religious revival which marked the latter part of the eighteenth
century in England, and which was called Evangelicism within the
establishment and Methodism without. In this way he is associated with
Wesley and Whitefield, as well as with the philanthropists of the
movement, such as Wilberforce, Thornton, and Clarkson. As a poet he
touches, on different sides of his character, Goldsmith, Crabbe, and
Burns. With Goldsmith and Crabbe he shares the honour of improving
English taste in the sense of truthfulness and simplicity. To Burns he
felt his affinity, across a gulf of social circumstance, and in spite
of a dialect not yet made fashionable by Scott. Besides his poetry, he
holds a high, perhaps the highest place, among English letter writers:
and the collection of his letters appended to Southey's biography
forms, with the biographical portions of his poetry, the materials for
a sketch of his life. Southey's biography itself is very helpful,
though too prolix and too much filled out with dissertations for common
readers. Had its author only done for Cowper what he did for Nelson!
[Our acknowledgments are also due to Mr. Benham, the writer of the
Memoir prefixed to the Globe Edition of Cowper.]

William Cowper came of the Whig nobility of the robe. His great-uncle,
after whom he was named, was the Whig Lord Chancellor of Anne and
George I. His grandfather was that Spencer Cowper, judge of the Common
Pleas, for love of whom the pretty Quakeress drowned herself, and who,
by the rancour of party, was indicted for her murder. His father, the
Rev. John Cowper, D.D., was chaplain to George II. His mother was a
Donne, of the race of the poet, and descended by several lines from
Henry III. A Whig and a gentleman he was by birth, a Whig and a
gentleman he remained to the end. He was born on the 15th November
(old style), 1731, in his father's rectory of Berkhampstead. From
nature he received, with a large measure of the gifts of genius, a