He replied, "I feel unutterable despair." To face damnation with the sweet unselfishness of William Cowper is a rare and saintly accomplishment. It gives him a place in the company of the beloved authors with men of far greater genius than himself--with Shakespeare and Lamb and Dickens. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has, in one of his essays, expressed the opinion that of all the English poets "the one who, but for a stroke of madness, would have become our English Horace was William Cowper. He had the wit," he added, "with the underlying moral seriousness." As for the wit, I doubt it. Cowper had not the wit that inevitably hardens into "jewels five words long." Laboriously as he sought after perfection in his verse, he was never a master of the Horatian phrase. Such phrases of his--and there are not many of them--as have passed into the common speech flash neither with wit nor with wisdom. Take the best-known of them: "The cups That cheer but not inebriate;" "God made the country and man made the town;" "I am monarch of all I survey;" "Regions Cæsar never knew;" and "England, with all thy faults, I love thee still!" This is lead for gold. Horace, it is true, must be judged as something more than an inventor of golden tags. But no man can hope to succeed Horace unless his lines and phrases are of the kind that naturally pass into golden tags. This, I know, is a matter not only of style but of temper. But it is in temper as much as in style that Cowper differs from Horace. Horace mixed on easy terms with the world. He enjoyed the same pleasures; he paid his respects to the same duties. He was a man of the world above all other poets. Cowper was in comparison a man of the parlour. His sensibilities would, I fancy, have driven him into retreat, even if he had been neither mad nor pious. He was the very opposite of a worldling. He was, as he said of himself in his early thirties, "of a very singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed with." While claiming that he was not an absolute fool, he added: "If I was as fit for the next world as I am unfit for this--and God forbid I should speak it in vanity--I would not change conditions with any saint in Christendom." Had Horace lived in the eighteenth century he would almost certainly have been a Deist. Cowper was very nearly a Methodist. The difference, indeed, between them is fundamental. Horace was a pig, though a charming one; Cowper was a pigeon.