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On the return to power of the Conservatives, after the defeat of the Home Rule Bill of 1886, Sir Robert Hamilton was retired, and in his stead Sir Redvers Buller was sent to rule Ireland manu militari. This officer, on being examined by Lord Cowper's Commission, expressed his opinion that the National League had been the tenants' best, if not their only, friend.
There is no trace of the instinctive poetic utterance of bards such as Shelley and Keats, but there is a constant appeal to the strongest and most elementary human feelings, rarely met with in any but the greatest works of art. It was never Cowper's fate to be exposed to that brilliant but unsympathetic criticism which is the most short-sighted kind.
Perhaps Cowper's greatest accomplishment, though not his greatest work, was a translation of Homer. He had never considered Pope's Homer good, and he wished to leave to the world a better. Cowper's version was published in 1791, and he fondly believed that it would take the place of Pope's.
The following is Cowper's translation of a pretty little poem by Anacreon on the grasshopper: Happy songster, perched above, On the summit of the grove, Whom a dew-drop cheers to sing With the freedom of a king, From thy perch survey the fields, Where prolific Nature yields Naught that, willingly as she, Man surrenders not to thee. For hostility or hate, None thy pleasures can create.
Was not Sir Robert Walpole an abominable Minister? 29th. P.S. The man who certainly provoked Ireland to think, is dead Lord Sackville. 30th. I see, by the Gazette, that Lord Cowper's pinchbeck principality is allowed. I wonder his Highness does not desire the Pope to make one of his sons a bishop in partibus infidelium. STRAWBERRY HILL, Oct. 4, 1785.
Nevertheless Cowper's natural descriptions are at once more distinct and more imaginative than Thomson's. The Task reflects, also, the new philanthropic spirit, the enthusiasm of humanity, the feeling of the brotherhood of men to which Rousseau had given expression in France, and which issued in the French Revolution.
Pope, who loves to be fine, calls them urns. Cowper, who loves to be coarse, calls them casks; a translation more improper than Pope's; for a cask is, in our general understanding, a wooden vessel; and the Greek word means an earthen vessel. There is a curious letter of Cowper's to one of his female correspondents about this unfortunate word.
Meantime Calypso brought him for a sail Fittest materials, which he also shaped, And to his sail due furniture annexed Of cordage strong, foot-ropes and ropes aloft, Then heaved her down with levers to the deep. Odyssey, B. V. COWPER'S Trans.
And, what was stranger still, she talked French. 'Sleep and see her again, laughed Berenger. I am all wonder, O my son, my soul Is stunned within me; powers to speak to him Or to interrogate him have I none, Or even to look on him. Cowper's ODYSSEY
Therefore she took the other course and belittled the whole affair. "Oh, well," she said, "He was a silly creature, and if I were you, I'd think no more about it." "No," said Rachel, sitting bolt upright, "I shan't do that. I shall think about it all day and all night until I find out exactly what it does mean." "Don't you ever read?" Helen asked tentatively. "Cowper's Letters that kind of thing.
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