THE TOWN OF COWPER. I. COWPER'S HOUSE AND THE MARKET-PLACE. I. COWPER'S HOUSE. THE general appearance of Olney is probably familiar to all lovers of Cowper; even those who have never pilgrimaged hither have pictured to themselves its long broad street widening southwards into a spacious triangular market-place, the tall steeple with its bulging sides, and the silent river coiling half round the little town and winding tortuously through its meadows; and the fact, too, must be widely known that the large red-brick house, with stone dressings, sometimes called Orchard Side, that stands in the south side of the Marketplace, was for nineteen years the residence of the poet Cowper. In his poetical epistle to Lady Austen, Cowper describes his house as an obscure part of the town, at the mouth of which stood two public-houses. Nothing, however, but poetical license justifies him in so describing it. We do not wish to give the idea that it was the most agreeably situated house in the town, for to live even on the verge of what was formerly the Alsatia of Olney must have been accompanied with certain disadvantages; but it faces the market-hill, its situation is far from unpleasant, and on the whole Cowper made himself very comfortable in It was by no means every day that the boys of Silver it. A End splashed his windows with mud, nor is it likely that the wailings of the infants of that locality were absolutely without intermission. The accompanying engraving, which shows the house as it actually appeared in the time of Cowper, has never before been given to the public. It is taken from a small etching (probably by Mr. James Storer) in my possession, which has written under it in neat lettering, "View in Olney, COWPER'S HOUSE IN THE TIME OF COWPER. (The windows of the world-famous parlour are those between the two doors.) Bucks, Sept. 1819," and, as the reader will see, represents the house with cornice and imitation battlements which hide the roof, and two doors instead of three. The alteration to its present appearance is referred to in the following verse, taken from some clever lines by Mr. James Storer, that describe the various objects figuring in his large engraving entitled, "A sketch from nature at Olney, Bucks, September 23, COWPER'S HOUSE, OLNEY. (From a Photograph.) To its castellated appearance Cowper himself refers in a letter of July 3, 1786. The first sight of the odd-looking place quite shocked Unwin. It seemed so like a prison, and he did not at all like the idea of his mother living in it. The part of the house occupied by Cowper and Mrs. Unwin -for they never occupied the whole-was the western half, which is the farther of the two from Silver End. It should |