Editorial note — LETTER TO JOHN MURRAY, ESQ. ON THE REV. W.L. BOWLES'S STRICTURES ON THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF POPE.
Reading edition
[Footnote 1: I will submit to Mr. Bowles's own judgment a passage from another poem of Cowper's, to be compared with the same writer's Sylvan Sampler. In the lines to Mary,—
"Thy needles, once a shining store, For my sake restless heretofore, Now rust disused, and shine no more, My Mary,"
contain a simple, household, "indoor," artificial, and ordinary image; I refer Mr. Bowles to the stanza, and ask if these three lines about "needles" are not worth all the boasted twaddling about trees, so triumphantly re-quoted? and yet, in fact, what do they convey? A homely collection of images and ideas, associated with the darning of stockings, and the hemming of shirts, and the mending of breeches; but will any one deny that they are eminently poetical and pathetic as addressed by Cowper to his nurse? The trash of trees reminds me of a saying of Sheridan's. Soon after the "Rejected Address" scene in 1812, I met Sheridan. In the course of dinner, he said, "Lord Byron, did you know that, amongst the writers of addresses, was Whitbread himself?" I answered by an enquiry of what sort of an address he had made. "Of that," replied Sheridan, "I remember little, except that there was a phoenix in it."—"A phoenix!! Well, how did he describe it?"—"Like a poulterer," answered Sheridan: "it was green, and yellow, and red, and blue: he did not let us off for a single feather." And just such as this poulterer's account of a phoenix is Cowper's stick-picker's detail of a wood, with all its petty minutiæ of this, that, and the other.]