_The Slave Trader in the Dumps_, with its ghastly array of horrors dancing a jig to a ballad metre, justifies the shrinking of an artist from a subject hardly fit for art.
If the cistern which had supplied _The Task_ was exhausted, the rill of occasional poems still ran freely, fed by a spring which, so long as life presented the most trivial object or incident could not fail.

Why did not Cowper go on writing these charming pieces which he evidently produced with the greatest facility?
Instead of this, he took, under an evil star, to translating Homer.

The translation of Homer into verse is the Polar Expedition of literature, always failing, yet still desperately renewed.

Homer defies modern reproduction.

His primeval simplicity is a dew of the dawn which can never be re-distilled.