only sunny days. Nor was he dependent upon events for his inspiration. Like a spider, he span out of himself the web of his fancy. Again and again he begins a letter by confessing that he has nothing to say, and instantly he follows a quiet train of thought wherever it leads him. Which is merely another way of saying that he was by nature as well as by habit a writer of letters. The only purposes he knew were to express himself and to amuse his friend. It was not for him to vaunt his prowess or to extol his talent. He was wholly incapable of writing for any other than his chosen audience, and his letters never irk you by such tricks and antics as they employ who keep their eye upon a larger public and upon posthumous fame.

The material of Cowper's letters is the mere tittle-tattle of a country village. His motto was, Bene vixit qui bene latuit. He tells his friends how he mends the kitchen - windows, and he takes pride in his early salads. His chief occupation in January is to walk ten times in a day from his fireside to his cucumber-frame. In the summer a promenade with Mrs Unwin or a picnic in the open air are his wildest pleasures. The story of an escaped hare, touched by his magician's wand, thrills the reader. A lion at the fair, seventy years of age, and tame as a goose, arouses his curiosity, as well it might. Under his pen, a visit of the candidate, Mr Grenville, "a most loving, kissing, kind

hearted gentleman," becomes a veritable scene from a comedy. His joys are simple, and, after friendship, are chiefly of the earth and sky. "O! I could spend whole days and moonlight nights," says he, "in feeding upon a lovely prospect! My eyes drink the rivers as they flow." On another day, in the heat of June, he writes Iwith the classic touch which is habitual to him, "My garden languishes, and what is worse the fields too languish, and the upland grass is burnt." As for politics, he read the news, and saw that things went wrong in every quarter. He could not, if he would, be an unconcerned spectator. True patriot as he was, he saw no opportunity in the course of public events to arouse his patriotism. He could but expend his enthusiasm upon the past. "When poor Bob White brought in the news of Boscawen's success off the coast of Portugal," he writes, "how did I leap for joy! When Hawke demolished Conflans, I was still more transported. But nothing could express my rapture when Wolfe made the conquest of Quebec.' As in prose, so in verse the poet rejoiced

"That Chatham's language was his mother tongue, And Wolfe's great name compatriot with his own."

These grave thoughts were but interludes. He recognised the perfect simplicity of his life, and rejoiced. The symbol which he found for it will be intelligible to all. "Your mother and I walked yester

day in the Wilderness," he wrote to William Unwin. "As we entered the gate, a glimpse of something white, contained in a little hole in the gate-post, caught my eye. I looked again, and discovered a bird's nest, with two tiny eggs in it. Byand-by they will be fledged, and tailed, and get wing-feathers, and fly. My case is somewhat similar to that of the parent bird. My nest is in a little nook. Here I brood and hatch, and in due time my progeny takes wing and whistles." For it must not be forgotten that he was always a poet and man of letters. His judgments are sometimes unsound. It is a grotesque perversion to say that Gray is "the only poet since Shakespeare entitled to the character of sublime." Though he perceived the genius of Burns, he made a monstrous comment upon it. "I have read Burns's poems," he says, "and have read them twice; and though they be written in a language that is new to me, and many of them on subjects much inferior to the author's ability, I think them on the whole a very extraordinary production. It will be a pity if he should not hereafter divest himself of barbarism, and content himself with writing pure English, in which he appears perfectly qualified to excel. He who can command admiration dishonours himself if he aims no higher than to raise a laugh." To-day criticism has set in the opposite direction. No man of sense or man of letters would dare to prefer Burns's

English verse to his incomparable poems in the vernacular, or to pretend that his masterpieces aimed no higher than a laugh. Cowper, however, was a man of his time, while Burns, a free spirit, unfettered by the years, did and thought what seemed good in his own eyes.

For the rest, Cowper displayed an admirable appreciation of Milton, and Homer, and Virgil. He lived on familiar terms with the greatest. The page in which he contrasts Pope and Dryden is a page of pure insight. And by a strange paradox, the literary figure which stalks in the background of Cowper's thought is Samuel Johnson. He was not often in sympathy with him. He deplored bitterly, as he might, the gross injustice which Johnson did to Milton. He finds many passages in the 'Lives of the Poets' of which he disapproves. Yet fear and respect mingle in his mind when it turns to Johnson. The two

never met, perhaps happily. Johnson might not have understood the shy merits of Cowper. Cowper would certainly have shown himself at his worst in the presence of the literary autocrat. Yet it was for Johnson's approval that Cowper sighed. "It is possible he may be pleased," he said, when he hoped his book was in Johnson's hands, "and if he should, I shall have engaged on my side one of the best trumpeters in the Kingdom." Alas! Johnson refused to be engaged, though there is no reason to think that he would not have appreciated

the tranquil merit of of the the "Task." But wherever Cowper's enthusiasm was aroused he wrote with ardour and sensibility. If he over-praised Vincent Browne, who will regret it? At any rate, he proved how warmly he admired his Muse by the tribute of translation. "I love the memory of Vinny Browne," he wrote; "I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way, except Ovid, and not at all inferior to him. I love him, too, with a love of partiality, because he was usher of the fifth form at Westminster when I passed through it. He was so goodnatured, and so indolent, that I lost more than I got by him, for he made me as idle as himself." An amiable eulogy, in truth, and made real by a reminiscence. "I remember," adds Cowper, "seeing the Duke of Richmond set fire to his greasy locks, and box his ears to put it out again."

Such are some of the observations wherewith Cowper beguiled the leisure of his friends. And his observations beguile our leisure too, because they are perfect in style and manner. Cowper's ear was was equally attuned to verse and prose, and it is impossible to read his letters without finding a pleasure in their various cadences. He rings the changes on his vowels like the unconscious master that he was. He

separates harsh consonants from one another by discreet intervals. His style is perfectly adapted to its subjects and to his temperament. Discreetly gay or doucely melancholy, it admirably serves the purpose of a writer who would rather hide than reveal the sorrows of his heart. He was a natural artist, who obtained his effects without thinking too deeply of them. The sincerity of his mind dictated what he should say; and he said it well, because he could not do otherwise. In conclusion, it may be said of him what he said with truthfulness of of Lady Hesketh. He had assured her that her letters were the best in the world, and thus he imagined her reply. "You will say, he wrote, "That is impossible, for I always write what comes uppermost, and never trouble myself either about method or expression.' And for that very reason, my dear, they are what they are, so good that they could not be better. As to expression, you have no need to study it; yours is sure to be such as it ought; and as to method, you know as well as I that it is never more out of place than in a letter." But, to end on a paradox, there was method in Cowper's very absence of method, there was art in his artlessness, or we should not be reading his letters with pleasure more than a century after they were written.

It was in 1878 when Lesseps, flushed with triumph over the success of his Suez Canal scheme, formed a Company in France to construct another canal across the narrow neck of land dividing the North and South American Continents, known as the Isthmus of Panama. The French nation to a man were willing to find him all the capital he required. After numerous difficulties work was commenced, but bribery and corruption and an under-estimation of the magnitude of the task caused the Company to fail, only to be reconstructed time and again with similar results. In addition to this, yellow fever and every possible disease known to tropical climates decimated the hordes of workmen who poured into the Isthmus from the West Indies and adjoining States. The average time that any one lived was only fifteen days, so prevalent were yellow and blackwater fever. Men had to be paid enormous wages to risk their lives in this unhealthy climate, but even so, the number of skilled men who were willing to labour under such conditions gradually gave out, and thus the work of construction came to a standstill. The United States had kept an eye for years on the progress of the French Company, as the con

struction of this Canal meant the easiest way of access for their war-ships from one side of the continent to the other. On the conclusion of the Spanish American War very striking sanitary work had been undertaken by the United States Government in Cuba, and

as a result of these efforts the island was rendered habitable for Europeans. Encouraged by this success, negotiations were set on foot by the American Government for the purchase of the Panama undertaking from the French Canal Company, and in 1899 these negotiations were carried to a successful conclusion. The Panama Government sold for 10,000,000 dollars a strip of ground five miles on each side of the centre line of the canal, which enables them to boast they are the only Government in the world with a credit balance instead of a National Debt.

For the first year or two practically no work was done at all. Commissions and inquiries were instituted in order to investigate the unhealthy climatic conditions that existed and propound remedies. The doctors have made the Panama Canal, for without the medical profession the great work which is now coming to an end would have been an impossibility. Panama to-day is one of the most healthy places