came to be 
adopted by the leaders of Education in Britain. 
Cowper made a new departure in the style of poetry, in the 
subjects for verse, and in his treatment of those subjects. He is 
not without his faults. His versification is sometimes harsh or 
careless, his style austere, his rhymes halting. He shook 
himself free from the traditions of a former age, but did not 
gain that mastery of verse which distinguished his immediate 
successors, Byron and Scott. To use one of Macaulay’s illustra- 
tions, the part which Cowper performed was that of Moses rather 
than that of Joshua—he opened the house of bondage, but did not 
enter the promised land. To the Olney recluse and the Ayrshire 
ploughman is due the honour of transforming the system of 
poetry in Britain and raising it to a higher level. These men— 
so different in many respects—never met, but each. left on record 
his admiration for the poems of the other. Southey, Coleridge, 
and Wordsworth, each of whom published his first volume of 
poems during the last decade of Cowper's life, were indebted both 
to Burns and Cowper. Wordsworth was the true successor of 
the author of ‘“‘The Task.” They had many things in 
common, perhaps the most noticeable was their ardent love 
of Nature and their ability as her exponent. Cowper re- 
discovered the sweet and real English landscape, ‘“ with all 
its genial breezes and wholesome freshness.” To this land- 
scape (which, thanks to our poets, we have come to view as 
among the fairest scenes of creation), Wordsworth brought a 
deeply reasoning spirit. The latter’s well-known lines, be- 
ginning ‘“ Nature never did betray the heart that loved her,” 
are an adaptation of a passage in “The Winter Evening” 
