PR 3383 S5 1884 Copy 1 :2^ o >i^,:tCI»':> .>:3 ■3 ^-x^Sto---^- > :> > > ^^ J* LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. Shelf ...^ S 6" UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. ^. - ^^ 3 > ;> , ' 1.1 > >5^ 'Si' -ST ■ ^ > > \ ^ O-' > ^» „> >5 > ^ >> 13 » ''■' v> --^ ^ ■^- ^ ^ 3 ' ■> > y r> ^ ' ■■■3»>> 1 > ;3 > ^ ^ -) ) -:^a> :s> -Oil '^ ^^ .:> > ^^>:' > .}>^ > ■ to > » i or^ > > > > T>-3 S7> ^ 5> J> ^::p. rM^y:^ fWUm H-iSH-. \i^%SfJJL9t1^^ TRI -WEEKLY TU5U CkTlOtf of Thg BC5>T COWIgt/r U STAHltM^ LlTER»>TVRg Englisn Men of Letters, Edited by John Money LIFE BY GOLDWIN SMITH Author of "FALSE HOPES," &c., &c. Entered at the Post Office, N. Y. as second-class matter. ^ Copyrifrht, 1884, by John W, Lovell Co. NEAV YOR 0fn^ ^'wr^ ^^^^ ^^^^ p^^ ^^^^ jHHk j^H^ 1^1 ^^B^ iBr^ i^" A neat CLOTH BINDING- for ti: - ic.i. .e can be obtained i.>m any bookse5!er o' newsdealer, price 15cts. LOVELL'S LIBRARY-CATALOGUE. 1. Hyperion 20 2. Outre-Mer 20 3. The Happy Boy 10 4. Arne 10 5. Frankenstein 10 6. TheLast of theMohicans.20 7. Clytie 20 8. The Moonstone, Part 1 . 10 9. The Moonstone, Part II. 10 10. Oliver Twist 20 11. The Coming Race 10 12. Leila 10 13. The Three Spaniards.. .20 14. The Tricks of the Greeks. 20 15. L' Abbe Constantin 20 16. Freckles 20 17. The Dark Colleen 20 18. They were Married .... 10 19. Seekers After God 20 20. The Spanish Nun 10 21. Green Mountain Boys.. 20 22. Fleurette 20 23. Second Thoughts 20 24. The New Magdalen .... 20 25. Divorce 20 26. Life of Washington 20 27. Social Etiquette 15 28. Single Heart, Double .T Face 10 29. Irene ; or, The Lonely Manor 20 30. Vice Versa 20 31. Ernest Maltravers 20 32. The Haunted House... 10 33. John Halifax 20 34. 800 Leagues on the Amazon 10 35. The Cryptogram 10 36. Life of Marion 20 37. Paul and Virginia 10 38. A Tale of Two Cities 20 39. The Hermits 20 40. An Adventure in Thule, etc 10 41. A Marriage in High Life2o 42. Robin 20 43. Two on a Tower 20 44. Rasselas 10 45. Alice ; a sequel to Er- nest Maltravers 20 46. Duke of Kandos .20 47. Baron Munchausen 10 48. A Princess of Thule.. ..20 49. The Secret Despatch.. ..20 50. Early Days of Christian- ity, 2 Parts, each 20 51. Vicar of Wakefield 10 52. Progress and Poverty ... 20 53. The Spy 20 54. East Lynne 20 55. A Strange Story 20 56. Adam Bede, Part 1 15 Adam Bede, Part II 15 57. The Golden Shaft 20 58. Portia 20 59. Last Days of Pompeii. . .20 60. The Two Duchesses 20 61. TomBrown'sSchoolDays.20 62. Wooing O't, 2 Pts. each. 15 63. The Vendetta 20 64. Hypatia, Part 1 15 Hypatia, Part II 15 65. Selma 15 66. Margaret and her Brides- maids 20 67. Horse Shoe Robinson, 2 Parts, each 15 68. Gulliver's Travels 20 69. Amos Barton 10 70. The Berber 20 71. Silas Marner 10 72. Queen of the County . . .20 73. Life of Cromwell 15 74. Jane Eyre 20 75. Child'sHist'ry of Engl'd . 20 76. Molly Bawn 20 ']■]. Pilloiie 15 78. Phyllis 20 79. Romola, Part 1 15 Romola, Part II 15 80. Science in ShortChapters. 20 81. Zanoni 20 82. A Daughter of Heth 20 83. Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible 20 84. NightandMoming,Pt.I.i5 NightandMorningjPt.II 15 85. Shandon Bells 20 86. Monica .10 87. Heart and Science 20 88. The Golden Calf 20 89. The Dean's Daughter ... 20 90. Mrs. Geoffrey 20 91. Pickwick Papers, Part 1 . 20 Pickwick Papers.Part II. 20 92. Airy, Fairy Lilian 20 93. Macleod of Dare 20 94. Tempest Tossed, Part 1 . 20 Tempest Tossed, P't IL20 95. Letters from High Lat- itudes. ... 20 96. Gideon Fley ce 20 97. India and Ceylon 20 98. The Gypsy Queen 20 99. The Admiral's Ward 20 00. Nimport, 2 Parts, each ..15 01. Harry Holbrooke. 20 02. Tritons, 2 Parts, each .. 15 03. Let Nothing You Dismay. TO 04. LadyAudley's Secret... 20 05. Woman's Place To-day. 20 06. Dunallan, 2 parts, each. 15 07. Housekeeping and Home making 15 08. No New Thing 20 09. TheSpoopendykePapers.2o 10. False Hopes 15 11. Labor and Capital 20 12. Wanda, 2 parts, each ... 15 13. More Words aboil^ Bible. 20 14. Monsieur Lecocq, P't. 1.20 Monsieur Lecocq, Pt. 1 1. 20 15. An Outline of Irish Hist. 10 16. The Lerouge Case 20 17. Paul Clifford 20 18. A New Lease of Life.. .20 19. Bourbon Lilies 20 20. Other People's Money.. 20 21. Lady of Lyons 10 22. Ameline de Bourg 15 23. A Sea Queen 20 24. The Ladies Lindores. ..20 25. Haunted Hearts 10 261, Loys, Lord Beresford.. .20 127, Under Two Flags, Pt I. 20 Under Two Flags, Pt II.20 28. Money 10 29. In Peril of His Life 20 30. India; What can it teach us? 20 3 1. Jets and Flashes 20 32. Moonshine and Margue- rites ...10 33. Mr. Scarborough's Family, 2 Parts, each . . 15 34. Arden 15 35. Tower of Perceraont. . . .20 36. Yolande 20 37. Cruel London 20 38. The Gilded Clique 20 39. Pike County Folks 20 40. Cricket on the Hearth.. . 10 41. Henry Esmond 20 42. Strange Adventures of a Phaeton 20 43. Denis Duval 10 44. 01dCuriosityShop,P't 1. 15 OldCuriosityShop.P'rt II. 15 45. Ivanhoe, Parti 15 Ivanhoe, Part II 15 46. White Wings 20 47. The Sketch Book 20 48. Catherine 10 49. Janet's Repentance 10 50. Bamaby Rudge, Part I..1S Barnaby Rudge, Part II. 15 51. Felix Holt 20 52. Richelieu 10 53. Sunrise, Part 1 15 53. Sunrise, Part II 15 54. Tour of the World in 80 Days 20 55. Mystery of Orcival 20 56. Lovel, the Widower.. .. 10 57. Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid 10 58. DavidCopperfield, Part 1.20 DavidCopperfield,P'rt 11.20 59. Charlotte Temple • . 10 60. Rienzi, 2 Parts? each ...15 61. Promise of Marriage.. .. 10 62. Faith and Unfaith 20 63. The Happy Man 10 64. Barry Lyndon 20 65. Eyre's Acquittal 10 66. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea 20 67. Anti-Slavery Days 20 68. Beauty's Daughters 20 69. Beyond the Sunrise 20 70. Hard Times 20 71. Tom Cringle's Log .... 20 72. Vanity Fair 30 73. LTnderground Russia 20 74. Midd]emarch,2 Pts.each.20 75. Sir Tom 20 76. Pelham 20 77. The Story of Ida 10 78. Madcap Violet 20 79. The Little Pilgrim 10 80. Kilmeny 20 81. Wiiist, or Bumblepuppy?. 10 82. That beautiful \yretch.. 20 83. Her Mother's Sin 20 84. Green Pastures, etc 20 85. 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"Written by a women who speaks from the stand-point of an eaucated ex- perience. Its sjyle is simple, chaste and earnest, and it treats of bubjects which it vastly concerns wives, mothers and daughters to know." National Tribune, Washington, D. C. "The information which this book affords is precisely what every woman ought to have." Zions Herald, Boston, Mass. "• In clear and plain style, with the modesty and the knowledge which en educated wol. an has of her subject, is presented just what the young head of a family ought to know about herself and those who may come under her care. It is an admirable book of its kind." liew York Star. " The work opens with a chapter on physical cultuie, which is followed by essays on physiology in general. The feeding of chiVlren. the rights of chil- dren, the question of education, etc., are all discussfd, and the work is fully illustrated." N. Y. Medical Times. " It treats of the importance of physical culture and hygiene. The chapters on ' Intemperance and Tobacco' are especially worthy ci' iiote. Such books as this manual are to be welcomed as helpere-on in the rood cause of uplifting and perfectiLg humanity."' Scientific American, N. Y. ''The importance of physical culture for women, with Rf»pecial reference to their duties in the household and the raising and cure ot children, are promi- nently treated in this book." Indianapolis Journal, Indiana. " Some work of this kind is indispensable and thi» one seems to be perfectly suited to the purpose for which it was prepared." Presbyterian Banner, Pittsburg, Pa- " Prepared by a woman who has herself received a medical trainin"', it c-n- tains for mothers instruction and warning that should be caret ullj considered." LADIES WANTED to act as Agents, to whom liberal terms will be given. Copies sent by mail, post-paid, en receipt of price, ^1.50. Address HYGIENIC PUBLISHING CO., 917 Broadway, New Yorli, or 482 Van Buren Street, MiHvauliec, Wis. **>. %. ^^'c C O W P E R. CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE. CowPER is the most important English poet of the period be- tween Pope and the illustrious group headed by Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, which arose out of the intellectual ferment of the European Revolution. As a reformer of poetry, who called it back from conventionality to nature, and at the same time as the teacher of a new school of sentiment which acted as a solvent upon the existing moral and social system, he may perhaps him- self be numbered among the precursors of the Revolution, though he was certainly the mildest of them all. As a senti- mentahst he presents a faint analogy to Rousseau, whom in natural temperament he somewhat resembled. He was also the great poet of the religious revival which marked the latter part of the eighteenth century in England, and which was called Evangelicism within the establishment, and Methodism without. In this way he is associated with Wesley and Whitefield, as well as with the philanthropists of the movement, such as Wilberforce, Thornton, and Clarkson. As a poet he touches, on different sides of his character, Goldsmith, Crabbe, and Burns. With Goldsmith and Crabbe he shares the honour of improving English taste in the sense of truthfulness and simplicity., To Burns he felt his affinity, across a gulf of social cir- cumstance, and in spite of a dialect not yet made fashionable by Scott. Besides his poetry, he holds a high, perhaps the highest place, among English letter-writers ; and the collection of his letters appended to Southey's biography forms, with the biographical por- tions of his poetry, the materials for a sketch of his life. Southey's biography itself is very helpful, though too prolix and too much filled out with dissertations for common readers. Had its author only done for Cowper what he did for Nelson ! * William Cowper came of the Whig nobility of the robe. His great-uncle, after whom he was named, was the Whig Lord Chan- * Our acl^nowlcdcrinents 7>.rr^ a'so flue to Mr. Beiiham, the writer of the Memoir pre- fixed to the Globe Edition of Cowper. 8 CO IVPER. cellor of Anne and George I. His gi-andfallier ^^•as that Spencer Cowper, judge of the Common Pleas, for love of whom the pretty Quakeress drowned herself, and who, by the rancour of party, was indicted for her murder. His father, the Rev. John Cowper, D.D., was chaplain to George II. His mother was a Donne, of the race of the poet, and descended by several lines from Henry III. A Whig and a gendeman he was by birth, a Whig and a gentleman he remained to the end. He was born on the 15th November (old style), 1 731, in his father's rectory of Berkhampstead. From nature he received, with a large measure of the gifts of o-enius, a still larger measure of its painful sensibilities. In his portrait by Romney the brow bespeaks intellect, the features feeling and refinement, the eye madness. The stronger parts of character, the combative and propelling forces, he evidently lacked from the be- ginning. For the battle of life he was totally unfit. His judgment in its healthy state was, even on practical questions, sound enough, as his letters abundantly prove ; but his sensibility not only ren- dered him incapable of wrestling with a rough world, but kept him always on the verge of madness, and frequently plunged him into it. To the malady which threw him out of active life we owe not the meanest of English poets. At the age of thirty-two, writing of himself, he sa3"s, " I am of a very singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed with. Certainly I am not an absolute fool, but I have more weakness than the greatest of all the fools I can recollect at present. In short, 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." Folly produces nothing good, and if Cowper had been an absolute fool, he would not have written good poetry. But he does not exaggerate his own weakness, and that h.e should have l)ecome a power among men is a remarkable triumph of the influences which have given birth to Christian civilization. The world into which the child came was one very adverse to him, and at the same "time very much in need of him. It was a world from which the spirit of poetry seemed to have fled. There could be no stronger proof of this than the occupation of the throne of S]5enser, Shakspeare. and Milton by the arch-versifier Pope. The Revolution of 1688 was glorious, but unlike the Puritan Rev- olution which it followed, and in the political sphere partly ratified, it was profoundly prosaic. Spiritual religion, the source of Puritan grandeur and of the poetry of Milton, was almost extinct ; there was not much more of it among the Nonconformists, who had now become to a great extent mere Whigs, with a decided Unitarian tendency. The Church was little better than a political force, cul- tivated and manipulated by political leaders for their own purposes. The Bishops were either politicians or theological polemics collect- ing trophies of victory over free-thinkers as titles to higher prefer- ment. The inferior clergy, as a body, were far nearer In character to Trulliber than to Dr. 'Primrose ; coarse, sordid, neglectful of CO WPER. 9 their duties, shamelessly addicted to sinecurism and pluralities, fanatics in their Toryism and in attachment to their corporate privileges, cold, rationalistic and almost heathen in their preachings, if they preached at all. The society of the day is mirrored in the pictures of Hogarth, in the works of Fielding and Smollett ; hard and heartless polish was the best of it; and not a little of it was Marriage a la Mode. Chesterfield, with his soulless culture, his court graces, and his fashionable immoralities, was about the highest type of an English gentleman ; but the Wilkeses, Pot- ters, and Sandwiches, whose mania for vice culminated in the Hell-fire Club, were more numerous than the Chesterfields. Among the country squires, for one Allworthy or Sir Roger de Covcrley there were many Westerns. Among the common people religion was almost extinct, and assuredly no new morality or sentiment, such as Positivists now promise, had taken its place. Sometimes the rustic thought for himself, and scepticism took formal posses- sion of his mind ; but, as we see from one of Cowper's letters, it was a coarse scepticism which desired to be buried with its hounds. Ignor- ance and brutality reigned in the cottage. Drunkenness reigned in palace and cottage alike. Gambling, cock-fighting, and bull-fighting were the amusements of the people. Political life, which, if it had been pure and vigorous, might have made up-for the absence of spir- itual influences, was corrupt from the top of the scale to the bottom : its effect on national character is pourtrayed in Hogarth's Election. That property had its duties as well as its rights, nobody had yet ventured to say or think. The duty of a gentleman towards his own class was to pay his debts of honour and to fight a duel when- ever he was challenged by one of his own order ; towards the lower class his duty was none. Though the forms of government were elective, and Cowper gives us a description of the candidate at election-time obsequiously soliciting votes, society was intensely aristocratic, and each rank was divided from that below it bv a sharp line which precluded brotherhood or sympathy. Says the Duchess of Buckingham to Lady Huntingdon, who had asked her to come and hear Whitefield, " I thank your ladyship for the in- formation concerning the Methodist preachers ; their doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually endeavouring to level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be told you have a heart as sinfulas the common wretches that crawl on the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting ; and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at vari- ance with high rank and good breeding. I shall be most happv to come and hear your favourite preacher." Her Grace's sentiments towards the common wretches that crawl on the earth were shared, we may be sure, by her Grace's waiting-maid. Of humanity there was as little as there was of religion. It was the age of the criminal law which hanged men for petty thefts, of life-long imprisonment for debt., of the stocks and the pillory, of a Temple Bar garnished with the heads of traitors, of the unreformed prison system, of the 1 o CO WPER. press-gang, of unrestrained tyranny and savagery at public schools. That the slave-trade was iniquitous hardly any one suspected ; even men who deemed themselves religious took part in it without scru- ple. But a change was at hand, and a still mightier change was in prospect. At the time of Cowper's birth, John Wesley was twenty- eight, and Whitefield was seventeen. With them the revival of religion was at hand. Johnson, the moral reformer, was twenty- two. Howard was born, and in less than a generation Wilberforce was to come. When Cowper was six years old his mother died ; and seldolT^^ has a child, even such a child, lost more, even in a mother. Fifty years after her death he still thinks of her, he says, with love and tenderness every day. Late in his life his cousin, Mrs. Anne Bodham, recalled herself to his remembrance by sending him his mother's picture. " Every creature," he writes, " that has any affinity to my mother is dear to me, and you, the daughter of her brother, are but one remove distant from her ; I love you there' fore, and love you much, both for her sake and for your own. The world could not have furnished you with a present so acceptable to me as tiie picture which you have so kindly sent me. I received it the night before last, and received it with a trepidation of nerves and spirits somewhat akin to what I should have felt had its dear original presented herself to my embraces. I kissed it, and hung it where it is the last object which I see at night, and the first on which I open my eyes in the morning. She died when I com- pleted my sixth year ; yet I remember her well, and am an ocular witness of the great fidelity of the copy. I remember, too, a mul- titude of the maternal tendernesses which I received from her, and which have endeared her memory to me beyond expression. There is in me, I believe, more of the Donne than of the Cowper, and though I love all of both names, and have a thousand reasons to love those of my own name, yet I feel the bond of nature draw me vehemently to your side." As Cowper never married, there was nothing to take the place in his heart which had been left vacant by Ills mother. " My mother ! when T learn'd that thou wast dead, Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed."* Hover'd thy spirit o'er thy sorrowing son, Wretch even then, life's journev just begun? Perhaps thou gav'st me, though unfelt, a kiss; Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep in bliss — Ah, that.maternal smile! — it answers — Yes. I heard the bell toll'd on thv burial day, I saw the hearse that bore thee slow awav, And, turning from my nursery window, drew A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu! But was it such ? — It was. — Where thou art gone Adieus and farewells are a sound unknown. May I but meet thee on that peaceful shore, The parting word shall pass my lips no more ! COUTER. II Th}' maideVif., grieved ib.ciriSilvcs at my concern, Oft gave me jiromisc of tliV c[uick return. What ardently I wish'd, 1 long believed, And disappointed still, was still deceived; By expectation every day beguiled, Dupe of to-morrow even from a child. Thus many a sad to-morrow came and went, Till, all my stock of infant sorrows spent, I learn'd at last submission to my lot, But, though I less deplored thee, ne'er forgot." In the years that followed no doubt he remembered her too well. At six years of age this little mass of timid and quivering sensibil- ity was, in accorcfance with the cruel custom of the time, sent to a large boarding-school. The change from home to a boarding-school is bad enough now ; it was much worse in those days. " I had hardships," says Cowper, "of various kinds to conflict with, which I felt more sensibly in proportion to the tenderness with which I had been treated at home. But my chief affliction con- sisted in my being singled out from all the other boys by a lad of about fifteen years of age as a proper object upon whom he might let loose the cruelty of his temper. I choose to conceal a particular recital of the many acts of barbarity with which he made it his busi- ness continually to persecute me. It will be sufificient to say that his savage treatment of me impressed such a dread of his figure upon my mind, that I well remember being afraid to lift my eyes upon him higher than to his knees, and that I knew him better by his shoe-buckles than by any other part of his dress. May the Lord pardon him, and may we meet in glory ! " Cowper charges him- self, it may be in the exaggerated style of a self-accusing saint, with having become at school an adept in the art of lying. Southey says this must be a mistake, since at English public schools boys do not learn to lie. But the mistake is on Southey's part; bullying, such as this child endured, while it makes the strong boys tyrants, makes the weak boys cowards, and teaches them to defend themselves by deceit, the fist of the weak. The recollection of this boarding- school mainly it was that at a later day inspired the plea for a home education in Tirocinium. " Then why resign into a stranger's hand A task as much within your own command, That God and nature, and your interest too, Seem with one voice to delegate to you .-* Whv hire a lodging in a house unknown For one whose tenderest thoughts all hover round your own? Thi"^ second weaning, needless as it is, How does it lacerate both vour heart and his ! The indented stick that loses dav bv day Notch after notch, till all are smooth'd away, Bears witness long ere his dismission come, With what intense desire he wants his home. But though the jovs he hopes beneath your roof Bid fair enough to answer in the proof, 13 COWPER. Har;rJc;-s, and safe, ar.d natural as they are, A disapi'.ointuient waits him even there : Arrived, he feels ?:^ unexpected change, He blushes, han;^s his head, is shy and strange. No longer takes, as once, with fearless ease, His favourite stand between his father's knees. But seeks the corner of some distant seat, And eyes the door, and watches a retreat, And, least familiar where he should be most, Feels all his happiest privileges lost. Alas, poor l:)oy ! — the natural effect Of love by absence chill' d into respect." From the boarding-school, the boy, his eyes being liable to in- flammation, was sent to live with an oculist, in wdiose house he spent two years, enjoying at all events a respite from the sufferings and the evils of the boarding-school. He was then sent to West- minster School, at that time in its glory. That Westminster in those da3\s must have been a scene not merely of hardship, but of cruel suffering and degradation to the younger and weaker boys, has been proved by the researches of the Public Schools Commis- sion. There was an established system and a regular vocabulary of bullying. Yet Cowper seems not to have been so unhappy there as at the private schocl ; he speaks of himself as having excelled at cricket and football ; and excellence in cricket and football at a public school generally carries with it, besides health and enjoy- ment, not merely immunity from bullying, but high social consider- tion. With all Cowper's delicacy and sensitiveness, he must have had a certain fund of physical strength, or he could hardly have borne the literary labour of his later years, especially as he was subject to the medical treatment of a worse than empirical era. At one time he says, while he was at Westminster, his spirits were so buoyant that he fancied he should never die, till a skull thrown out before him by a grave-digger as he was passing through St. Margaret's churchyard in the night recalled him to a sense of his mortality. The instruction at a public school in those days was exclusively classical. Cowper was under Vincent Bourne, his portrait of whom is in some respects a picture not only of its immediate subject, but of the school-master of the last century. " I love the memory of Vinny Bourne. I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Pro- pertius, 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 par- tiality, because he was usher of the fifth form at Westminster when I passed through it. He was so good-natured and so indolent that T lost more than I got by him, for he made me as idle as himself. He was such a slov^en, as if he had trusted to his genius as a cloak for everything that coidd disgust you in his person ; and indeed in his writings he has almost made amends for all I remember seeing the Duke of Richmond set fire to his greasy locks, and box his ears to put it out again." Cowper learned, if not to write Latin COWPER. 13 verses as well as Vinny Bourne himself, to write them very well, as his Latin versions of some of his own short poems bear witness. Not only so, but he evidently became a good classical scholar, as classical scholarship was in those days, and acquired the literary form of which the classics are the best school. Out of school hours he studied independently, as clever boys under the unexact- ing rule of the old public schools often did, and read through the whole of the //^Vzc/and Odyssey with a friend. He also, probably, picked up at Westminster much of tiie little knowledge of the world which he ever possessed. Among his school-fellows was Warren Hastings, in whose guilt as proconsul he afterwards, for the sake of Auld Lang Syne, refused to believe, and Impey, whose character has had the ill-fortune to be required as the shade in Macaulay's fancy picture of Hastings. On leaving Westminster, Cowper, at eighteen, went to live with Mr. Chapman, an attorney, to whom he was articled, being destined for the Law. He chose that profession, he says, not of his own accord, but to gratify an indulgent father, who may have been led into the error by a recollection of the legal honours of the family, as well as by the "^ silver pence " which his promising son had won by his Latin verses at Westminster School. The youth duly slept at the attorney's house in Ely Place. His days were spent in "gig- gling and making giggle " with his cousins, Theodora and Har- riet, the daughters of Ashley Cowper, in the neighbouring South- ampton Row. Ashley Cowper was a very little man, in a white hat lined with yellow, and his nephew used to say that he would one day be picked by mistake for a mushroom. His fellow-clerk in the office, and his accomplice in giggling and making giggle, was one strangely mated with him ; the strong, aspiring and un- scrupulous Thurlow, who, though fond of pleasure, was at the same time preparing himself to push his way to wealth and power. Cowper felt that Thurlow would reach the summit of ambition while he would himself remain below, and made his friend prom- ise when he was Chancellor to give him something. When Thurlow was Chancellor, he gave Cowper his advice on translating Homer. At the end of his three )^ears with the attorney, Cowper took chambers in the Middle, from which he afterwards removed to the Inner Temple. The Temple is now a pile of law offices. In those days it was still a Society. One of Cowper's set says of it: "The Temple is the barrier that divides the City and Suburbs; and the gentlemen who reside there seem influenced by the situa- tion of the place they inhabit. Templars are in general a kind of citizen courtiers. They aim at the air and the mien of the draw- ing-room, but the holy-day smoothness of a 'prentice, heightened with some additional touches of the rake or coxcomb, betrays it- self in everything they do. The Temple, however, is stocked with its peculiar beaux, wits, poets, critics, and every character in the gay world ; and it is a thousand pities that so pretty a societv should be disgraced with a few dull fellows, who can submit to puzzle them- 14 COWPER. selves with cases and reports, and have not taste enough to follow tile genteel method of studying the law." Cowper, at all events, studied law by the genteel method ; he read it almost as httle in the Temple as he had in the attorney's office, though in due course of time he was formally called to the Bar, and even managed in some way to acquire a reputation which, when he had entirely given up the profession, brought him a curious offer of a readership at Lyons Inn. His time was given to literature, and he became a member of a little circle of men of letters and journalists which had its social centre in the Nonsense Club, consisting of seven West- minster men who dined together every Thursday. In the set were Bonnell Thornton and Colman, twin wits ; fellow-writers of the pe- riodical essays which were the rage in that day; joint proprietors of the St. Ja7nes''s Chronicle j contributors both of them to the Connoisseur ; and translators, Colman of Terence, Bonnell Thorn- ton of Plautus, Colman being a dramatist besides. In the set was Lloyd, another wit and essayist and a poet, with a character not of the best. On the edge of the set, but apparently not in it, was Churchill, who was then running a course which to many seemed meteoric, and of whose verse, sometimes strong but always tur- bid, Cowper conceived and retained an extravagant admiration. Churchill was a link to Wilkes ; Hogarth, too, was an ally of Col- man, and helped him in his exhibition of Signs. The set was strict- ly confined to Westminsters. Gray and Mason, being Etonians, were objects of its literary hostility, and butts of its satire. It is needless to say much about these literary companions of Cowper's youth; his intercourse with tliem was totally broken off ; and be- fore he himself became a poet its effects had been obliterated by madness, entire change of mind, and the lapse of twenty years. If a trace remained, it was in his admiration of Churchill's verses, and in the general results of literary society, and of early practice in composition. Cowper contributed to the Connoisser and the St. James's Chronicle. His papers in the Connoisseur have been preserved ; they are mainly imitations of the lighter papers of the Spectator hy a student who affects the man of the world. He also dallied with poetry, writing verses to "Delia," and an epistle to Lloyd. He had translated an elegy of Tibullus when he was four- teen, and at Westminster he had written an imitation of Phillips's Splendid Shilling, which, Southey says, shows his manner formed. He helped his Cambridge brother, John Cowper, in a translation of the Heriade. He kept up his classics, especially his Homer. In his letters there are proofs of his familiarity with Rousseau. Two or three ballads which he wrote are lost, but he says they were popular, and we may believe him. Probably they were patriotic. ' When poor Bob White," he says, " brought in the news of Bos- cawen's success off the Coast of Portugal, how did I leap for joy ! When Hawke demohshed Conflans, I was still more transported. But nothing could express my rapture when Wolfe made the con- quest of Quebec." The " Delia " to whom Cowper wrote verses was his cousin COWPER. 15 Theodora, with whom he had an unfortunate love affair. Her father, Ashley Cowper, forbade their marriage, nominally on the ground of consanguinity ; really, as Southey thinks, because he saw Cowper's unfitness for business, and inability to maintain a wife. Cowper felt the disappointment deeply at the time, as well he might do if Theodora resembled her sister, Lady Hesketh. Theodora remained unmarried, and, as we shall see, did not forget her lover. His letters she preserved till her death in extreme old age. In 1756 Cowper's father died. There does not seem to have been much intercourse between them, nor does the son in after- years speak with any deep feeling of his loss : possibly his com- plaint in Tirociniiini of the effect of boarding-schools, in estrang- ing children from their parents, may have had some reference to his own case. His local affections, however, were very strong, and he felt with unusual keenness the final parting from his old home, and the pang of thinking that strangers usurp our dwelling and the familiar places will know us no more. " Where once we dwelt our name is heard no more, Children not thine have trod my nursery floor; And where the gardener Robin, day by day, Drew me to school along the public way, Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapp'd In scarlet mantle warm and velvet capp'd. 'Tis now become a history little known. That once we call'd the pastoral house our own." Before the rector's death, it seems, his pen had hardly realised the cruel frailty of the tenure by which a home in a parsonage is held. Of the family of Burkhampstead Rectory there was now left besides himself only his brother John Cowper^ Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge, whose birth had cost their mother's life. When Cowper was thirty-two, and still living in the Temple, came the sad and decisive crisis of his life. He went mad, and attempted suicide. What was the source of his madness .? There is a vague tradition that it arose from licentiousness, which, no doubt, is sometimes the cause of insanity. But in Cowper's case there is no proof of anything of the kind : his confessions, after his conversion, of his own past sinfulness point to nothing worse than ^Ceneral ungodliness and occasional excess in wine ; and the tradi- tion derives a colour of probability only from the loose lives of one or two of the wits and Bohemians with whom he had lived. His virtuous love of Theodora was scarcely compatible with low and gross amours. Generally, his madness is said to have been religious, and the blame is laid on the same foe to human weal as that of the sacrifice of Iphigenia. But when he first went mad, his conversion to Evangelicism had not taken place ; he had not led a particularly religious life, nor been greatly given to religious prac- tices, though as a clergyman's son he naturally believed^in religion, had at times felt religious emotions, and when he found his heart sinking had tried devotional bocks and prayers. The truth is, his 1 6 COWPE!^. malady was simple hypochondria, having its source in delicacy of constitution and weakness of digestion, combined with the influence of melancholy surroundings. It had begun to attack him soon after his settlement in his lonely chambers in the Temple, when his pursuits and associations, as we have seen, were far from Evangel- ical. When its crisis arrived, he was living by himself without any society of the kind that suited him (for the excitement of the Non- sense Club was sure to be followed by reaction) ; he had lost his love, his father, his home, and, as it happened, also a dear friend ; his little patrimony was fast dwindling away; he must have despaired of success in his profession ; and his outlook was altogether dark. It yielded to the remedies to which hypochondria usually yields — air, exercise, sunshine, cheerful society, congenial occupation. It came with January and went with May. Its gathering gloom was dispelled for a time by a stroll in fine weather on the hills above Southampton Water, and Cowper said that he was never unhappy for a whole day in the company of Lady Hesketh. When he had become a Methodist, his hypochondria took a religious form, but so did his recovery from hypochondria ; both must be set down to the account of his faith, or neither. This double aspect of the matter will plainly appear further on. A votary of wealth, when his brain gives way' under disease or age, fancies that he js a beggar. A Methodist, when his brain gives way under the same influences, fancies that he is forsaken of God. In both cases the root of the malady is physical. In the lines which Cowper sent on his disappointment to Theo- dora's sister, and which record the sources of his despondency, there is not a touch of religious despair, or of anything connected with religion. The catastrophe was brought on by an incident with which religion had nothing to do. The office of clerk of the Jour- nals in the House of Lords fell vacant, and was in the gift of Cow- per's kinsman, Major Cowper, as patentee. Cowper received the nomination. He had longed for the office sinfully, as he afterwards fancied ; it would exactlyhave suited him, and made him comfort- able for hfe. But his mind had by this time succumbed to his malady. His fancy conjured up visions of opposition to the appoint- ment in the House of Lords ; of hostility in the office where he had to study the Journals ; of the terrors of an examination to be undergone before the frowning peers. After hopelessly poring over the Journals for some months he became quite mad, and his mad- ness took a suicidal form. He has told with unsparing exactness the story of his attempts to kill himself. In his youth his father had unwisely given him a treatise in favour of suicide to read, and when he argued against it, had listened to his reasonings in a si- lence which he construed as sympathy with the writer, though it seems to have been only unwillingness to think too badly of the state of a departed friend. This now recurred to his mind, and talk with casual companions in taverns and chop-houses was enough in his present condition to confirm him in his belief that self-de- struction was lawful. Evidently he was perfectly insane, for he CO VVPER. I J could not take up a newspaper without reading in it a fancied libel on himself. First he bought laudanum, and had gone out into the fields with the intention of swallowing it, when the love of life sug- gested another way of escaping the dreadful ordeal. He might sell all he had, .fly to France, change his religion, and bury himself in a monastery. He went home to pack up ; but while he was looking over his portmanteau, his mood changed, and he again resolved on self-destruction. Taking a coach, he ordered the coachman to drive to the Tower Wharf, intending to throw himself into the river. But the love of life once more interposed, under the guise of a low tide and a porter seated on the quay. Again in the coach, and afterwards in his chambers, he tried to swallow the laudanum ; but his hand was paralysed by "the convincing Spirit," aided by sea- sonable interruptions from the presence of his laundress and her husband, and at length he threw the laudanum away. On the night before the day appointed for the examination before the Lords, he lay some time with the point of his penknife pressed against his heart, but without courage to drive it home. Lastly, he tried to hang himself ; and on this occasion he seems to have been saved notW the love of life, or by want of resolution, but by mere acci- dent." He had become insensible, when the garter by which he was suspended broke, and his fall brought in the laundress, who sup- posed him to be in a fit. He sent her to a friend, to whom he re- lated all that had passed, and despatched him to his kinsman. His kinsman arrived, listened widi horror to the story, made more vivid by the sight of the broken garter, saw at once that all thought of the appointment was at end, and carried away the instrument of nomination. Let those whom despondency assails read this passage of Covvper's life, and remember that he lived to write John Gilpin and The Task. Cowper tells us that "to this moment he had felt no concern of a spiritual kind ; " that " ignorant of original sin, insensible of the guilt of actual transgression, he understood neither the Law nor the Gospel; the condemning nature of the one, nor the restoring mercies of the other." But after attempting suicide he was seized, as he well might be, with religious horrors. Now it was that he began to ask himself whether he had been guilty of the unpardon- able sin, and was presently persuaded that he had, tliough it would be vain to inquire what he imagined the unpardonable sin to be. Li this mood, he fancied that if there was any balm for him in Gilead, it would be found in the ministrations of his friend Martin jMadan, an Evangelical clergyman of high repute, whom he had been wont to regard as an entluisiast. His Cambridge brother, John, the trans- lator of the Henriade, seems to have had some philosophic doubts as to the efiicacy of the proposed remedy, but, like a philosopher, he consented to' the experiment. Mr. Madan came and ministered, but in that distempered soul his balm turned to poison ; his relig- ious conversations only fed the horrible illusion. A set of Eng- lish Sapphics, written by Cowper at this time, and expressing his despair, were unfortunately preserved ; they are a ghastly play of 1 8 COWPER. the poetic faculty in a mind utterly deprived of self-control, and amidst the horrors of inrushing madness. Diabolical they might be termed more truly than religious. There was nothing for it but a madhouse. The sufferer was consigned to the private asylum of Dr. Cotton, at St. Alban's. An ill-chosen physician Dr. Cotton would have been, if the malady had really had its source in religion ; for he was himself a pious man, a writer of hymns, and was in the habit of holding religious inter- course with his patients. Cowper, after his recovery, speaks of that intercourse with the keenest pleasure and gratitude ; so that, in the opinion of the two persons best qualified to judge, religion in this case was not the bane. Cowper has given us a full account of his recovery. It was brought about, as we can plainly see, by medical treatment wisely applied ; but it came in the form of a burst of re- ligious faith and hope. He rises one morning feeling better ; grows cheerful over his breakfast, takes up the Bible, which in his fits of madness he always threw aside, and turns to a verse in the Epistle to the Romans. " Immediately I received strength to believe, and the full beams of the Sun of Righteousness shone upon me. I saw the sufficiency of the atonement He had made, my pardon in His blood, and the fulness and completeness of His justification. In a moment I believed and received the Gospel." Cotton at first mis- trusted the sudden change ; but he was at length satisfied, pro- nounced his patient cured, and discharged him from the asylum, after a detention of eighteen months. Cowper hymned his deliver- ance in The Happy Change, as in the hideous Sapphics he had given religious utterance to his despair. "The soul, a dreary province once Of Satan's dark domain, Feels a new empire form'd within. And owns a heavenly reign. "The glorious orb whose golden beams The fruitful year control, Since first obedient to Thy word. He started from the goal, " Has cheer'd the nations with the joys His orient rays impart ; But, Jesus, 'tis Thy light alone Can shine upon the heart." Once for all, the reader of Cowper's life must make up his mind to acquiesce in religious forms of expression. If he does not sym- pathise with them, he will recognise them as phenomena of opin- ion, and bear them hke a philosopher. He can easily translate them into the language of psychology, or even of physiology, if he thinks fit. COWPER. - 19 CHAPTER II. AT HUNTINGDON — THE UNWINS. The storm was over; but it had swept away a great part of Cowper's scanty fortune, and almost all his friends. At thirty-five he was stranded and desolate. He was obHged to resign a Com- missionership of Bankruptcy which he held, and httle seems to have remained to him but the rent of his chambers m the lemple. A return to his profession was, of course, out of the question. His relations, however, combined to make up a little income for him, thouo-h from a hope of his family, he had become a melancholy di»- appomtment ; even the Major contributing, in spite of the rather tryino- incident of the nomination. His brother was kind, and did a brother's duty, but there does not seem to have been much sym- pathy between them ; John Cowper did not become a convert to Evan<^elical doctrine till he was near his end, and he was incapable of sharing William's spiritual emotions. Of his briUiant compan- ions, the Bonnell Thorntons and the Colmans, the quondam mem- bers' of the Nonsense Club, he heard no more, till he had himself become famous. But he still had a staunch friend in a less bril- liant member of the club, Joseph Hill, the lawyer, evidently a man who united strong sense and depth of character with literary tastes and love of fun, and who was throughout Cowper's life his Mentor in matters of business, with regard to which he was himself a child. He had brought with him from the asylum at St. Alban's the servant who had attended him there, and who had been drawn by the singular talisman of personal attraction which partly made up to this frail and helpless being for his entire lack of force. He had also brought from the- same place an outcast boy whose case had excited his interest, and for whom he afterwards provided by putting him to a trade. The maintenance of these two retainers was expensive, and led to grumblinc" amons: the subscribers to the family subsidy, the Maior especially threatening to withdraw^ hi? contribution. While the matter was' in aoiitation, Cowper received an anonymous letter couched in the kindest terms, bidding^ him not distress' himself, for that whatever deduction from his income mi2:ht be made, the loss would be supplied by one who loved him ten'derly and approved his conduct. In a letter to Lady Hesketh, he says that he wishes he knew who dictated this letter, and that he had seen not long before a style excessively like it. He can scarcely have failed to guess that 'it came from Theodora. It is due to Cowper to sav that he accepts the assistance of his relatives, and all acts of kindness done to him, with sweet apd be^ 20 COWPER, . coming thankfulness ; and that whatever dark fancies he may have had about his religious state^ when the evil spirit was upon him, he always speaks w^ith contentment and cheerfulness of his earthly lot. Nothing splenetic, no element of suspicious and irritable self- love entered mto the composition of his character. On his release from the asylum he was taken in hand by his brother John, who first tried to find lodgings for him at or near Cambridge, and, failing in this, placed him at Huntingdon, within a long ride, so that William becoming a horseman for the purpose, the brothers could meet once a week. Huntingdon was a quiet little town with less than two thousand inhabitants, in a dull coun- try, the best part of which was the Ouse, especially to Cowper, who was fond of bathing. Life there, as in other English country towns in those days, and, indeed, till railroads made people everywhere too restless and migratory for companionship, or even for acquaint- ance, was sociable in an unrefined way. There were assemblies, dances, races, card-parties, and a bowhng-green, at which the little world met and enjoyed itself. From these the new convert, in his spiritual ecstasy, of course turned away as mere modes of murder- ing time. Three families received him with civility, two of them with cordiality ; but the chief acquaintances he made were with "odd scrambling fellows like himself;" an eccentric water-drinker and vegetarian who was to be met by early risers and walkers every .morning at six o'clock by his favourite spring; a char-parson, of the class common in those days of sinecurism and non-residence, who walked sixteen miles every Sunday to serve two churches, be- sides reading daily prayers at Huntingdon, and who regaled his friend with ale brewed by his own hands. In his attached servant the recluse boasted that he had a friend ; a friend he might have, but hardly a companion. For the first days, and even weeks, however, Huntingdon seemed a paradise. The heart of its new inhabitant was full of the un- speakable happiness that comes with calm after storm, with health after the most terrible of maladies, with repose after the burning fever of the brain. When first he went to church, he was in a spiritual ecstasy ; it was with difficulty that he restrained his emo- tions ; though his voice was silent,- being stopped by the intensity of his feelin2:s, his heart within him sang for joy ; and when the Gospel for the dav was read, the sound of it was more than he could well bear, this brightness of his mind communicated itself to all the objects round him— to the sluggish waters of the Ouse, to dull, fenny Huntinirdon, and to its commonplace inhabitants. For about three months his cheerfulness lasted, and with the help of books, and his rides to meet his brother, he got on pretty well ; but then " the communion which he had so long been^ able to maintain with the Lord v/as suddenly interrupted." This is his theolo2:ical version of the case : the rationalistic version immedi- ately follows : " I began to dislike my sohtary situation, and to fear I should never be able to weather out the winter in so lonely a dwelling." No man could be less fitted to bear a lonely life ; per COWPER. 21 *.ister,ce 'n llie attempt would soon have brought back his madness. He was longing for a home ; and a home was at hand to receive him. It was not, perhaps, one of the happiest kind; but the in- fiuence which detracted from its advantages was the one which »-endered it hospitable to the wanderer. If Christian piety was carried to a morbid excess beneath its roof. Christian charity opened Us door. The rehgious revival was now in full career, with Wesley fof its chief apostle, organiser, and dictator ; Whitefield for its great preacher; Fletcher of Madeley for its typical saint ; Lady Hunting- don for its patroness among the aristocracy, and the chief of its "devout women." From the pulpit, but still more from the stand of the field-preacher and through a well-trained army of social propagandists, it was assailing the scepticism, the coldness, the frivolity, the vices of the age. English society was deeply stirred ; multitudes were converted, while among those who were not con- verted violent and sometimes cruel antagonism was aroused. The party had two wings — the Evangelicals, people of the wealthier class or clergymen of the Church of England, who remained within the Establishm.ent ; and the Methodists, people of the lower middle class or peasants, the personal converts and followers of Wesley and Whitefield, who, like their leaders, without a positive secession, soon found themselves organising a separate spiritual life in the freedom of Dissent. In the early stages of the move- ment the Evangelicals were to be counted at most by hundreds, the Methodists by hundreds of thousands. So far as the masses were concerned, it was, in fact, a preaching of Christianity anew. There was a cross division of the party into the Calvinists and those whom the Calvinists called Arminians ; Wesley belonging to the latter section, while the most pronounced and vehement of the Calvinists was " the fierce Toplady." As a rule, the darker and sterner element, that which delighted in religious terrors and threatenings was Calvinist, the milder and gentler, that which preached a gospel of love and hope continued to .look up to Wesley, and to bear with him the reproacli of being .Arminian. It is needless to enter into a minute description of Evangelicism and Methodism; they are not things of the past. If Evangelicism has novv^ been reduced to a narrow domain by the advancing forces of Ritualism on one side, and of Rationalism on the other, Method- ism is still the great Protestant Church, especially beyond the Atlantic. The spiritual fire which they have kindled, the character which they have produced, the inoral reforms which they have wrought, the works of charity and pliilanthropy to which they have given birth, are matters not only of recent memory, but of present experience. Like the great Protestant revivals which had preceded them in England, like the Moravian revival on the Continent, to which they were closely related, tliev sou mens hardly do justice to a series of which the charm, such as it is, is evenly diffused, not gathered into centres of brilliancy like Madam de Sevigne's letter on the Orleans Marriage. Here is a letteu written in the highest spirits to Lady Hesketh. " Olney, Feb. 9th, 1786. " My dearest Cousin, — I have been impatient - to tell you that I am impatient to see you again. Mrs. Unwin partakes with me in all my feelings upon this subject, and longs also to see you, I should have told you so by the last post, but have been so com- pletely occupied by this tormenting specimen, that it was impossible to do it. I sent the General a letter on Monday, that would dis- tress and alarm him ; I sent him another yesterday, that will, I hope, quiet him again. Johnson has apologised very civilly for the multitude of his friend'^ strictures ; and his friend has promised to confine himself In future to a comparison of me with the original, so that, I doilbt not, we shall jog on merrily together. And now, my dear, let me tell you once more that your kindness in promising us a visit has charmed us both. I shall see you again. 1 shall hear your voice. We shall take walks together. I will show you my prospects — the hovel, the alcove, the Ouse and its banks, every- thing that I have described. I anticipate the pleasure of those days not very far distant, and feel a part of it at this moment. Talk not of an inn ! Mention it not for your life ! We have never had so many visitors but we could easily accommodate them all; though we have received Unwin, and his wife, and his sister, and his son all at once. My dear, I will not let you come till the end of May, or beginning of June, because before that time my greenhouse will not be ready to receive us, and it is the only pleasant room belong- ing to us. When the plants go out, we go in. I line it with mats, and spread the floor with mats ; and there you shall sit with a bed of mignonette at your side, and a hedge of honeysuckles, roses, and jasmine ; and I will make you a bouquet of myrtle every day. Sooner than the time I mention the country will not be in complete beauty. " And I will tell you what you shall find at your first entrance. Imprimis, as soon as you have entered the vestibule, if you cast a look on either side of you, you shall see on the right hand a box of my making. It is the box in which have been lodged all my hares, and in which lodges Puss at present; but he, poor fellow, is worn out with age, and promises to die before you can see him. On the right hand stands a cupboard, the work of the same author ; it was once a dove-cage, but 1 transformed it. Opposite to you stands a table, which I also made ; but a merciless servant having scrubbed it until it became paralytic, it serves no purpose now but of orna- ment ; and all my clean shoes stand under it. On the left hand, at the further end of this superb vestibule, you will find the door of the parlour, into which I will conduct you, and where I will intro- duce you to Mrs. Unwin, unless we should meet her before, and COWPER. 65 where we will be as happy as the day is long. Order yourself, my cousin, to the Swan at Newport, and there you shall find me ready to conduct you to OIney. " My dear, I have told Homer what you say about casks and urns, and have asked him whether he is sure that it is a cask in which Jupiter keeps his wine. He swears that it is a cask, and that it will never be anything better than a cask to eternity. So, if the god is content with it, we must even wonder at his taste, and be so too. " Adieu ! my dearest, dearest cousin. W. C." Here, by way of contrast, is a letter written in the lowest spirits possible to Mr. Newton. It displays literary grace inalienable even in the depths of hypochondria. It also shows plainly the connex- ion of hypochondria with the weather. January was a month to the return of which the sufferer always looked forward with dread as a mysterious season of evil. It was a season, especially at Olney, of thick fog combined with bitter frosts. To Cowper this state of the atmosphere appeared the emblem of his mental state ; we see in it the cause. At the close the letter slides from spiritual despair to the worsted-merchant, showing that, as we remarked before, the language of despondency had become habitual, and does not always flow from a soul really in the depths of woe. To THE Rev. John Newton. "Jan. 13th, 1784. " My dear Friend, — I too have taken leave of the old year, and parted with it iust when you did, but with very different sentiments and feelino-s upon the occasion. I looked back upon all the pas- sac^es and^occurrences of it, as a traveller looks back upon a wil- derness through which he has passed with weariness and sorrow of heart reapinf^'no other fruit of his labour than the poor consolation that, dreary as the desert was, he has left it all behind him. The traveller would find even this comfort considerably lessened if, as soon as he had passed one wilderness, another of equal length, and equally desolate, should expect him. In this particular, his expe- rience and mine would exactlv tally. I should rejoice, indeed, that the old year is over and gone, if I had not every reason to prophesy a new one similar to it. t + • "The new year is already old in my account. I am not, in- deed, sufficiently second-sighted to be able to boast by anticipation an acquaintance with the events of it yet unborn, but rest con- vinced that, be they what they may, not one of them comes a mes- sen^rer of o-ood to me. If even death itself should be of the num- ber,%e is "no friend of mine. It is an alleviation of the woes even of an unenlightened man, that he can wish foi death, and indulge a hope, at least, that in death he shall find deliverance. But, loaded as my life is with despair, I have no such comfort as would result from a supposed probability of better things to come, were it once S 66 COWPER. ended. For, more unhappy than the traveller with whom 1 set out, pass through what difficulties I may, through whatever dangers and afflictions, I am not a whit nearer the home, unless a dungeon may be called so. This is no very agreeable theme ; but in so great a dearth of subjects to write upon, and especially impressed as I am at this moment with a sense of my own condition, I could choose no other. The weather is an exact emblem of my mind in its pres- ent state. A thick fog envelopes everything, and at the same time it freezes intensely. You will tell me that this cold gloom will be succeeded by a cheerful spring, and endeavour to encourage me to hope for a spiritual change resembling it ; — but it will be lost labour. Nature revives again ; but a soul once slain lives no more. The hedge that has been apparently dead, is not so ; it will burst into leaf and blossom at the appointed time ; but no such time is ap- pointed for the stake that stands in it. It is as dead as it seems, and will prove itself no dissembler. The latter end of next month will complete a period of eleven years in which I have spoken no other language. It is a long time for a man, whose eyes were once opened, to spend in darkness ; long enough to make despair an inveterate habit ; and such it is in me. My friends, I know, expect that I shall see yet again. They think it necessary to the existence of divine truth, that he who once had possession of it should never finally lose it. I admit the solidity of this reasoning in every case but my own. And why not in my own ? For causes which to them it appears madness to allege, but which rest upon my mind with a weight of immovable conviction. If I am recover- able, why am I thus .'' — why crippled and made useless in the Church, just at that time of life when, my judgment and experience being matured, I might be most useful ? — why cashiered and turned out of service, till, according to the course of nature, there is not life enough left in me to make amends for the years I have lost — till there is no reasonable hope left that the fruit can ever pay the expense of the fallow.'' I forestall the answer: — God's ways are mysterious, and He giveth no account of His matters — an answer that would serve my purpose as well as theirs to use it. There is a mystery in my destruction, and in time it shall be explained, " I am glad you have found so much hidden treasure ; and Mrs. Unwin desires me to tell you that you did her no more than justice in believing that she would rejoice in it. It is not easy to surmise the reason why the reverend doctor, your predecessor, concealed it. Being a subject of a free government, and I suppose full of the divinity most in fashion, he could not fear lest his riches should expose him to persecution. Nor can I suppose that he held it any disgrace for a dignitary of the Church to be wealthy, at a time when Churchmen in general spare no pains to become so. But the wisdom of some men has a droll sort of knavishness in it, much like that of a magpie, who hides A-^hat he finds with a deal of con- trivance, merely for the pleasure of doing it. " Mrs. Unwin is tolerably well. She wishes me to add that she shall be obliged to Mrs. Newton, if, when an opportunity offers, COWPER. ej she will give the worsted-merchant a jog. We congratulate you that Eliza does not grow worse, which I know you expected would be the case in the course of the winter. Present our love to her. Remember us to Sally Johnson, and assure yourself that wc re- mam as warmly as ever, Yours, W. C " M. U." In the next specimen we shall see the faculty of imparting in- terest to the most trivial incident by the way of telling it. The incident in this case is one which also forms the subject of the little poem called The Colubriad. To THE Rev. William Unwin. " Aug. 3rd, 1782. " My dear Friend, — Entertaining some hope that Mr. New- ton's next letter would furnish me with the means of satisfying your inquiry on the subject of Dr. Johnson's opinion, I have till now delayed my answer to your last ; but the information is not yet come, Mr. Newton having intermitted a week more than usual since his last writing. When I receive it, favourable or not, it shall be communicated to you ; but 1 am not very sanguine in my ex- pectations from that quarter. Very learned and very critical heads are hard to please. He may, perhaps, treat me with levity for the sake of my subject and design, but the composition, I think, will hardly escape his censure. Though all doctors may not be of the same mind, there is one doctor at least, whom I have lately dis- covered, my professed admirer. He too, like Johnson, was with difficulty persuaded to read, having an aversion to all poetry ex- cept the N^ight Thoughts ; which, on a certain occasion, when being confined on board a ship, he had no other employment, he got by heart. He was, however, prevailed upon, and read me several times over; so that if my volume had sailed with him, instead of Dr. Young's, I might, perhaps, have occupied that shelf in his memory which he then allotted to the Doctor : his name is Renny, and he lives at Newport Pagnel. " It is a sort of paradox, but it is true : we are never more in danger than when we think ourselves most secure, nor in reality more secure than when we seem to be most in danger. Both sides of this apparent contradiction were lately verified in my experience. Passing from the greenhouse to the barn, I saw three kittens (for we have so many in our retinue) looking with fixed attention at something, which lay on the threshold of a door, coiled up. I took but little notice of then at first ; but a loud hiss engaged me to attend more closely, when behold — a viper ! the largest I re- member to have seen, rearing itself, darting its forked tongue, and ejaculating the aforementioned hiss at the nose of a kitten, almost in contact with his lips. I ran into the hall for a hoe with a long handle, with which I intended to assail him, and returning in a few 68 COWPER. seconds missed him % he was gone, and J feared had escaped me. Still, however, the kitten sat watching immovably upon the same spot. I concluded, therefore, that, sliding between the door and the threshold, he had found his way out of the garden into the yard. I went round immediately^ and there found him in close conversation with the old cat, whose curiosity being excited by so novel an appearance, inclined her to pat his head repeatedly with her fore foot ; with her claws, however, sheathed, and not in anger, but in the way of philosophical inquiry and examinationo To pre- vent her falling a victim to so laudable an exercise of her talents, I interposed in a moment with the hoe, and performed an act of decapitation, which, though not immediately mortal, proved so in the end. Had he slid into the passages, where it is dark, or had he, when in the yard, met with no interruption from the cat, and secreted himself in any of the outhouses, it is hardly possible but that some of the family must have been bitten ; he might have been trodden upon without being perceived, and have slipped away before the sufferer could have well distinguished what foe had wounded him. Three years ago we discovered one in the same place, which the barber slew with a trowel. " Our proposed removal to Mr. Small's was, as you suppose, a jest, or rather a joco-serious matter. We never looked upon it as entirely feasible, yet we saw in it something so like practicability, that we did not esteem it altogether unworthy of our attention. It was one of those projects which people of hvely imaginations play with, and admire for a few days, and then break in pieces. Lady Austen returned on Thursday from London, where she spent the last fortnight, and whither she was called by an unexpected opportunity to dispose of the remainder of her lease. She has now, therefore, no longer any connexion with the great city; she has none on earth whom she calls friends but us, and no house but at Olney. Her abode is to be at the Vicarage, where she has hired as much room as she wants, which she will embellish with her own furni^ ture, and which she will occupy, as soon as the minister's wife has produced another child, which is expected to make its entry in October. "Mr. Bull, a dissenting minister of Newport, a learned, inge- nious, good-natured, pious friend of ours, who sometimes visits us, and whom we visited last week, has put into my hands three voU umes of French poetry, composed by Madame Guyon ; — a quietist, say you, and a fanatic ; I will have nothing to do with her. It is very well, you are welcome to have nothing to do with her, but in the meantime her verse is the only French verse I ever read that I found agreeable ; there is a neatness in it equal to that which we applaud with so much reason in the compositions of Prior. I have translated several of them, and shall proceed in my translations till I have filled a Lilliputian paper-book I happen to have by _me, which, when filled, I shall present to Mr. Bull. He is her passion- ate admirer, rode twenty miles to see her picture in the house of a stranger, which stranger pohtely insisted on his acceptance of it. COWPER. 69 and it now hangs over his parlour chimney. It is a striking por- trait, too characteristic not to be a strong resemblance, and were it encompassed with a glory, instead of being dressed in a nun's hood, might pass for the face of an angel. " Our meadows are covered with a winter-flood in August ; the rushes with which our bottomless chairs were to have been bot- tomed, and much hay, which was not carried, are gone down the river on a voyage to Ely, and it is even uncertain whether they will ever return. Sic transit gloria iimndi ! " I am glad you have found a curate ; may he answer ! Am happy in Mrs. Bouverie's continued approbation ; it is worth while to write for such a reader. Yours, W. C. " The power of imparting interest to commonplace incidents is so great that we read with a sort of excitement a minute account of the conversion of an old card-table into a writing and dining tal:)le, with the causes and consequences of that momentous event; curiosity having been first cunningly aroused by the suggestion that the clerical friend to whom the letter is addressed might, if the mystery were not explained, be haunted by it when he was getting into his pulpit, at which time, as he had told Cowper, perplexing questions were apt to come into his mind. A man who lived by himself could have little but himself to write about. Yet in these letters there is hardly a touch of offensive egotism. Nor is there any querulousness, except that of religious despondency. From those weaknesses Cowper was free. Of his proneness to self-revelation we have had a specimen already. The minorantiquities of the generations immediately preceding ours are becoming rare, as compared with those of remote ages, because nobody thinks it worth while to preserve them. It is al- most as easy to get a personal memento cf Priam or Nimrod as it is to get a harpsichord, a spinning-wheel, a tinder-box, or a scratch- back. An Egyptian wig is attainable, a wig of the Georgian era is hardly so, much less a tie of the Regency. So it is with the scenes of common life a century or two ago. They are being lost, because tb.ey were famihar. Here are two of them, howeve'r, which have limned themselves with the distinctness of the camera-obscura on the page of a chronicler of trifles. To THE Rev. John Newton. Nov. 17th, 1783. " My dear Friend. — The country around is much alarmed with apprehensions of fire. Two have happened since that of Olney. One at Hitchin, where the damage is said to amount to eleven thousand pound-s ; and another, at a place not far from Hitchin, of which I have not yet learnt the name. Letters have been dropped at Bedford, threatening to burn the town; and the inhabi- tants have been so intimidated as to have place a guard in many parts of it, several nights past. Since our conflagration here, we 70 CO IVPEK. have sent two vvoman and a boy to the justice for depredation; S.R. for stealing a piece of beef, which, in her excuse, she said slie intended to take care of. This lady, whom you well remember, escaped for want of evidence ; not that evidence v.^as wanting;, but our men of Gotham judged it unnecessary to send it. With her went the 'Toman I mentioned before, who, it seems, has made some sort of profession, but upon this occasion allowed herself a latitude of conduct rather inconsistent with it, having filled her apron with wearing-apparel, which she likewise intended to take care of. She would have gone to the county gaol, had William Raban, the baker's son, who prosecuted, insisted upon it; but he, good-naturedly, though I think weakly, interposed in her favour, and begged her off. The young gentleman wliO accompanied these fair ones is the junior son of Molly BoswelL He had stolen some iron-work, the property of Griggs the butcher. Being convicted, he was ordered to be whipped, which operation he underwent at the cart's tail, from the stone-bouse to the high arch, and back again. He seemed to show great fortitude, but it was all an im- position upon the public. The beadle, vA\o performed it, had filled his left hand with yellow ochre, through which, after every stroke, he drew the lash of his whip, leaving the appearance of a wound upon the skin, but in reality not hurting him at all. This being perceived by Mr. Constable H., who followed the beadle, he applied his cane, without any such management or precaution, to the shoulders of the too merciful executioner. The scene immediately became more interesting. The beadle could by no means be pre- vailed upon to strike hard, which provoked the constable to strike harder ; and this double flogging continued, till a lass of Silver- End, pitying the pitiful beadle thus suffering under the hands of the pitiless constable, joined the procession, and placing herself immediately behind the latter, seized him by his capillary club, and pulling him backwards by the same, slapped his face with a most Amazon fury,. This concatenation of events has taken up more of my paper than I intended it should, but I could not forbear to inform you how the beadle thrashed the thief, the constable the beadle, and the lady the constable, and how the thief Avas the only person concerned who suffered nothing. Mr. Teedon has been here, and is gf^^ne acrain. He came to thank me for some left-off clothes. In answer to our inquiries after his health, he replied that he had a slow fever, which made him take all possible care not to inflame his blood. I admitted his prudence, but in his par- ticular instance could not verv clearlv discern the need of it. Pump water will not heat him much ; and, to speak a little in his own style, more inebriating fluids are to him, I fancy, not very at- tainable. He brought us news, the truth of which, however, I do not vouch for, that the town of Bedford was actually on fire yester- day, and the flames not extinguished when the bearer of the tidings left it. " Swift observes, when he is giving his reasons why the preacher is elevated always above his hearers, that, let the crowd be as COWPER. n great as it will below there is alsvays room enough overTiead. If the French philosophers can carry their art of flying to the perfection they desire, the observation maybe reversed, the crowd, will Idc overhead, and they will have most room who stay below. I can' assure you, however, upon my own experience, that tliis way of travelling is very dehghtful. I dreamt a night or two since that I drove myself tlirough the upper regions in a balloon and pair, with the greatest ease and security. Having finished the tour I intended, I made a short turn, and with one flourish of my whip, descended ; my horses prancing and curvetting with an infinite share of spirit, but without the least danger, either to me or my vehicle. The time, we may suppose, is at hand, and seems to be prognosticated by my dream, when these airy excursions v/ill be universal, when judges will fly the circuit, and bishops their visita- tions ; and when the tour of Europe will be performed with much greater speed, and with equal advantage, by all who travel merely for the sake of having it to say that they have made. " I beg you will accept for yourself and yours our unfeigned love, and remember me affectionately to Mr. Bacon, when you see him. Yours, my dear friend, " Wm. Cowper." To THE Rev. John Newton. " March 29th, 1784. " My dear Friend, — It being his Majesty's pleasure that I should yet hav^ another opportunity to write before he dissolves the Parliament, I avail myself of it with all possible alacrity. I thank \'0u for your last, which was not the less welcome for coming, like an extraordinary gazette, at a time when it was not expected. "As when the sea is uncommonly agitated, the water finds its way into creeks and holes of rocks, which in its calmer state it never reaches, in like manner the effect of these turbulent times is felt even at Orchard Side, where, in general, we live as undisturbed by the political element as shrimps or cockles that have been acci- dentally deposited in some hollow beyond the water-mark, by the usual dashing of the waves. We were sitting yesterday after din- ner, the two ladies and myself, very composedly, and without the least apprehension of any'such intrusion in our snug parlour, one lady knitting, the other netting, and the gentleman winding worsted, when to our unspeakable surprise a mob appeared before the win- dow : a smart rap was heard at the door, the boys bellowed, and the maid announced Mr. Grenville. Puss was unfortunately let out of her box, so that the candidate, with all his good friends at his heels, wps refused admittance at the grand entry, and referred to the back door, as the only possible way of approach. " Candidates are creatures not very susceptible of affronts, and would rather, I suppose, climb in at the window than be absolutely excluded. In aminute, the yard, the kitchen, and the parlour were filled. Mr. Grenville, advancing toward me, shook me by the hand 7 2 COWPER. with a degree of cordiality that was extremely seducing. As soon as he, and as many more as could find chairs, were seated, he be- «an to open the intent of his visit, I told him I had no vote, for which he readily gave me credit. 1 assured him I had no influence, w^hich he was not equally inclined to believe, and the less, no doubt, because Mr. Ashburner, the draper, addressing himself to me at this moment, informed me that I had a great deal. Supposing that I could not be possessed of such a treasure without knowing it, I ventured to confirm my first assertion by saying, that if I had any I was utterly at a loss to imagine where it could be, or wherein it consisted. Thus ended the conference. Mr. Grenville squeezed me by the hand again, kissed the ladies, and withdrew. He kissed, likewise, the maid in the kitchen, and seemed, upon the whole, a most loving, kissing, kind-hearted gentleman. He is very young, ,Senteel, and handsome. He has a pair of very good eyes in his head, which not being sufficient as it should seem for the many nice and difficult purposes of a senator, he has a third also, which he suspended from his l)uttonhole. The boys halloo 'd ; the dogs barked; puss scampered; the hero, with his long train of obsequi- ous followers, withdrew. We made ourselves very merry witli the adventure, and in a short time settled into our former tranquility, never probably to be thus interrupted more. I thought myself, however, happy in being able to affirm truly that I had not that in- fluence for which he sued ; and which, had I been possessed of it, with my present views of the dispute between the Crown and the Commons, I must have refused him, for he is on the side of the former. It is comfortable to be of no consequence in a world where one cannot exercise any without disobliging somebody. The town, however, seems to be much at his service, and if he be equally suc- cessful throughout the country, he will undoubtedly gain his elec- tion. Mr. Ashburner, perhaps, was a little mortified, because it was evident that I owed the honour of this visit toliis misrepresen- tation of my importance. But had he thought proper to assure Mr. Grenville that I had three heads, I should not, I suppose, have been bound to produce them. '• Mr. Scott, who you say w^as so much admired in your pulpit, would be equally admired in his own, at least by all capable judges, were he not so apt to be angry with his congregation. This hurt him, and had he the understanding and eloquence of Paul himself, would still hurt him. He seldom, hardly ever indeed, preaches a gentle, well-tempered sermon, but I hear it highly commended ; but warmth of temper, indulged to a degree that may be called scold- ing, defeats the end of preaching. It is a misapplication of his powers, which it also cripples, and tears away his liearers. But he is a good man, and may perhaps outgrow it. " Many thanks for the worsted, which is excellent. We are as well as a spring hardly less severe than the severest winter will give us leave to be. With our united love, we conclude ourselves yours and Mrs. Newton's affectionate and faithful, W. C. M. U." COWPER. 73 In 1789 the French Revolution, advancing with thunder-tread, makes even the hermit of Weston look up for a moment from his translation of Homer, though he little dreamed that he, with his gentle philanthropy and sentimentalism, had anything to do with the great overturn of the social and political systems of the past. From time to time some crash of especial magnitude awakens a faint echo in the letters. To Lady Hesketh. "July 7th, 1790. " Instead of beginning with the saffron-vested mourning to which Homer invites me, on a morning that has no saffron vest to boast, I shall begin with you. It is irksome to us both to wait so long as we must for you, but we are willing to hope that by a longer stay you will make us amends for all this tedious procrastination. " Mrs. Unwin has made known her whole case to Mr. Gregson, whose opinion of it has been very consolatory to me ; he says, in- deed, it is a case perfectly out of the reach of all physical aid, but at the same time not at all dangerous. Constant pain is a sad grievance, whatever part is affected, and she is hardly ever free from an aching head, as well as an uneasy side ; but patience is an anodyne of God's own preparation, and of that he gives her largely. "The French who, like all lively folks, are extreme in every- thing^, are such in their zeal for freedom ; and if it were possible to make so noble a. cause ridiculous, their manner of promoting it could not fail to do so. Princes and peers reduced to plain gentle- manship, and gentles reduced to a level with their own lackeys, are excesses of which they will repent hereafter. Differences of rank and subordination are, I believe, of God's appointment, and consequently essential to the well-being of society ; but what we mean by fanaticism in religion is exactly that which animates their politics ; and, unless time should sober them, they will, after all, be an unhappy people. Perhaps it deserves not much to be won- dered at, that at their first escape from tyrannic shackles they should act extravagantly, and treat their kings as they have some- times treated their idol. To these, however, they are' reconciled in due time again, but their respect for monarchy, is at an end. They want nothing now but a little English sobriety, and that they v.-ant extremely. I heartily wish them some wit in their anj^er, for it were great pity that so many millions should be miserable for want of it." This, it will be admitted, is very moderate and unapocalvDtic. Presently Monarchical Europe takes arms against the Revolution. But there are two political observers at least who see that Monarch- ical Europe is making a mistake — Kaunitz and Cowper. " The French," observes Cowper to Lady Heslceth in December, 1792, "are a vain and childish people, and conduct themselves on this grand occasion with a levity and extravagance nearly akin to mad- 74 COWPER. ness : but it would have been better for Austria and Prussia to let them alone. All nations have a right to choose their own form of government, and the sovereignty of the people is a doctrine that evinees itself; for, vviienever the people choose to be masters, thev always are so, and none can hinder them. God grant that we mav have no revolution here, but unless we have reform, we certainlV shall. Depend upon it, my dear, the hour has come when power founded on patronage and corrupt majorities must govern this land no longer. Concessions, too, must be made to Dissenters of everv denomination. They have a right to them— a right to all the priv- ileges of Englishmen, and sooner or later, by fair means or bv foul, they will have them." Even in 1793, though he expresses, as he well might, a cordial abhorrence of the doings of the French, he calls them not fiends, but " madcaps." He expresses the strongest indignation against the Tory mob which sacked Priestley's house at Birmingham, as he does, in justice be it said, against 'all mani- festations of fanaticism. We cannot help sometimes wishing, as we read these passages in tlie letters, that their calmness'^and reasonableness could have been communicated to another " Old Whig," who was setting the world on fire with his anti-revolution- ary rhetoric. It is true, as has already been said, tha.t Cowper was "extra- mundane; '' and that his political reasonableness was in part the result of the fancy that he and his fellow-saints had nothing to do with the world but to keep themselves clear of it, and let it go its own wav to destruction. But it must also be admitted that while the wealth of Establishments of which Burke was the ardent de- fender, is necessarilv reactionary in the highest degree, the ten- dency of religion itself, wbere it is genuine and sincere, must be to repress any selfish feeling about class or position, and to make men, in tem.poral matters, more willing to sacrifice the present to the future. e?peciallv where the hope is held out of moral as well as of material improvement. Thus it has come to pass that men who professed and im.a?ined themselves to have no interest in this World have practicallv been its great reformers and improvers in the political and material as well as in the moral sphere. The b^t <;Decimpn shall be one in the more sententious style, and one which proves that Cowper was capable of writing in a judicious manner on a difficult and delicate question— even a question so difficult and so delicate as that of the propriety of painting the face. To THE Rev. William Uxwix. ''■:May 3d, 1784. "My Dear Friend.— The subject of face painting maybe considered. I think, in two points of view. First, there is room for dispute with respect to the consistency of the practice with good morals: and, secondlv. whether it be. on the w'hole. convenient or not, mav be a matter' worth v of agitation. I set out with all the formality of logical disquisition, but do not promise to observe the VOWPER. 75 same re,?ularity any further tlian it may comport with my purpose of writino- as fast as 1 can. '' As to the immorality of the custom, were I in France, I should see none. On the contrary, in seems in that country to be a symp- tom of m cSv i- tc 1- CC XC ^irc C5.< < or, c. CC cc: ■^ c c cc <3Cc:o Fee «;: c