|AMONG its many drawbacks controversy has this in particular, that it sometimes embroils us with our closest friends. Writing recently of Lord Chesterfield, * we found occasion to comment upon certain couplets which the poet of the 'Progress of Error' addressed to his Lordship concerning his celebrated 'Letters.' * See ante, p. 192. What was said amounted to no more than that Cowper, in this instance at least, had not proved himself a Juvenal,--a sentiment which, seeing that his accredited biographer, Mr. Goldwin Smith, accuses him, as a satirist, of brandishing a whip without a lash, could scarcely be regarded as extravagant condemnation. Not the less, it has lain sorely upon our conscience. Of all the lettered figures of the eighteenth century, none is more dear to us than the gentle recluse of the sleepy little town by the Ouse. What!--the captivating letter-writer, the inventor of the immortal 'John Gilpin,' the delightful 'diva-gator' of the 'Task' and the tea-urn, the kindly proprietor of those 'canonized pets of literature,' Puss and Bess and Tiney--how, upon such a theme, could one excusably utter things harsh or censorious! It is impossible to picture him, when the curtains had fallen over those two windows, that looked upon the three-cornered market-place at Olney,--his head decorated (it may be) with the gaily ribboned cap which had been worked for him by his cousin Lady Hesketh, * his eyes milder than they seem in Romney's famous portrait, and placidly reading the 'Public Advertiser' to the click-click of Mrs. Unwin's stocking-needles,--without being smitten by a feeling of remorse. And opportunity for the expression of such remorse arrives pleasantly with an old-fashioned _octavo_ which supplies the pretexts for a palinode in prose. * A writing-cap worn by Cowper, his watch, a seal-ring given to him by his eousin Theodora (his first love), and a ball of worsted which he wound for Mrs. Unwin, were among the relics exhibited in the South Gallery of the Guelph Exhibition of 1891. The exhibitors were the Rev. W. Cowper Johnson, and the Rev. W. Cowper Johnson, jun. Its title, 'writ large,' is 'Cowper, illustrated by a Series of Views, in, or near, the Park of Weston-Underwood, Bucks;' and it is lavishly 4 embellished' with those mellow old plates which denote that steel had not yet supplanted copper. The artists and engravers were James Storer and John Greig, topographical chalcographers of some repute in the days of conventional foregrounds, and trees that look like pressed-out patterns in seaweed. But the 'picturesque' designs give us a good idea of the landscape that Cowper saw when he walked from Silver End at Olney to his friends the Throckmortons (the 'Mr. and Mrs. Frog' of his letters) at Weston House. Here is the long bridge of 'The Task,'= ```'That with its wearisome, but needful length, ```Bestrides the wintry flood'=