We have already glanced at the way in which Cowper applied it in his larger poems: he did it equally well, and perhaps more tellingly, in his smaller. The day on which a poet of no mean pretensions, one belonging altogether to the upper classes of English society, and one whose lack of university education mattered the less because the universities were just then at their nadir, dared to write of the snake he killed
"And taught him never to come there no more"
was an epoch-making day. Swift would have done it; but Swift was in many ways a voice crying in the wilderness, and Swift was not, strictly speaking, a poet at all. Byrom would have done it; but Byrom was emphatically a minor poet. Cowper could--at least in and for his day--boast the major afflatus, and Cowper did not disdain vernacular truth. He never could have been vulgar; there is not in the whole range of English literature quite such a gentleman in his own way as Cowper. But he has escaped almost entirely from the genteel style--from the notion of things as below the dignity of literature.
His prose in this respect is at least equal to his verse, though, as it was known much later, it has greater tendency than influence. All good critics have agreed that his letters are not surpassed, perhaps not surpassable. He has more freedom than Gray; he has none of the coxcombry of Walpole and Byron; and there is no fifth name that can be put even into competition with him. Ease, correctness, facility of expression, freedom from convention within his range, harmony, truth to nature, truth to art:--these things meet in the hapless recluse of Olney as they had not met for a century--perhaps as they had never met--in English epistles. The one thing that he wanted was strength: as his madness was melancholy, not raving, so was his sanity mild but not triumphant.
George Crabbe was three and twenty years younger than Cowper, having been born on Christmas Eve 1754. But his first publication, _The Library_, the success of which was due to the generous and quick-sighted patronage of Burke after the poet had wrestled with a hard youth, coincided almost exactly with the first appearance of Cowper, and indeed a little anticipated it. _The Village_ appeared in 1783, and _The Newspaper_ in 1785, and then Crabbe (who had taken orders, had been instituted to livings in the East of England, and had married, after a long engagement, his first love) was silent for two and twenty years. He began again in 1807 with _The Parish Register_. _The Borough_, his greatest work, appeared in 1810. Shifting from the East of England to the West in 1813, he spent the last twenty years of his long life at Trowbridge in Wiltshire, and died in 1832 at the age of seventy-eight.