William Cowper and the Friends in England and America

2 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL SOCIETY. WILLIAM COWPER AND THE FRIENDS IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA. Part I. In England. In his rather unsympathetic study of Cowper, Walter Bagehot wrote : " He is the one poet of a class which have no poets. In that once large and still considerable portion of the English world, which regards the exercise of the fancy and the imagination as dangerous—snares, as they speak—distracting the soul from an intense consideration of abstract doctrine, Cowper's strenuous inculcation of those doctrines has obtained for him a certain toleration. . . . Most poets must be prohibited. . . . But Cowper is a ticket-of-leave man. He has the chaplain's certificate. He has expressed himself ' with the utmost propriety/ The other imaginative criminals must be left to the fates, but he may be admitted to the sacred drawing-room, though with constant care and scrupulous surveillance."1 Beneath this tone of banter, Bagehot is right in his analysis of the phenomenon of Cowper's popularity with a certain class of readers. His words are particularly to be borne in mind when we come to account for the affectionate regard in which the Poet has been held by the Society of Friends. Cowper appears to have had no social contact with the Quakers of his day. There are only a few slight references to them in his Letters. When the Poet and Mrs. Unwin were preparing lodgings for the reception of Lady Hesketh in 1786, a Quaker family in Olney rendered some assistance that was appreciated. Mrs. Unwin was conferring on the subject with one Maurice Smith, when his wife called out, "Why dost thee not take the vicarage? . . . We will furnish it for thee, and at the lowest rate; from a bed to a platter we will find all." A little later, on June 12, 1786, he again wrote to his cousin: "My friend the Quaker, in all that I have seen of his doings, has acquitted himself much to my satisfaction. Some little things, he says, will perhaps be missing at first, in such a multiplicity, but they shall 1 William Cowper in Literary Studies. Works (Hartford ed.), I, 432. WILLIAM COWPER AND THE FRIENDS.3 be provided as soon as called for." In a letter to Newton of February 18, 1781, he wrote: "I do not know, but am inclined to suspect that if my Muse was to go forth clad in Quaker colour, without one bit of riband to enliven her appearance, she might walk from one end of London to the other, as little noticed as if she were one of the sisterhood indeed." Once when discussing politics in a letter of March i6, 1780, to Joseph Hill, he wrote: " As for me, I am no Quaker, except where military matters are in question, and there I am much of the same mind with an honest man, who, when he was forced into the service, declared he would not fight, and gave this reason—because he saw nothing worth fighting for." Such are the sparse references in Cowper's Letters to the Quakerism of his day : nothing to indicate on his part much personal familiarity with, or interest in, the Quakers or their tenets. He was certainly not in the least degree affected by Quaker thought. But in the other direction the influence has been profound . He has been a favorite with a Society which has been inexacting of art in poetry, but very requiring as to its edifying content. The documents to which we now turn our attention have never before been brought together for this purpose. Indeed , they are for the most part not in print. They could be indefinitely multiplied, as a result of personal inquiry among members of the older generation, if further proof were required. What is here said will prove the point which has not yet been clearly brought out by historians of Quakerism: that Cowper was the titled Poet of Quakerism for upwards of a century. The attitude of eighteenth-century Quakerism toward literature in general is officially set forth in a Mjinute drawn up by London Yearly Meeting in 1764, and printed in the first printed Discipline...