VI. THE POET COWPER. Cowper is certainly the sweetest of our didactic poets."-Dr. DORAN. "I have always considered the letters of Mr. Cowper as the finest specimen of the epistolary style in our language. To an air of inimitable ease and carelessness they unite a high degree of correctness, such as could result only from the clearest intellect, combined with the most finished taste.”— ROBERT HALL. "If there is a good man on earth, it is William Cowper."-LORD THURLOW. I. FIRST THIRTY-SIX YEARS (1731-1767). Of the places resided at or visited by the poet Cowper, it is natural that none should have been remembered by him with more affection than Great Berkhampstead; for here, in the Rectory House, on the 26th of November 1731, he was born, and here he spent the happy days of his childhood, becoming attached to every tree, gate, and stile in the neighbourhood, preferring his own house to a palace, and supposing as a matter of course that he and his father and mother were going to live in it always. His father, the Rev. John Cowper, D.D., was rector of the parish, and chaplain to King George II.; his mother, Anne, daughter of Roger Donne, Esq., of Ludham Hall, in Norfolk, was of the same family as Dr. Donne, the poet and satirist of James the First's reign. She died in 1737 at the age of thirty-four. Her affection and tenderness made such an impression on the mind of her son, that fifty years afterwards, on receiving her picture, he "dwelt as fondly on the cherished features as if he had just mourned her death." Writing to his cousin Mrs. Bodham, who had sent him the portrait, he says, "I received it the night before last, and viewed it with a trepidation of nerves and spirits somewhat akin to what I should have felt had the dear original presented herself to my embraces. I kissed it, and hung it where it is the last object that I see at night, and, of course, the first on which I open my eyes in the morning." His lines "On the receipt of my Mother's Picture out of Norfolk" form one of the most beautiful and touching elegies in the language. How pathetic, for example, is the following: "My mother! when I learned that thou wast dead, Soon after his mother's death, William, who was the elder of her two sons (John being at this time an infant), was sent, at the age of six, to a large boarding school, where he experienced much cruel treatment from older and rougher boys, and the two years spent there were remarkable only for their wretchedness. He was removed on account of serious inflammation in his eyes, and placed under the care of an eminent oculist; and at the age of ten, when sufficiently recovered, was entered at Westminster, where he was the schoolfellow of Warren Hastings, Elijah Impey, Robert Lloyd, Charles Churchill, Richard Cumberland, George Colman the elder, and Bonnell Thornton, all of whom rose to distinction and fame. He left school when about eighteen, and after spending nine months at Berkhampstead, was sent to acquire the practice of law with Mr. Chapman, an attorney. But his time was spent not so much at Mr. Chapman's as in Southampton Row, with his cousins Harriet (afterwards Lady Hesketh) and Theodora, where, as he himself tells us, he and his fellow-student, Thurlow, the future Lord Chancellor, were "constantly employed from morning to night in giggling and making giggle, instead of studying the law." In 1752 he took chambers in the Temple, and here it was that he first experienced that melancholy and depression of spirits that afterwards assumed so serious a form, Among his acquaintances at the Temple were Carr, Allston and Clotworthy Rowley, and it may have been to one of these that he wrote the earliest preserved letters of his, one of which is dated Feb. 21, 1754, and which begin "Dear Toby." He was also a member of a society of wits called the Nonsense Club, which included among its members Cowper's lifelong friend Joseph Hill. He was called to the Bar in 1754. In the meantime he had fallen in love with his cousin Theodora, the Delia of his early poems, but Mr. Ashley Cowper firmly refused his assent to the union. The decision of the father was accepted on both sides as final; Cowper took his farewell of her about 1756, and they never again met. After many years had passed by, when in the height of his fame, he received at different times several handsome presents from an anonymous donor, who, though he himself never suspected it, was doubtless his cousin Theodora. Now it was a writing-desk, the same that figures in his portrait by Abbot, now an elegant snuff-box, with a representation of the Peasant's Nest on the lid. Sometimes even sums of money came just as anonymously. Theodora Cowper died unmarried in 1825. In 1756, shortly after the death of his father, Cowper bade his last adieu to Berkhampstead, its fields, and woods, and the old parsonage that was so familiar to him. Whilst at the Temple he was a member of the Nonsense Club, a society of literary triflers, Westminster men all of them, who dined together every Thursday; and he contributed a few papers to "The Connoisseur," and "produced several halfpenny ballads, two or three of which had the honour to become popular." He was now presented by his kinsman, Major Cowper, to the office of Clerk of the Journals to the House of Lords, a desirable and lucrative appointment, but doubly welcome to Cowper, for his patrimony was small, and fear of poverty was making his life miserable. But no sooner had he accepted it than he found he would be obliged to qualify himself at the bar of the House; and such was his sensitiveness, that the dread of the examination threw him into the deepest distress and misery. Having brooded over his accumulated troubles till worked up to a fit of madness, he attempted to commit suicide, and, |