William Cowper

BY MARION HARLAND

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Studies of the Home-Life of
Certain Writers and Thinkers

WILLIAM COWPER

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WILLIAM COWPER

William Cowpe

SEP 25 1931

^

BY

MARION HARLAND ?seu,<

AUTHOR OF "SOME COLONIAL HOMESTEADS AND THEIR

STORIES," "WHERE GHOSTS WALK," ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

TLhe IRntcfterbocfcer fl>ress

1899

Copyright, i8gg

BY

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Entered at Stationers' Hall, London

Zbc IKnicfcerbocfcer lprees, flew JSorfe

PREFATORY AND DEDICATORY

THESE studies of the characters and
home-lives of certain people famous
in the judgment of the public, have to do
with what they were, rather than with
what they did. I have essayed no critical
analysis of the works that won renown for
them. Believing that every human life is a
complete story in itself, full of movement
and interest, I have tried to disentangle the
personal element from the network in
which circumstance involved it, and to
tempt my reader to regard the man or
woman as a fellow-being, rather than as an
abstract product of the times in which he
or she lived and wrought.

I have an hereditary right to the more
than friendly interest I feel in William
Cowper. One hundred years ago, save
one, my maternal grandmother, a woman
of rare culture and fine literary taste, in
iii

iv Prefatory and Dedicatory

tender compliment to her favourite poet,
changed to " Olney " the Indian name of
the Virginia homestead to which she was
taken as a bride. Cowper's death, in 1800,
produced a profound sensation among his
admirers on this side of the Atlantic. Every
turn in his sorrowful pathway was almost
as familiar in the reading circles of America
as in England. As a child, I heard him
talked of as if he had lived and written and
suffered upon the adjoining plantation to
the Virginia Olney. The first bit of sacred
verse I committed to memory was learned
from a well-thumbed copy of Olney Hymns,
once the property of my sainted grand-
mother. At ten years of age I knew by
heart whole pages of The Task, and dozens
of Cowper's shorter poems, incited to the
undertaking by stories of that blessed
woman's fondness for the gentle poet's
writings. I learned to love him before I
really comprehended who and what he
was, also to associate his name with that
of the ancestress who died long before I
was born.

It seems, then, good in my eyes, and not
a sentimental fantasy, that this loving study
of William Cowper as man and friend

Prefatory and Dedicatory v

should be dedicated to the sweet memory
of the gracious gentlewoman from whom,
as I like to believe, I have inherited my
love of letters, and whatever talent for
story-making and story-telling I may
possess.

Among those to whom I am indebted for
assistance in the preparation of this work I
name with pleasure Rev. J. P. Langley,
Vicar of Olney, now resident in the Vicar-
age once tenanted by John Newton ; Mr.
Thomas Wright of Olney, the best living
authority upon all that pertains to the life
and writings of William Cowper, and Bev-
erly Chew, Esq., of New York, who has
courteously placed at my disposal certain
rare and valuable prints used in illustrating
these pages.

Marion Harland.

SlJNNYBANK, PoMPTON, N. J.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. BIRTH AND INFANCY — HIS MOTHER'S

DEATH I

II. LIFE OF A SCHOOL FAG — WESTMIN-
STER AND BRIGHTER DAYS . .12

III. LAW STUDIES — • THEODORA — FA-

THER'S INFLUENCE AND DEATH . 24

IV. " PUSH-PIN " — HEREDITARY GLOOMS

— DR. JOHN DONNE . . -35

V. GLOOM DEEPENS INTO MANIA — AT-
TEMPTED suicide — Theodora's

CONSTANCY . . . . 50

VI. LIFE IN DR. COTTON'S ASYLUM — RE-
COVERY AND CONVERSION . . 62

VII. LIFE IN HUNTINGDON — THE UNWINS. 76

VIII. MR. UNWIN'S DEATH — JOHN NEW-
TON— LIFE AT OLNEY . -91

viii Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

IX. QUIET LIFE AT OLNEY — DEATH OF
JOHN COWPER — OLNEY HYMNS —
SECOND ATTACK OF INSANITY . IO4

X. THE FATAL DREAM — CONVALESCENCE

— FIRST VOLUME OF POEMS . 120

XI. MRS. UNWIN — LADY AUSTEN— JOHN

GILPIN 134

XII. LADY AUSTEN'S FLIGHT — RENEWED
CORRESPONDENCE WITH LADY
HESKETH 149

XIII. GIFTS FROM " ANONYMOUS" — LADY

HESKETH'S ARRIVAL IN OLNEY . l6l

xiv. mr. newton's reproof of

" WORLDLY GAYETIES " — RE-
MOVAL TO WESTON LODGE . 1 73

XV. DEATH OF WILLIAM UNWIN — HOMER
AND HARD WORK — GATHERING
CLOUDS 185

XVI. SIX PEACEFUL, BUSY YEARS — MRS.
UNWIN S ILLNESS — SAMUEL TEE-
DON — VISIT TO EARTHAM . . 195

XVII. HOMER — "MY MARY ! " — FAMILIAR
DEMON — MRS. UNWIN'S DEATH —
THE END 2IO

XVIII. COWPER'S WRITINGS . . . 228

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

WILLIAM COWPER . . Frontispiece

cowper's MOTHER .... 4

From a miniature.

COWPER COAT-OF-ARMS ... 34

JOHN DONNE 44

From an old print in the possession oj
Beverly Chew, Esq., of New York.

ORCHARD SIDE \ COWPER'S HOUSE IN OL-

NEY FOR THIRTEEN YEARS ... 96

COWPER'S GALLERY PEW IN OLNEY

CHURCH IO4

JOHN DONNE Il6

From an old print in the possession of
Beverly Chew, Esq., of New York.

OLNEY VICARAGE 1 46

Illustrations

PAGE

LADY AUSTEN IN THE CHARACTER OF

LAVINIA 152

From a drawing by IV. Harvey from the
original by Romney.

COWPER S SUMMER-HOUSE OR "BOUDOIR I72

WESTON LODGE NEAR OLNEY *, COWPER'S

HOME FOR NINE YEARS

2l6

WILLIAM COWPER

WILLIAM COWPER

CHAPTER I

BIRTH AND INFANCY — HIS MOTHER'S DEATH

THE Reverend John Cowper, D.D., Rec-
tor of the Parish of Great Birkhamp-
stead in Hertfordshire, England, was not a
young man when his wife died, November

'3> 1737-

Scanty as are the fragments of her per-
sonal history that have drifted to us — dis-
tant over a century and a half from the
date of her son William's birth, — they en-
able us to fashion a pleasing, and what is
probably a tolerably faithful, portrait of her
character and habits. Anne Cowper, the
daughter of Roger Donne, Esq., of Ludham
Hall in the county of Norfolk, was a gentle-
woman ingrain. She had royal blood in
her veins, claiming descent from Henry III.

2 William Cowper

through more than one branch of her fam-
ily. A more immediate ancestor was "that
late learned and Reverend Divine, John
Donne, Dr. in Divinity, & Deane of S.
Paul's, London," the eccentric poet eulo-
gised by Izaak Walton. Believers in in-
alienable heredity will lay hold of this
circumstance as an interesting link in a
nobler than regal succession, even the trans-
mission of holy fire from soul to soul. Of
this significant relationship, whose bearing
upon the destiny of the subject of our
biography has been strangely overlooked
by the writers of the many Lives of Wil-
liam Cowper, I shall speak more at length
in subsequent chapters.

Three children were born to Dr. and Mrs.
Cowper within two years after their mar-
riage, a son who was born and died in 1729,
and twins, a boy and a girl, born in the fol-
lowing year, neither of whom lived more
than a few days. On November 26, 1731,
the cry of another new-born baby broke
the silence of the Rectory. A fortnight
and three days later, "William, the son of
John Cowper, D.D., rector of this Parish
and Anne his wife, was baptised " in the
old church. A second daughter and a

Birth and Infancy 3

fourth son, born in 1733, and 1734 did not
survive the first half-year of their lives.

William Cowper was, then, for the greater
part of the years lying between his birth
and that of his brother John, who entered
the world in 1737, the only nursling in the
oft-smitten household. He was within two
days of his sixth birthday and Baby John
was but a week old when they were left
motherless.

The fragile, high-born wife of the Birk-
hampstead Rector died " with all her music
in her," so far as verbal or written utter-
ance went. But, besides the mysterious
and unconscious influence flowing from the
mother-mind and disposition into the sen-
sitive thing to be born of her soul as of her
body, Mrs. Cowper left indestructible traces
of her personality upon her boy's charac-
ter as in his memory.

By a stroke here, and a touch there, a
dash of high lights deepening the sombre
background, the son sketches for us the
picture of the bright, brief years during
which they belonged to one another.

"I can truly say," he wrote when she
had lain for fifty years in the chancel of her
husband's church, "that not a week passes

4 William Cowper

(perhaps I might with equal veracity say a
day) in which I do not think of her. Such
was the impression her tenderness made
upon me, 'though the opportunity she had
for showing it was so short."

His lines On the Receipt of my Mother's
Picture (which we wonder was not given
to him before he was a grey-haired, broken
man of fifty-six) are too well known to
need repetition here. He had not forgotten
one feature of that lovely Long Ago. His
mother kept him much with her, and very
close to her, contrary to the custom of
higher-class English mothers with their
young children. Instead of the nursery in
the topmost storey of the well-appointed
Rectory, and the oversight and companion-
ship of a respectable middle-aged nurse,
we have a view of the mother in her dress-
ing-room, and the little fellow, already wise
beyond his years, and made "old-fash-
ioned " by the lack of companions of his
own age, seated upon a stool at her feet,
nestling in the folds of her gown.

" When playing with thy vesture's tissued flowers,
The violet, the pink and jessamine,
I pricked them into paper with a pin, —
And thou wast happier than myself the while,
Wouldst softly speak, and stroke my head and smile."

COWPER'S MOTHER

(FROM A MINIATURE)

Birth and Infancy 5

The smile that approved his skill in tracing
the pattern, the loving passage of her hand
over his hair, the patient hearing of his
prattle — are lifelike and exquisitely ren-
dered. Never too busy to heed what he
was doing, never so preoccupied by her
own musings and talks that she could not
spare a thought for the solitary survivor of
her six babies, — she grew more tenderly
solicitous with the nearing of the time
when there would be another claimant
upon mother-love and motherly offices :

" Thy nightly visits to my chamber made,

That thou mightest know me safe and warmly laid ;

Thy morning bounties ere I left my home,

The biscuit, or confectionery plum,

All this, and more endearing still than all,

Thy constant flow of love that knew no fall ; "

— are some of the "high lights" alluded
to just now.

Gently and gradually he was prepared
for the coming change. Her own hands
would wrap him in the scarlet cloak, and
settle upon his sunny head the velvet cap
that arrayed him for his first day at school.
Other mothers' eyes moisten in contem-
plating the group at the Rectory door.
The small, delicately featured face of the

6 William Cowper

child, alight with gleeful pride in the "bau-
ble coach " built for his express use ; the
yearning smile, more sad than tears, in the
sweet eyes bent downward upon her boy,
as both bade farewell to the babyhood he
left behind in his trial-trip into the wide,
cold world ; the "Gardener Robin," dele-
gated to draw the young master to "the
dame-school," consequential in the sense
of the trust reposed in him ; — there is
nothing more common than the scene in
our changeful, working-day world, and not
many things more beautiful.

Day after day, the little equipage was
drawn along the public road to the school
where the Rector's son was a personage of
distinction ; each afternoon home-coming
was an event to the pupil, elate with tales
of his new associates and of lessons that
were never a labour, and sure of the sym-
pathy of his confidante. By what system
of time-keeping the mother told off the
slow-footed days in her calendar, those can
divine who, like her, have waited with
what patience faith and hope can lend,
for what may bring added wealth of hap-
piness, or the blank end of earthly expecta-
tion and desire.

His Mother's Death 7

Was it upon his return from school in
the twilight of an English November day
that William Cowper was told he had
a little brother called for their father, —
John ? And how, after the week of ban-
ishment from his mother's room, was the
news broken to him — and was it suddenly
or tactfully — that his mother was dead ?
As a clergyman's son, he knew already
what death meant. In the anguish of his
unchildlike grief, he was, it would seem,
left to the care of servants, and they, how-
ever sincerely compassionate of the lonely
little fellow, had the fondness of their guild
for the ghoulish details of "an affliction in
the family." The boy, always abnormally
sensitive, and now stricken to his heart's
core and shuddering in the arctic night
that had swallowed up his summer, was
led to the nursery window to see the cof-
fin lifted into the hearse, and the hearse
driven away to the churchyard. The
strokes of the tolling bell, keeping time
to the measured crunch of the horses' hoofs
upon the gravel, and the horrid rumble
of the mourning coaches, unlike any other
sound known to conventional civilisation,
— were as distinct in the son's ears, after

8 William Cowper

the lapse of five decades, as on that
" burial-day."

The passion of weeping that succeeded
the hysterical "long, long sigh" with
which the child rushed away from the
window probably saved his reason. The
maids, — we hear nothing of other comfort-
ers,— alarmed by the excess of his sorrow,
cheated him by prophecies of his mother's
return "to-morrow," if he would be good
and patient. A commonplace child would
have seen through the flimsy deception.
The grey-haired poet explains, as simply as
if still a boy of six, that his credence of the
servants' tale was born of his agonised
longing — the strong necessity of having his
mother back again — the utter impossibility
of living without her. The pitying ruse
was a prolonged strain upon young nerves
and strength.

" By expectation everyday 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 learned at last submission to my lot,
But, 'though I less deplored thee, ne'er forgot."

Sorrow and the burial-day ; the missing,
the longing, false hopes, and despair, were

His Mother's Death 9

bitten into his soul by the slow corrosion of
the many sad To-morrows.

Celibate cynics sneer at this, our day, as
"the Children's Age." That we have
gained immeasurably in common humanity
upon that of five generations ago, is mani-
fest in the indignant inquiry of the least
sentimental reader of the piteous tale before
us, as to the whereabouts, and doings, and
feelings of the Reverend John Cowper,
D.D., while the cruel trick was practised
upon his son.

The Rector of Great Birkhampstead
"came of the Whig nobility of the robe."
Spencer Cowper, his father, was a Judge
of the Court of Common Pleas, eminent
for learning and personal attractions. Sir
William Cowper, uncle of the Reverend
John, and for whom our poet was named,
was Lord Chancellor in the reign of Queen
Anne and in that of her successor, George
I. Spencer Cowper's choice of the Church
for his second son was not guided by ap-
preciation of especial fitness in John for
the profession.

Professor Goldwin Smith says of the
religion of John Cowper's times :

" The Church was little better than a political force,

io William Cowper

cultivated and manipulated by political leaders for their
own purposes. The Bishops were either politicians or
theological polemics, collecting trophies of victory over
free-thinkers as titles to higher preferment. The inferior
clergy, as a body, were far nearer in character to Trul-
liber than to Dr. Primrose ; coarse, sordid, neglectful of
their duties, shamelessly addicted to sinecurism and
pluralities, fanatics in their Toryism and in attachment
to their corporate privileges, cold, rationalistic in their
preachings, if they preached at all."

Without accepting this composite photo-
graph as a presentment of the incumbent
of Birkhampstead, we extract from the
insight thus gained into the temper and
practice of his generation some drops of
tolerant oil to be applied to our further con-
sideration of his treatment of the mother-
less child.

William Cowper's picture of the board-
ing-school boy in Tirocinium has a reminis-
cence of his early home-life in the pleading
with a father not to

<( hire a lodging in a house unknown
For one whose tenderest thoughts all hover round your
own."

The reference to the home-bred lad who

"takes, with Tearless ease,
His favourite stand between his father's knees,"

His Mother's Death

1 1

introduces a shadowy possible figure of the
Reverend John into the pretty domestic
scene of the mother's dressing-room. And
what more natural, we reason, than that
their great common sorrow may have drawn
out the " tenderest thoughts " of each for the
other, when father and son were left with-
out other society in the desolate Rectory,
made more desolate by the wail of the hap-
less baby who was the price of the mother's
life ? If, in such favouring circumstances,
the intercourse of the two ever approxi-
mated the sweet familiarity of "chum-
ship " that has been the salvation of many
a motherless boy and the solace of many a
widower, the blessed season wras very
short.

CHAPTER II

LIFE OF A SCHOOL FAG — WESTMINSTER AND
BRIGHTER DAYS

R. GOLDWIN SMITH'S Cowper be-
longs to the English Men of Letters

M

Series, and has to do with the writer of
essays, poems, and translations, rather than
with the individual man. Yet the great,
warm heart of the able scholar speaks in a
sentence which strikes the colour out of our
dream-pictures, and raises the curtain upon
a long act of brutal realism, fraught with
tragical consequences:

" At six years of age this little mass of timid and
quivering sensibility was, in accordance 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 worse in those days."

How much worse, it is hard for the Ameri-

12

Life of a School Fag 13

can reader of any age to comprehend, even
with the help of writers like Miss Edge-
worth and Dickens. In Maria Edgeworth's
Moral Tales we have the story of a fag
who was sent, shivering, on bitter winter
nights, through a dormitory containing
twenty beds, to warm each for his luxuri-
ous masters by lying between the sheets
until his body had taken off the chill. The
wretched human warming-pan performed
his duty nightly until released by the return
of warmer weather.

Sweet Anne Cowper could never have
contemplated the banishment of her darling
to such a region, or she would not have
indulged him and herself in a course of pet-
ting which was the worst possible prepara-
tion for a fag's life. " I had hardships of
different kinds to conflict with, which I
felt more sensibly in proportion to the
tenderness with which I had been treated
at home," is the sufferer's own story of this
time.

In rude contrast to his mother's watchful
love, Robin's proud protection, and the
maids' fond, if injudicious spoiling, was
the lot of the youngest boy — a "mother's
boy," at that — hurled into the midst of a

14 William Cowper

pack of nascent tyrants. He was the sport
of all, the slave of one. A fifteen-year-old
cub chose him as his fag, and broke his own
infamous record by the ingenuity of his
barbarities.

The hapless butt of these could never
allude to them in his manhood without a
sick shiver. Nor could he trust himself to
enumerate the details of his school-experi-
ences. That he was beaten, half-starved,
and set about degrading and menial tasks
beyond his strength, was but a small part
of his grievances. The victim says of his
brutal senior:

"He had, by his savage treatment of me, impressed
such a dread of his figure upon my mind that I well
remember being afraid to lift up my eyes upon him,
higher than his knees, and that 1 knew him by his shoe-
buckles better than any other part of his dress."

He adds an ejaculatory prayer to which
less sanctified readers will be slow in re-
sponding " Amen ! "

" May the Lord pardon him, and may we meet in
glory ! "

It is argued in extenuation of a system
that admitted of such outrages that it

Life of a School Fag 1 5

"made boys hardy" and helped on with
the manufacture of English pluck, honoured
by powerful nations and feared by weak.
A lad who had roughed it at school entered
the world, of which the school was sup-
posed to be a type and foretaste, with a
heart, a head, and a fist for any fate. It
was the principle of the survival of the fit-
test reduced to hourly and heroic practice.
The study of general principles was the
specialty of the century. Appreciation of
the importance 01 personal traits and of the
value and the danger of personal peculiari-
ties was reserved for more merciful mod-
ern educators. Tough and tender went
into one and the same mill, the wisest pre-
ceptors having no misgiving that what
hardened stout fibres might destroy delicate
textures.

It is superfluous to subjoin, after reading
and hearing of William Cowper's early
school-days, that he carried the scars of
that terrible period to his grave, with the
graver effects of disordered nerves and
physical cowardice. All that could be
done in after-life for the broken and jarred
mechanism was to put it together so that it
would work for a time and after a fashion.

16 William Cowper

"God," says Dr. Holmes, " would never
create a hunchback and then damn him for
not sitting straight."

A ruthful truism we shall have occasion
to recall at every turn of the life we are
following.

The lad's eyes failed him when he had
been two years at school. Floating specks
danced between his vision and his books,
and blurred the familiar outlines of his ty-
rant's shoe-buckles. It would not have
been surprising had he wept himself blind,
and cold, nervousness, and unsuitable food
doubtless took their evil part in the work.
His father and the family physician decided
to place him under the care of a Mr. Disney,
an oculist of some eminence, Whose wife
was his fellow-practitioner. Mrs. Disney
seems to have had especial charge of the Rec-
tor's son. Under another alien roof, the boy,
practically homeless and orphaned, — al-
though nominally the possessor of a parent
who paid his bills for lodgings, board, and
medical services, — passed two compara-
tively comfortable years. He gained health
there, and some degree of robustness. It was
to the oculist's interest to keep his patient
in good physical case, and not his business

Brighter Days 17

to interfere with the boy's personal liberty.
The tortured nerves and wearied frame
were "rested out"; the shadow of the
tyrannical taskmaster passed from his
spirit, and something of the natural, glad-
some youth that should belong to his years
awoke in him.

At this period of his early life, he became
intimate with his cousins Harriet, Anne,
Elizabeth, and Castres, the children of
the Reverend Roger Donne, his mother's
brother. Their home at Catfield in Nor-
folk was also his during his holidays while
at school and with the Disneys. It is inter-
esting to note, in this connection, that Anne
(afterward Mrs. Bodham) was the donor of
his mother's picture to him after they had
both passed middle life. The presumption
is that she came into possession of the
treasure as her aunt's namesake.

He was but ten years old when he was
enrolled in the public school of Westmin-
ster, an educational institution of high repu-
tation, and always full of gentlemen's sons.

At no other period of his life was he so
nearly the normal boy in body and in spir-
its as in the ensuing four years. There
was bullying in this renowned school, and

1 8 William Cowper

plenty of it, the weaker and smaller lads
being, as always, the chief sufferers. Re-
ports, private and unofficial, of atrocities
winked at by the authorities, and uncon-
demned by public opinion, are before us
that cast into the shade the worst cases of
" hazing" ever glossed over in American
colleges.

Cowper was never robust, and never
physically brave. We are naturally curious
to learn to what he owed immunity from
the persecutions which the knowledge of
these deficiencies would excite among the
lawless and belligerent young animals by
whom he was surrounded. He played
football and gained a certain degree of pro-
ficiency in that barbaric form of recreation,
convincing proof of marvellous improve-
ment in his bodily powers ; he was a good
cricketer and eager to take the field when-
ever a game was called. His surprise at
the awakening into this new life is pathetic
when one considers that the average Eng-
lish boy then took frolic and health and the
love of fun of whatever description as a
matter of course, a development as natural
as the taste for toffey and half-holidays and
robbing apple-orchards. He had not known

Brighter Days 19

what it was to be happy for so long that
gladness wore an unfamiliar face. The
most Cowperish touch in his recital of the
halcyon Westminster days is an incident
that befell him one night in passing through
a churchyard.

He relates it with the comment : " I had
become so forgetful of mortality that, sur-
veying my activity and strength, and ob-
serving the evenness of my pulse, I began
to entertain, with no small complacency,
a notion that perhaps I might never die."

The sunken graves and headstones
among which he tramped as a short-cut
home, after a joyous afternoon on the
cricket- or ball-grounds, were no more to
him than the pavements and houses of a
city street. On this particular night, a sex-
ton was digging a grave by the light of his
lantern, and, tossing up a skull from the pit
in which he stood, hit Cowper on the knee.

"This little accident was an alarm to my
conscience ; for that event may be num-
bered among the best religious documents
which I received at Westminster."

We are distinctly sorry for the shock,
and the recollection ; are jealous, to the
point of greed, for every glint of sunshine

20 William Cowper

that could be his very own before the com-
ing of the days of darkness that were to be
many. With the same feeling we read of
his fondness for Vincent Bourne, the usher
in the fifth form to whom he owed the
love for Latin verse which yielded him oc-
cupation and solace while he lived.

" I love the memory of Vinny Bourne. I think him
a better poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any
of the writers in his way, except Ovid, and not at all
inferior to him. I love him too with a love of partiality,
because he was usher of the Fifth Form at Westminster
when I passed through it."

A bubble of boyish merriment breaks
through the half-pensive reminiscence in
the anecdote of the prank played upon the
easy-going pedagogue by a titled pupil.
The usher's wig was thick with pomatum
and powder he was too lazy to comb out.

"I well remember seeing the Duke of
Richmond set fire to the greasy locks, and
box his ears to put it out again."

Pomatum, erudition, and horse-play were
characteristic of the Westminster of the
seventeen-forties. To the unexpected com-
bination we are indebted for one of the few
broad laughs we have in the review of a
career so early and so darkly overcast.

Brighter Days 21

Cowper's zest in the narrative is significant
of what we are not slow in discovering,
i.e., that in those years at Westminster was
brought to light, if not born, the sense of
humour which blended so strangely with
incurable melancholy in his subsequent life.
He says in playful affectionateness of
Bourne, that "he made me as idle as him-
self." Yet the "love of partiality " he bore
the usher, or love of learning for learning's
sake, made him a good student in and out
of school. " Vinny " gave him a bias for
Greek and Latin classics. He read Homer
with avidity and of his own volition, scrib-
bled Latin verses for pleasure when he had
finished those allotted as daily tasks, and
won more than one prize for his work
along these lines. All that we learn of his
public-school life goes to prove genuine
love of knowledge and study, amiability
and a sort of affectionate facileness of dis-
position inclining him to lean and be led,
instead of striking out for himself and forg-
ing ahead in paths of his own engineering,
and withal, the peculiar isolation of his lot.
Again and again in his autobiographical
papers he returns to Westminster days
and friendships as to a care-free asylum.

22 William Cowper

His intimates there were, perhaps without
exception, more stalwart of mind and of
will than himself. Many made their mark
upon their generation, among them Warren
Hastings. Lord Dartmouth, in whose Manor
of Olney Cowper lived for so many years,
sat next him on the sixth form, and his
most intimate friend was Sir William Rus-
sell, a lineal descendant of Oliver Cromwell.
If any of "the boys " were ever otherwise
than kind to him, William forgot it in the
affectionate review of the terms they had
passed together before the plunge into the
maelstrom which was to bear them in dif-
ferent directions, and cast them upon widely
dissimilar shores.

Most of his fellows had definite aims and
purposes. He had none. His father had
thrust him out of the warmth and luxury
of home into the misery of fagdom and the
turbulence of a boys' school ; then boarded
him out to be doctored as he might send an
ailing horse to a veterinary stable. When
cured, he was consigned, still as a chattel,
to the uncertain mercies of democratic
Westminster. In his acquiescence in the
autocrat's will, the son was not merely
obedient ; he was dutiful to a degree that

Brighter Days

23

is amazing to us in considering his tempera-
ment and needs. So, at the end of his
academic course, when the same autocratic
will designated the next step, William
offered no resistance, active or passive.
Grandfather Judge and Lord Chancellor
uncle were arguments for grandson's and
nephew's acceptance of the law as a pro-
fession, the cogency of which satisfied the
Reverend John, and was not gainsaid by
the junior.

CHAPTER III

LAW-STUDIES — THEODORA — FATHER'S INFLU-
ENCE AND DEATH

WESTMINSTER dormitory, quadran-
gle, and cricket-green were ex-
changed for a corner in the stuffy office of a
London attorney's office by day, with bed
and board in the attorney's house, and the
dutiful son began what was, at the best, a
lounge through the several stations of the
Bar-ward road. He studied law when he
felt like doing so, and usually felt more like
strolling, in the same light-hearted, pur-
poseless fashion, around to the house of
Ashley Cowper, his father's brother, who
lived at No. 30 Southampton Row, but a
block or two away.

" Ashley Cowper," says a biographer,
" was a very little man in a white hat lined
with yellow, and his nephew used to say
24

Theodora 25

that he would some day be picked by mis-
take for a mushroom and popped into a
basket."

The oft-quoted witticism was among the
saucy hits that made the small ''mush-
room's " daughters regard their cousin as
uncommonly good company. Harriet (bet-
ter known to us as Lady Hesketh) and
Theodora Cowper were what we would
class as "thoroughly nice girls." London
was full of temptations to an idle young
man who had never earned a penny for
himself, and was, therefore, ignorant of
the value of money and time. Extrava-
gance, gaming, and profligacy were the
hall-marks of men of fashion who had
wealth enough to keep their heads above
the waters of bankruptcy and their bodies
out of the debtors' prison, and the man of
fashion, being what he was, had a host
of imitators without wealth and without
wit. The drawing-room of No. 30 South-
ampton Row, where Ashley Cowper's
brace of pretty and vivacious daughters
" made giggle " over silly next-to-nothings,
was a clean, safe haunt for the lad of
eighteen. His pure mother — dead these
dozen years — could not have chosen more

26 William Cowper

virtuous associates for him, or more inno-
cent recreation for his unemployed even-
ings and many lazy afternoons.

Unless, indeed, she had held the same
views with Ashley Cowper upon the dan-
gerous inexpediency of marriages between
cousins german. It was inevitable that the
affectionate, indolent boy should make love
to one or the other of his charming kins-
women. His choice lighted — capriciously
or from some occult principle of natural
selection — upon the younger of the sisters,
Theodora. The affair may have begun in
giggle, and been fostered by propinquity,
but the result showed the attachment to be
no boy-and-girl fancy. The pair had taken
it seriously and fairly tested the stuff of
which it was made by the time William
Cowper attained his nominal majority, and
the very little man in the white hat lined
with yellow rubbed his eyes open to the
fact that something more than fun-making
was going on in the heart of his home.

The father is proverbially slow of sight
and of wit with regard to his daughters'
love-matters. The awakening to the prob-
ability of courtship and marriage for them,
the certainty that they will prefer other men

Theodora 27

to himself, some day, — if the exhibition of
bad taste be not already an accomplished
and mortifying fact, — is always a disagree-
able surprise. Theodora's father was no
more astute than other parents of his sex in
foreseeing what was bound to happen ; he
was prompt and resolute in action when he
did awaken. His nephew William was
well enough in his place, having commend-
able parts of a certain sort. He could
scribble tolerable verse in English, an ac-
complishment which the uncle liked to
believe and declare came from the Cowper
side of the family. Ashley turned out
poems that were not bad, and his clerical
brother John had a neat knack in the same
direction. William's Latin and Greek verses
were said to be clever ; he had a pretty wit
in conversation, and his manners were not
unbecoming the descendant of a King, a
'distinguished Jurist, and a Doctor of Divin-
ity. Being now one-and-twenty years of
age, he would soon be called to the Bar,
and thus be placed in the direct line of legal
promotion, his antecedents being propitious
to such advancement. He would have a
genteel patrimony at the death of his father,
with but one brother — John, now in Cam-

28 William Cowper

bridge University — to divide it with him.
That foolish baby, Theodora, was fond of
her good-looking cousin and he of her.

"If you marry William Cowper, what
will you do for a living ? " he had asked his
daughter, testily.

She laughed in his frowning face.

" Do, sir ? Why, wash all day, and ride
out on the great dog at night ! "

The paternal protest was not to be turned
aside by a jest. Over against the pros of
the case in hand were the cons of the suit-
or's disinclination to take his profession —
or anything except love-making — seriously;
the absolute certainty, to his uncle's appre-
hension, that he would saunter, dreamily
and smilingly, through life as he was accus-
tomed to lounge into the girls' sitting-room
at all hours of the day, when he and they
should be busied elsewhere. He was a
decent enough lad, but "Ne'er do weel"
was written all over him, and he was Theo-
dora's first cousin, — but one remove from
fraternal relationship. Marriage between
them was not to be thought of.

Filial piety must have been a family
characteristic in the Cowper connection. If
the lovers rebelled in word and in verse

Theodora 29

at the father's decree, there was no open
revolt.

" They sensibly bowed to fate, and agreed
to separate," says Mr. Thomas Knight,
Cowper's latest biographer. Among the
love-poems treasured by Theodora while
she lived, was one describing their parting :

" Yet, ere we looked our last farewell,
From her dear lips this comfort fell ; —
' Fear not that Time, where'er we rove,
Or absence, shall abate my love.' "

That Time was to prove how the girl
kept her promise. The evils of such mar-
riages as the young creatures had proposed
are better understood now than then ; yet
it may be questioned if William Cowper
could have done a wiser thing for himself
than by eloping with his cousin, and after-
ward, under her loving encouragement,
"buckling down" to the business of a
hard-working attorney, with prospects
founded upon family influence.

His verses to "Delia" are but echoes of
the moans wrung from him under the cruel
disappointment. While he lived and was
rational, there was in his heart a corner
consecrated to the memory of this first and

30 William Cowper

blameless love. We respect it and him the
more because he did not pose as love-lorn,
or the victim of paternal tyranny.

It was, undoubtedly, in the hope of for-
getting sorrow in active and congenial oc-
cupation that, soon after he was admitted
to the Bar, and had taken up his abode in
the Temple, he joined himself to six other
graduates of Westminster in a literary soci-
ety under the name of the Nonsense Club.
If the organisation existed in our day, the
members would call themselves " literati,"
and be sneered at by graver workers in
the realm of letters as "dilettanti." They
thought much of themselves and of each
other, and of what they did, while the
society lived. Their very names are strange
to nine out of ten fairly well-read people of
the present century, although two of them,
Churchill and Colman, owned the 5/. James
Chronicle and were prolific writers of
verse, dramas, reviews, and translations
from the Latin and Greek classics. Wil-
liam Cowper was a contributor to the St.
James Chronicle and other periodicals, try-
ing his 'prentice hand upon essays, poems
"after" his beloved classical masters, and
an occasional English ballad. " I have been

Father's Influence 31

a dabbler in rhyme ever since I was four-
teen years old," he says of himself. His
trial-effort was a translation of an elegy by
Tibullus.

The specimens of his early work that
have been preserved are neat, some affected,
and never original in thought or treatment.
Among his contributions to The Connoisseur
was one upon The Art of Keeping a Secret,
which had the not unusual effect of con-
vincing the author of the strength of his
own arguments.

"I once wrote a Connoisseur upon the
subject of secret-keeping," he told William
Unwin in 1780, "and from that day to
this I believe I have never divulged one."

Up to the twenty-fifth year of a, thus far,
profitless life, he had not falsified his uncle's
prognostications of his career. Always
singularly devoid of natural ambition, such
aspirations as were excited by his fellows
of the Nonsense Club soared no higher
than the columns of the reviews I have
mentioned.

When the Reverend John Cowper, D.D.,
died in 1756, leaving his second wife a
widow, William had done little or nothing
to justify his father's selection of a profes-

32 William Cowper

sion for him. If the parent were chagrined,
he died and made no sign. As nearly as
we can judge, he was of a dogmatic, yet
philosophical, turn of mind, and did not
weep over the irretrievable. He had used
his own judgment in placing his sons where
they might, and ought to, do well if they
would. Neither of them ever accused him
of neglect or unkindness. On the contrary,
William speaks of him, incidentally, as
"most indulgent." Southey reasons that,
"if he had not loved his father dearly and
found that home a happy one, he would
not have ' preferred it to a palace.' "

The unimaginative reader is, nevertheless,
struck by the fact that the only lament left
on record by the son of his parting from
Great Birkhampstead Rectory "forever," is
in a "long adieu to fields and woods from
which I thought I should never be parted."

If he never pretended to miss his father
sensibly, or to mourn for him long or deeply,
it was because he was innately sincere, and,
as I have said, no poseur. Still, in our quest
for causes obvious and recondite which
coloured and shaped William Cowper's
character, we cannot escape the conclusion
that the father's influence, however indi-

Father's Influence 33

rect, was strong in results. It was not
what he did, but what he left undone and
unsaid, that wrought upon the plastic na-
ture. He ignored the most sacred obliga-
tions of fatherhood after the mother's death
redoubled these. He did not interpose, as
he, alone, had the right to do, to save the
motherless baby from downright barbarity
in the two years following his great loss;
he gave the lad his head in Westminster
and in London, and, if he ever acted as the
spiritual guide of the young soul, we have
no intimation of the truth. The one indi-
cation of a disposition to direct his son's
mind to an existence beyond the grave,
given by William's pen, is unpleasing to
repulsiveness :

" When I was about eleven years of age my father
desired me to read a vindication of self-murder and give
him my sentiments upon the question. I did so, and
argued against it. My father heard my reasons and was
silent, neither approving nor disapproving ; from whence
I inferred that he sided with the author against me,
'though, all the time, I believe the true motive of his
conduct was that he wanted, if he could, to think
favourably of the state of a departed friend who had,
some years before, destroyed himself."

The more probable explanation of the
3

34 William Cowper

divine's singular behaviour in first putting
the pamphlet into the hands of a morbid,
introspective lad, and then, by silence, en-
dorsing the fiendish contention of the writer,
is that he was, all the while, thinking of
something else. Absence of mind from all
that bore upon the material or spiritual wel-
fare of his offspring would seem to have
been habitual with the professional phy-
sician of souls. The solution of the enigma
is not complimentary to him as parent,
clergyman, or human being. It is prefera-
ble to the hypothesis that suggested itself
to the lad then, and returned to him with
cumulative force in the hour of supreme
temptation.

COWPER COAT-OF-ARMS.

CHAPTER IV

PUSH-PIN " — HEREDITARY GLOOMS — DR.
JOHN DONNE

UNTIL William Cowper was a man of
one-and-thirty, his desultory, shift-
less mode of living had not weighed un-
comfortably upon his thoughts. Much less
had it offended a conscience that became,
afterward, unnaturally and hurtfully sensi-
tive. He could hardly have been called
idle, for his pen was continually employed
upon one theme and another. His brother's
tastes were cognate to his, and the two col-
laborated in a translation of the Henriade
into a popular version. Together they pro-
duced eight books of heroic couplets, each
writing four. John got twenty guineas for
his work, William waiving his claim to the
meagre compensation. A more delightful
task was the loving reperusal of the Iliad
35

36 William Cowper

and the Odyssey, and a critical comparison of
the noble originals with Pope's translation.

"There is hardly the thing in the world of which
Pope was so entirely destitute as a taste for Homer," he
says caustically. " When we looked for the simplicity
and majesty of Homer in his English representation, we
found puerile conceits instead, extravagant metaphors,
and the tinsel of modern embellishment in every possible
position."

Of this apparently dead level, separating
his entrance upon the nominal duties of his
profession from the tragedy that put an
end to these, he wrote, a quarter-century
thereafter:

"Everything that we do is in reality im-
portant, 'though half that we do seems to
be push-pin."

He had been playing push-pin for a third
of his years, not after the fashion of the
conventional young man of fashion, nor
with the heavy indolence of a drone in the
human hive. He indulged in no expensive
fancies, and had no relish for coarse dissi-
pation ; he was essentially refined and his
impulses were not wanting in nobility. His
life was simply objectless. He wrought
upon his manuscripts when the humour
seized him, and if, as did not always hap-

Hereditary Glooms 37

pen, they were finished and to his liking,
he either threw them into his desk and for-
got them, or into the hopper of the public
prints, and never bethought himself of their
after-history. That he was not habitually
melancholy, or even a sufferer from fre-
quent fits of depression, his private letters
and anecdotes connected with this epoch
prove to all except those who are deter-
mined to make him out a mental and spirit-
ual hypochondriac from the nursery.

Each of his biographers has his own — and
to himself satisfactory — explanation of the
insanity that overtook him in his thirty-sec-
ond year. The fretting pain, never allayed,
of disappointed love, foiled literary ambi-
tions, and — more persistently than these —
religious fanaticism, are the theories most
affected by professional limners and their
readers.

The first of these is easily disposed of.
There is no doubt of Cowper's genuine
attachment for the lovely cousin he had
wished to marry, and that her father's in-
flexible refusal of his consent to the union
broke off the intimacy between them, per-
haps all association even as friends after
they were convinced that Ashley Cowper's

38 William Cowper

"determination was unalterable." That
the young suitor suffered intensely is as
certain. His lines on this subject to the
confidante of both, and his lifelong friend,
Lady Hesketh, formerly Harriet Cowper,
are nearly as well known as his apostrophe
to his mother's picture. It does not, how-
ever, escape the notice of the cool-headed
critic that he couples, in his lament over his
ruined hopes, the death of his dear friend
and schoolmate Sir William Russell with
the loss of his Theodora :

" Deprived of every joy I valued most,
My friend torn from me and my mistress lost,

Still, still I mourn with each returning day,
Him, snatched by fate in early youth away,
And her, through tedious years of doubt and pain,
Fixed in her choice, and faithful, but in vain.

See me, ere yet my distant course half-done,
Cast forth, a wanderer, on a wild unknown.
See me, neglected on the world's rude coast,
Each dear companion of my voyage lost."

The threnody wins us to sympathy with
the poet's pain, but does not bear out the
hypothesis of an all-absorbing, overmaster-
ing love for one woman. We detect but a

Hereditary Glooms 39

faint sparkle of the old glow in the ashes
of years when he writes to her sister in
their middle age :

" I still look back to the memory of your
sister and regret her. But — how strange it
is ! if we were to meet now, we should
not know each other."

In a lighter mood that shows how sparkle
had gone out and ashes had cooled, he says
in another letter to his former confidante :

" So much as I love you, my dear cousin, I wonder
how the deuce it has happened I was never in love with
you. Thank Heaven that I never was ! for, at this
time I have had a pleasure in writing to you, which in
that case I should have forfeited. Let me hear from
you, or I shall reap but half the reward that is due to
my noble indifference."

The gallant badinage is of an age when
letter-writing was a fine art, and from the
hand of an adept in it. " He jests at scars
who never felt a wound," or to whom one
scar means no more than another.

The final separation from Theodora, after
which neither ever saw the other, was not
two years old when he could expatiate to a
correspondent upon the charms of a "lovely
and beloved" sixteen-year-old girl, "of
whom I have often talked to you."

40 William Cowper

"When she speaks, you might believe
that a Muse is speaking. Woe is me that
so bright a star looks to another region.
Having risen in the West Indies, thither it
is about to return, and will leave me no-
thing but sighs and tears."

Theodora's lover was no more fickle than
most of his age and sex ; neither was he
phenomenally constant.

Enough has been said of his dilettanteism
and unfeigned indifference to literary fame
to render discussion of the second diagnosis
superfluous. The poet's friends were even
more solicitous than he to conserve a repu-
tation he would never have bestirred him-
self to gain but for their incitement. As
we shall see, his best works were suggested
to, and urged upon him by them.

The assertion that much dwelling upon
religious subjects, especially upon the as-
pects of these presented by the fast-rising
Evangelical party of that decade, wrought
upon a lively imagination to the overthrow
of judgment and the undoing of reason
itself, is scarcely more tenable. William
Cowper had been duly prepared for con-
firmation at Westminster School by the
master, Dr. Nicholls. He makes grateful

Hereditary Glooms 41

note of "the pains which Dr. Nicholls took
to prepare us for confirmation."

" The old man acquitted himself of this duty like one
who had a deep sense of its importance, and I believe
most of us were struck by his manner, and affected by
his exhortations. Then, for the first time, I attempted
to pray in secret ; but, being but little accustomed to
that exercise of the heart, and having very childish no-
tions of religion, 1 found it a difficult and painful task,
and was, even then, frightened at my own insensibility.
This difficulty, 'though it did not subdue my good pur-
poses'till the ceremony of confirmation was passed, soon
after entirely conquered them. 1 lapsed into a total for-
getfulness of God, with all the disadvantages of being
the more hardened, for being softened to no purpose."

According to his own testimony, he had
been, thereafter, as little troubled by re-
ligious speculations as by the conviction of
his own sinfulness. His intellectual belief
in the evidences of Christianity was never
shaken and was sometimes blatant. He
reports a controversy with a deist, when,
Cowper says, he was, himself, "half-in-
toxicated," and "vindicated the truth of
Scripture, in the very act of rebellion against
its dictates." The action of his opponent,
who " cut short the matter by alleging that,
if what I said was true I was certainly
damned by my own choosing" passed

42 William Cowper

with a laugh like many another irreverent
bon mot

The singular omission of a hereditary bias
to insanity in the recapitulation, by thought-
ful writers, of the possible and probable ori-
gin of the horrible malady which was to
becloud the rest of his days, can be accounted
for only on the score of the comparative neg-
lect of prenatal influences on the part of the
scientific men of the eighteenth century.
An eminent modern writer upon psycho-
logical phenomena avers, as his deliberate
conviction, that not one man in a thousand
is utterly free from monomania, while two-
thirds of our daily associates are insane
upon one or more subjects; a state of things
referable, he says, to the fact that mental
and moral diseases are more surely passed
down from parents to children than physi-
cal infirmities.

Upon the second page of this book men-
tion is made of an ancestor of Anne Donne
and her sons, who played a prominent part
in the English Church and among English
men of letters, a century before William
Cowper was born. A contemporary poet
thus eulogises the great Dr. John Donne,
Dean of St. Paul's :

Dr. John Donne 43

" Whatsoever wrong
By ours was done the Greek or Latin tongue
Thou hast redeemed, and opened us a mine
Of rich and pregnant fancy, drawn a line
Of masculine expression, which had good
Old Orpheus seen, or all the ancient brood
Our superstitious fools admire, and hold
Their lead more precious than thy burnished gold,
Thou hadst been their exchequer.
Here lies a King that ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit ;
Here lies two Flamens, and both these the best, —
Apollo's first, at last the True God's Priest."

From this one of his distinguished for-
bears, William Cowper may well have
drawn the love for "Greek and Latin
tongue " that marked him from early boy-
hood; the "rich and pregnant fancy" that
earned him lasting fame; the patient, loving
care, the polishing and repolishing, line by
line and stanza by stanza, characteristic of
his literary methods, and furnishing the
"burnished gold" of composition to his
world of admiring readers. What else en-
tered into his inheritance ?

I have held in my hands a copy of the
rare book to which Edmund Gosse devotes
eight or nine pages in his fascinating group
of essays entitled Gossip in a Library.
The caption is:

44 William Cowper

Death's Duel ; or a Consolation to the Soule against
the dying Life and living Death of the Body Deliv-
ered in a sermon at White Hall before the King's
Majesty, in the beginning of Lent, 1630. By that late
learned and reverend Divine John Donne, Dr. in Di-
vinity & Deane of St. Paul's, London. Being his last
Sermon, and called by his Majesty's household, " The
Doctor's owne Funeral Sermon."

Gosse calls this discourse, ''one of the
most creepy fragments of theological lit-
erature it would be easy to find." The
dying poet shrinks from no physical horror
and no ghostly terror of the great crisis
which he was, himself, to be the first to
pass through.

" That which we call life," he says, " is but Hebdomada
mortium, a week of death, seven days, seven periods
of our life spent in dying, a dying seven times over, and
there is an end. Our birth dies in infancy, and our in-
fancy dies in youth, and youth and rest die in age, and
age also dies, and determines all."

While preparing his sermon, feeling the
inroads of a mortal disease within his body,
he ordered a burial-urn,

" just large enough to hold his feet, and a board as long
as his body, to be produced. When these articles were
ready they were brought into his study, and the old
man stripped off his clothes, wrapped himself in a wind-

Oeajenarii tJjTiji'ej- h ■•■
cam cehitem \s , -

cleji*

- vJ < /J ,7,. . /. _ .

JOHN DONNE

<FROM OLD PR(NT 1N THE possESS|ON QF B£vERLy cheW; esQ( op ^w ^

Dr. John Donne 45

ing-sheet and stood upright in the little wooden urn,
supported by leaning against the board. His limbs
were arranged like those of dead persons, and when his
eyes had been closed, a painter was introduced into the
room, and desired to make a full-length and full-sized
picture of this terrific object — this solemn, theatrical
presentment of life in death. . . . All this fortnight,
and to the moment of his death, the terrible portrait
of himself in his winding-sheet stood near his bedside,
where it could be the hourly object of his attention.

" So one of the greatest churchmen and one of the
greatest, if most eccentric, of its lyrical poets passed
away in the very pomp of death, on the 31st of March
1631."*

If one tithe of our specialist's sweeping
condemnation of his fellow-creatures be
true, and like begets like from generation
unto generation, John Donne's freakish fan-
cies may have been seed, buried long out
of sight and ken of men, but quick at heart
with evil life, and destined finally to spring
up in his ill-starred descendant. What
Donne's contemporaries catalogued as ec-
centricities budded and blossomed into
madness under the unfortunate conditions
of Cowper's early years. Had he, or his
relatives, or medical advisers had a glim-
mering appreciation of the lurking taint in
his blood and brain, they would have recog-

* Gossip in a Library.

46 William Cowper

nised what should have put them on their
guard before the open outbreak of lunacy.

Cowper was still a law-student when he
wrote to one of the Westminster " seven "
of assailants

" That with a black, infernal train
Make cruel inroads in my brain,
And daily threaten to drive thence
My little garrison of sense.
The fierce banditti which I mean
Are gloomy thoughts, led on by spleen."

The fell train had a definite anxiety as
leader in 1763. His slender means were
so nearly exhausted and his prospects of
money-making so unpropitious that, for
the first time in his experience, he was
alarmed as to his future. Casting about in
his mind for some way of driving the wolf
from his respectable door, he asked a friend
if, in the event of the death of the Clerk of
the Journals of the House of Lords, his
(Cowper's) relative, Major Cowper, who
had influence in that quarter, might not be
prevailed upon to give him the post. It is
likely that neither of the young men would
have recollected the conversation, had not
the official in question died suddenly soon

Hereditary Glooms 47

afterwards. Two other offices, yet more
lucrative, became vacant about the same
time, and Major Cowper astonished and
" dazzled" his kinsman by the sudden
offer of "the two most profitable places,
intending the other for his friend, Mr.
Arnold."

Cowper's brain needed but a touch, at
this juncture, to destroy its balance. The
reaction from the dread of poverty to the
certainty of what seemed to him affluence,
was a push and a violent one. To his pa-
tron's surprise, after accepting the "splen-
did proposal," he asked time to deliberate
upon it, and

" for the space of a week was harassed day and night,
perplexed by the apparent folly of casting away the only
visible chance of being well provided for and retaining
it. First he gave up the two places offered to him,
and flattered himself that the clerkship of the journals
would fall fairly and easily within the scope of his abil-
ities. Next, he was seized with nervous horrors at
thought of the preliminary examination at the bar of the
House ; then racked by misgivings as to his ability to
perform the duties of the office, and, when these barriers
were passed, conceived a terror of the inferior clerks,
who, he imagined, were inimical to him.

" The feelings of a man when he arrives at the place
of execution are probably much like mine every time \

48 William Cowper

set my foot in the office, which was every day for more
than half-a-year together."

The likelihood that the " powerful party
formed among the Lords " against him, and
the sulkiness of the sub-officials to the
newly appointed head of the office, were a
figment of Cowper's heated imagination is
increased by the rally of senses and spirits
at Margate, where he spent his vacation that
year. In the rebound of spirit caused by
the anticipation of the furlough, he wrote
cheerily to Lady Hesketh :

" . . . My days are spent in reading the Journals,
and my nights in dreaming of them. An employment
not very agreeable to a head that has long been habit-
uated to the luxury of choosing its subject, and has been
as little employed upon business as if it had grown upon
the shoulders of a much wealthier gentleman. But the
numskull pays for it now, and will not presently forget
the discipline it has undergone lately.

" If 1 succeed in this doubtful piece of promotion, I
shall have at least this satisfaction to reflect upon, —
that the volumes I write will be treasured up with the
utmost care for ages, and will last as long as the English
constitution — a duration which ought to satisfy the
vanity of any author who has a spark of love for his
country."

The pleasantry, forced or spontaneous,
was his last for many a weary day. The

Hereditary Glooms 49

beneficial effect of Margate and congenial
society was partial and temporary. In the
autumn he was recalled to London and the
employment he had found distasteful from
the beginning of his attempt to fill the
place. It was now so intolerable that he
welcomed the approach of actual insanity
that would release him from daily torment :

" My chief fear was that my senses would not fail me
time enough to excuse my appearance at the Bar of the
House of Lords, which was the only purpose I wanted it
to answer. Accordingly, the day of decision drew near,
and I was still in my senses [!], though in my heart I had
formed many wishes, and by word of mouth expressed
many expectations to the contrary."

This was sheer lunacy, and the art which
hid the truth from the clerks with whom
the shy, reserved stranger was not popular,
and the friends who rejoiced in his apparent
prosperity, was the cunning of a madman
who did not know that he was bereft of
reason, as of hope.

CHAPTER V

gloom deepens into mania — attempted
suicide — Theodora's constancy

THE particulars of the means by which
William Cowper, distraught and mis-
erable, tried to accomplish what he rightly
names "the dark and hellish purpose of
self-murder " are not pleasant reading.

It is one of the problems of his times that,
after the recovery of his reason, those who
loved him best, and to whom he believed
he owed, under God, his soul's salvation,
should have encouraged him to put the tale
upon paper with scrupulous circumstanti-
ality of revolting particulars. The writing
was enough, of itself, to invite a relapse.

As was natural, memory, treacherous in
other respects, reproduced with fatal fidel-
ity the incident of the treatise upon suicide
put into the child's hand by his father, and
50

Attempted Suicide 5 1

the father's apparent acquiescence in the
writer's views. "The circumstance now
weighed mightily with me," he says. It
was backed up by chance conversations
with certain people whom he met at chop-
houses and taverns. These agreed with
the quiet, scholarly gentleman who adroitly
led the talk into that channel, that "the
only reason why some men were content
to drag on their sorrows with them to the
grave, and others were not, was that the
latter were endued with a certain indignant
fortitude of spirit, teaching them to despise
life, which the former wanted."

Moved by this " indignant fortitude," the
doomed man bought a bottle of laudanum,
and, the date of the much-dreaded "at-
tendance at the bar of the House " being
still a week off, carried it about with him,
determined to use it at the eleventh hour,
if no other way of escaping the ordeal pre-
sented itself. A newspaper letter, which
his diseased fancy construed into a covert
attack upon himself, hastened the execu-
tion of his design.

Like one in a nightmare, he sought op-
portunity of getting rid of his life and found
none, — in the fields, where a temporary

52 William Cowper

change of purpose diverted his mind; in
his chambers, subject to the continual in-
trusion of the laundress and her husband; —
until — still as in a troubled dream — he hit
upon yet another expedient for bringing
about the desired end. Throwing himself
into a coach, he ordered the coachman to
drive to the quay, "intending never to re-
turn." The water was low, and a porter
or watchman eyed him suspiciously; he
reentered the carriage, drove back to the
Temple, shut himself up in his room, un-
corked the bottle, and lifted it to his mouth.
He believed, always, that the impression
of an invisible hand "swaying the bottle
downward as often as he set it against his
lips," was a reality, and not a nervous de-
lusion born of madness. After a score of
futile attempts to swallow the laudanum,
— the most determined of which was foiled
by the discovery that the fingers of both
hands were as closely contracted as if bound
with a cord, and entirely useless, — he threw
the poison away, "undetermined as to the
manner of dying, but still bent upon self-
murder as the only possible deliverance."
On the night preceding the day "that was
to place him at the bar of the House," he

Attempted Suicide 53

tried to stab himself with a penknife, "plac-
ing it upright under his left breast, and lean-
ing all his weight against it; but the point
was broken off square and it would not
penetrate."

When the day dawned and he was still
alive, he hanged himself upon the top of
the door of his room, after several inef-
fectual efforts to make the cord secure upon
the framework of his bed. After hanging
so long that consciousness quite forsook
him, his life was saved by the breaking of
the cord. "The bitterness of temporal
death had passed " before the agony of re-
turning physical life took hold upon him.
Bruised and giddy, he crept back to bed,
and early in the morning sent for Major
Cowper, to whom he showed the broken
noose and told the whole story.

" His words were — ( My dear Mr. Cowper, you terrify
me ! To be sure you cannot hold the office at this rate.
Where is the deputation ? ' I gave him the key of the
drawer where it was deposited ; and, his business re-
quiring his immediate attendance, he took it away with
him.

11 And thus ended all my connection with the Parlia-
ment office."

The action of the practical kinsman in

54 William Cowper

the instant removal of what William, and
perhaps the Major himself, believed to be
the exciting cause of the fit of frenzy, was
the most sensible measure that could be
devised. If the sufferer's horrible appre-
hensions had had any basis in the facts of
the case, and he really feared the Examina-
tion— the grisly hobgoblin that had pursued
him for weeks and months, — the certainty
that it had vanished would have been his
cure. As it was, another and more awful
phantom took its place.

" Before I arose from bed it was suggested to me that
there was nothing wanted but murder to fill up the
measure of my iniquities, and that, 'though I had failed
in my design, yet I had all the guilt of that crime to
answer for. A sense of God's wrath, and a deep despair
of escaping, instantly succeeded. The fear of death
became much more prevalent in me than ever the
desire had been."

As asphyxia and the fall had brought on
" excessive pressure upon the brain" and
other alarming symptoms, he summoned a
physician, and also wrote to his brother
John at Cambridge, confessing what he had
done, but assuring him that he was now
"desirous to live as long as it pleased the
Almighty to spare him."

Attempted Suicide 55

Then, instead of following the physician's
advice and going to the country, he shut
himself up in his lonely chambers, haunted
by the anguished fantasies of the last fort-
night, and faced his sins "now set in array
against him."

Candid inspection of one's naked soul, —
the awful setting of one's secret sins in the
light of God's countenance, — is enough to
drive a healthy mind to despair. The story
of what this sick and blinded soul endured
is not — to use a pietistic technicality — "to
edification," however different may have
been the judgment of those who incited
him to the revelation. The battle that en-
sued was not a spiritual struggle, but the
development of a mental malady. Arch-
bishop Tillotson's sermons, turned over in
piteous haste, and John Cowper's com-
ments upon them ; a volume of Beaumont,
picked up at random in a friend's apart-
ment, and every other book he opened,
contained "something that struck him to
the heart." The laugh of a street-lounger,
as the haunted man passed him ; the salu-
tations of acquaintances ; a ballad, trolled
on the corner by a wandering musician —
had meaning, point, and insult for him. He

56 William Cowper

was terrified in dreams ; he reeled in walk-
ing ; he shrank from the sight of his fellow-
men, and had intolerable anguish in the
thought that he could not escape the All-see-
ing Eye.

When John, full of tender sympathy,
pierced to the heart with the sight of his
brother's misery, tried to comfort him, he
got but one answer : "O Brother ! I am
damned ! Think of Eternity, and then think
what it is to be Damned ! "

Martin Madan, one of the new school of
Evangelical believers and teachers, answered
William's request that he would come to
him. "If there was any balm in Gilead,
he must administer it." The "enthusiast"
sat down upon the bedside of his afflicted
friend, and reasoned of original sin and the
corruption of man's fallen nature, until
Cowper listened with something like calm-
ness to a doctrine that " set him on a level
with the rest of mankind, and made his
condition appear less desperate." Then
the visitor began to pour into the fevered
wounds the true balm of Gospel truth,
insisting upon "the efficacy of the blood of
Jesus and His righteousness . . . lastly, the
necessity of a lively faith in Jesus Christ

Attempted Suicide 57

. . . It was the gift of God which the
speakertrusted He would bestow upon me."

"I wish He would!" groaned the
tempest-tossed soul. "A very irreverent
petition," he subjoins, in his narrative,
"but a very sincere one."

It may have appeared to Madan in the
same light. For my part, I can think of
nothing but the strong crying and tears
with which the father of the epileptic boy
sobbed — " Lord, I believe ! help Thou
mine unbelief ! " and that the only All-
wise Healer neither reasoned with nor
preached to the convulsed lad.

Let us bring to a swift close our painful
abstract of the long-drawn-out agony of
the recital. Madan's ministrations and
John's brotherly attentions brought a few
hours of comparative ease. The patient
slept, and awoke in tenfold greater anguish
of mind. About an hour after John arrived,
next morning, excruciating pains in the
head and "a strange and horrible darkness"
fell upon the patient. He raved incessantly
and wildly.

" All that remained clear was the sense of sin and the
expectation of punishment. . . .

" My brother instantly perceived the change [!] and

58 William Cowper

consulted with my friends on the best manner to dispose
of me."

Among those called into consultation
upon the unhappy "case," as it was now
decided to be, we note, with interest, the
name and visit of Lady Hesketh, now the
wife of a wealthy baronet. We cannot
help regarding her as, in some sense, the
representative of the sister whose silent
constancy to the lover of her youth invests
her with a halo of saintly steadfastness.
As we shall see, in due time, there is evid-
ence that Theodora Cowper never lost
sight of her unfortunate cousin. He had
written, " I shall always remember her with
regret." While keeping herself out of his
sight and refraining from all correspondence
with him, never so much as sending him a
line or a message in Lady Hesketh's many
letters, not an incident in his career eluded
her knowledge. In the one instance when
she could serve him, her hand was put out,
as from the veil of maidenly modesty she
wore close about her, and supplied his
needs. She has no place in the notable
group of women whose names and hist-
ories are interwoven with Cowper's later
life. We do not wear her picture in our

Theodora's Constancy 59

hearts as we treasure the gentle loveliness
of the mother he thought of every day.
No miniature of " Delia " —

11 through tedious years of doubt and pain,
Fixed in her choice, and faithful, but in vain," —

was found among his effects when doubt
and pain were passed as a tale that is told.
If she had ever written to him, he had not
kept her letters. The merest scrap of. paper
his pen had touched was a priceless relic to
her; the verses — many of them no better
than "the doggerel of an idle hour" — he
had copied out for her reading when they
saw each other daily, and had thoughts,
hopes, and plans in common, were rever-
ently hoarded for over forty years, and
never entrusted to another's keeping until
he lapsed into total imbecility. Had she
dreamed up to then of going over the
faded lines once more with him, and, in the
calm twilight of their lives, talking together,
as dear friends and kinspeople, of the Past
she had never forgotten ? When word of
his condition reached the faded spinster of
fifty-odd years, she committed the packet
— sealed — of manuscripts and notes to a
friend, with instructions that it was not to

60 William Cowper

be opened while she lived. The poems
thus preserved were published in 1825, to-
gether with personal recollections of the
poet, collated by Lady Hesketh, in a thin
volume now out of print. Theodora Cow-
per outlived her cousin twenty-four years,
dying, unmarried, in 1824. Her name and
the lifelong romance of her tender, un-
spoken fealty entitle her to an honourable
place on the list of the world's martyr-
heroines.

Lady Hesketh was the last visitor of his
own blood whom Cowper was permitted
to see before the real nature of his " dis-
temper " was recognised by doctors and
friends. After his recovery, he recalls the
circumstances of the trying interview to his
cousin in several notes full of feeling, and
touched by the peculiar grace that made all
his letters models of the epistolary art.

11 You do not forget, I dare say, that you and Sir
Thomas called upon me in my chambers, a very few
days before I took leave of London. Then it was that
I saw you last, and then it was that I said in my heart
upon your going out at the door : ' Farewell ! there will
be no more intercourse between us forever ! ' . . .

" What could you think of my unaccountable behav-
iour to you on that visit ? I neither spoke to you, nor
looked at you. The solution of the mystery indeed fol-

Gloom Deepens into Mania 6\

lowed soon after ; but at the time it must have been in-
explicable. The uproar within was even then begun,
and my silence was only the sulkiness of a thunder-
storm before it opens.

"I am glad, however, that the only instance in which
I knew not how to value your company was when I
was not in my senses."

And again —

"Since the visit you were so kind as to pay me in
the Temple (the only time I ever saw you without
pleasure ! ) what have I not suffered ! . . . Oh, the
fever of the brain ! "

When quite convinced that a man was
insane, physicians and philanthropists had
ways and places for the management of
him. Dr. Cotton of St. Albans was at the
head of a madhouse there. That was
what they called it. There was no smooth-
ing over jagged realities with such euphem-
isms as " Retreats," or even " Asylums."
He was a wise specialist in his line, and
"of well-known humanity and sweetness
of temper."

Yet upon the heels of the attestation,
Cowper concludes the harrowing narrative
with a sentence that shudders in every
word :

"It will be proper to draw a veil over
the secrets of my prison-house."

CHAPTER VI

LIFE IN DR. COTTON'S ASYLUM — RECOVERY
AND CONVERSION

THE publication of the last verses written
by Cowper before he was placed
under restraint strikes us as an offence to
taste and an outrage to his memory. His
friends might as well have preserved a bit
of the cord with which he had tried to hang
himself, and the bottle that had held the
laudanum he was miraculously prevented
from swallowing.

The so-called " sapphics " are turgid with
misery, and violent in the expression of it.
Of literary merit they have little or none.
After this shriek from the depths there is a
dead silence for five months.

Whatever may have been the dread se-
crets of his prison-house, unkindness from
Dr. Cotton and the attendants had no part
62

Dr. Cotton's Asylum 63

in them, other than their conscientious em-
ployment of the drastic remedies then used
to subdue mania. He was brought very
low in bodily strength, as he records after-
wards without a suspicion that any but the
most intelligent treatment had contributed
to this end.

Eight months went by and John Cowper
— one of the fondest of brothers — had a
report from the physician-in-chief, a shade
more hopeful than those which had pre-
ceded it. The patient had emerged so far
from the black apathy of despair as to enter
into conversation with Dr. Cotton ; had
smiled at a funny story, and aroused him-
self to furnish an anecdote in the same
vein.

" He observed the seeming alteration with pleasure,"
says Cowper's chronicle. " Believing, as well he might,
that my smiles were sincere, he thought my recovery
well-nigh complete ; but they were, in reality, like the
green surface of a morass, pleasant to the eye, but a
cover for nothing but rottenness and filth."

It was, then, not surprising that the
brother, hastening hopefully to St. Albans,
should be bitterly disappointed at William's
continued reserve and gloom.

"As much better as despair can make

64 William Cowper

me," was the only reply he could obtain to
his affectionate inquiries. The two were
pacing the garden-walks in company, and
the fresh air and sunshine may have
wrought with John's urgent protestations
that the " settled assurance of sudden judg-
ment" crushing the other's soul, was "all
a delusion." For the first time since his
seizure, a gush of healthful tears came to
the relief of the fevered brain.

" If it be a delusion, then am I the happi-
est of beings ! " exclaimed the poor sufferer,
and wept himself calm. The first whisper
of hope was breathed into the ear of his
understanding at that moment. His clearer
eyes and more cheerful speech were at
once noted by the faithful servant who had
tended him through his illness, and the joy-
ful news spread in the staff of the asylum.
The blessed change, the more hopeful be-
cause gradual and with few fluctuations,
progressed satisfactorily in the ensuing
weeks. In one of the earliest letters written
from St. Albans to Lady Hesketh, he credits
John with the inception of the glorious
work.

" 'Though he only stayed one day with me, his com-
pany served to put to flight a thousand deliriums and

Dr. Cotton's Asylum 65

delusions which I still laboured under, and the next
morning I found myself a new creature."

Such crises are a familiar feature to the
specialist in mental and nervous disorders.
Up to the day of John's visit, the healthful
work had been like the growth of the
young root underground. The brotherly
sympathy and robust cheer were the sun-
shine and warm air that made it break the
soil and reach up into the light.

Walking in the garden upon another day,
he espied a Bible lying upon a seat, left in
his way, doubtless, by wise Dr. Cotton.
Opening it, the convalescent was moved
almost to tears by the story of Lazarus, but
without applying to his own case the lesson
of Divine compassion it illustrated. Rising
the next morning — still with a lighter spirit
— before his breakfast was ready, he again
picked up a Bible, left, as by accident, upon
the window-bench, and fluttered the leaves
casually. We give what followed in his
own words :

"The first verse I saw was the twenty-fifth of the
third chapter of Romans : —

" 'Whom God hath set forth to he a propitiation
through faith in tfis blood, to declare His righteousness

66 William Cowper

for the remission of sins that are past, through the
forbearance of God.'

"In a moment I believed and received the Gospel.
Whatever my friend Madan had said to me, so long
before, revived in its clearness, with ' demonstration of
the Spirit and with power.' Unless the Almighty arm
had been about me, I think I should have died with
gratitude and joy. My eyes filled with tears, and my
voice choked with transport. I could only look up to
heaven in silent fear, overwhelmed with love and
wonder."

Dr. Cotton, himself a man of devout
spirit and warm, living piety, was yet a
wary physician, and too well versed in the
deceitful phases of mania to be prematurely
persuaded that this was indeed cure, and
not a trick of fancy, or the natural rebound
of animal spirits after long repression.
Cowper's tribute to his judicious regimen
is unequivocal :

" I was not only treated by him with the greatest
tenderness while I was ill, and attended with the utmost
diligence, but when my reason was restored to me, and
I had so much need of a religious friend to converse with
to whom I could open my mind without reserve, I could
hardly have found a fitter person for the purpose. My
eagerness and anxiety to settle my opinions upon that
long-neglected point, made it necessary that, while my
mind was yet weak and my spirits uncertain, I should
have some assistance. . . . How many physicians

Recovery and Conversion 67

would have thought this an irregular appetite, and a
symptom of remaining madness ! But, if it were so,
my friend was as mad as myself ; and it was well for me
that it was so."

The letter to Lady Hesketh in which he
thus pours out his happiness in his new-
found joy was written in 1765, a month
after his removal from St. Albans. With
rare prudence and far-seeing sagacity, Dr.
Cotton had impressed upon the patient's
relatives the propriety of leaving him in his
present quarters for ten months after the
hopeful change.

What Cowper aptly terms the "storm
of sixty-three " had swept away the last
remnants of his slender patrimony. He
returned to the world from which he had
been secluded for nearly two years, as
destitute as when he entered it, a wailing,
naked infant, and, it may be added, hardly
more fit to contend with it, in the fight for
daily bread. In addition to the office that
had been Pandora's gift by the hand of his
well-meaning kinsman, Major Cowper,
William had held for several years the
virtual sinecure of the Commissioner of
Bankrupts, at a salary of three hundred
dollars a year. In the conviction that it

68 William Cowper

was dishonest to receive payment for work
he could not do, he resigned the position
and well-nigh beggared himself. Nothing,
he affirmed, should tempt him to return to
London, and his advisers acquiesced in the
decision.

What followed, while it seems foreign to
our ideas of independence, and even of
manliness, was germane to the spirit and
customs of the day. Patronage of men of
letters was a practice handed down from
the times of Cicero and Maecenas. Litera-
ture was a polite profession which nobody
expected to "pay." They who plied the
pen did not live by it, and there were sel-
dom wanting men whom appreciation of
genius and art inclined to contribute to the
encouragement of these. Desultory as
Cowper's literary labours had been, they had
yet established his right to be enrolled in
the guild of poets and essayists. It had
been calamitously proved that he was not
fit to practise law, or to occupy any office
of public trust. If — as was exceedingly
doubtful — he were ever again competent to
engage in any sort of work, it must be
something he could do at home, and in
sedulous retirement.

Recovery and Conversion 69

"My father," said a brilliant American
writer, "left me money to buy bread with.
Literature supplies the butter."

The Cowper clan, including Sir Thomas
and Lady Hesketh, and, it is surmised, at
the earnest suggestion of the latter, pledged
the family to furnish a yearly sum that
should ensure a decent lodging and daily
bread to their unfortunate connection during
a lifetime that was likely, in their opinion,
to be short. Not one of them, it is evident,
was sanguine in the hope that science and
religion had so effectually routed the un-
clean spirit that there was no probability of
his return to the swept and garnished house.
In consideration of the different standards
of literature as a self-supporting craft, set
up at that era and in ours, we may reason-
ably side with those biographers who
commend "the sweet and becoming thank-
fulness " with which William Cowper
resigned himself to the position of perpetual
pensioner upon the bounty of a younger
brother; upon the uncle who had refused
to give him his daughter in marriage, and
sundry cousins, more or less beloved. He
singles out one of these for honourable and
grateful notice.

jo William Cowper

" The Major's behaviour to me after all he suffered in
my abandoning his interest and my own in so miserable
a manner, is a noble instance of generosity and true
greatness of mind ; and indeed I know no man in whom
these qualities are more conspicuous. ... I have
great reason to be thankful I have lost none of my ac-
quaintance but those whom I determined not to keep.
I am sorry this class is so numerous."

The only "butter-money," upon which
the recluse had any right to depend, was
the rent of the Temple chambers, taken
upon a long lease by him, and now sublet.

His brother engaged quiet lodgings for
the convalescent in Huntingdon, and thither
he removed on the twenty-second of June,
1765, accompanied by the servant who had
had charge of him at Dr. Cotton's, and from
whom no persuasions on the part of those
who questioned the economy of the meas-
ure could induce Cowper to separate.

" He is the very mirror of fidelity and affection to his
master," he wrote from Huntingdon to his legal friend
Joseph Hill. " And, whereas the Turkish Spy says he
kept no servant, because he would not have an enemy
in his house, I hired mine, because I would have a
friend. Men do not usually bestow these encomiums on
their lackeys, nor do they usually deserve them, but I
have had experience of mine, both in sickness and in
health, and never saw his fellow."

Recovery and Conversion 7 1

In connection with the apparent extrava-
gance of keeping this treasure — who, it
must be owned, fully justified his master's
praises, — I introduce an incident that belongs
most fitly to this part of our story, although,
chronologically, to a date a year later (1766).
Cowper was then living with the Unwins,
in the first real home he had had since his
mother died.

His peace of mind, "flowing like a river,"
was ruffled to the depths by a letter from
Ashley Cowper. The little man had reason
to believe that "the family were not a little
displeased at having learned that he kept a
servant, and that he maintained a boy also,
whom he had brought with him from St.
Albans." The plain intimation was, Cow-
per admits, couched in " the gentlest terms,
and such as he was sure to use." Still, the
intelligence was not pleasant, nor, we may
suppose, would the nephew have selected
this one of his patrons as the medium
through which it would have to reach him.
He replied, respectfully, but firmly, to the
effect that his peculiar needs demanded the
care of this man, and that, although his
expenses at Huntingdon had outrun his
means, he had good hopes of retrenching

72 William Cowper

them sensibly, now that he was no longer
a housekeeper but a boarder. Finding
him resolute in the intention of retaining
his attendant, Ashley Cowper spoke more
specifically, but "as softly as he could."

" There was danger lest the offence taken
by his relations should operate to the pre-
judice of his income."

At this juncture, John Cowper, ever ready
alike in consolation and in action, stepped
in, and went to the root of the matter.
One of the aforesaid cousins — a colonel in
the army, and a man of handsome means —
"had been the mover of this storm."

"Finding me inflexible," William goes on to say to
Lady Hesketh, "he had convened the family on the
occasion ; had recommended to them not to give to one
who knew so little how to make a right use of their
bounty, and declared, that for his own part he would
not, and that he had accordingly withdrawn his con-
tribution. My brother added, however, that my good
friend, Sir Thomas, had stepped into his place, and
made good the deficiency. . . . Being thus in-
formed,— or, it seems now, misinformed, — you will not
wonder, my dear, that I no longer regarded the Colonel
as my friend, or that 1 have not inquired after him from
that day to the present. But when, speaking of him,
you express yourself thus, — ' Who, you know, has been so
constantly your friend' — I feel myself more than recon-
ciled to him ; I feel a sincere affection for him, convinced

Recovery and Conversion 73

that he could not have acted toward me as my brother
had heard, without your knowledge of it."

The truth, as afterward transpired, was
that the Colonel's threat was uttered in
earnest, but hastily, in the irritation of the
moment ; that, shamed, perhaps, by Sir
Thomas Hesketh's generous promptness, or
softened by sincere affection for his kins-
man, he had retracted his purpose, and
never returned to it.

The circumstance is unimportant to us,
and the family flurry would be hardly
worth jotting down, were it not for the in-
teresting sequel given in another letter from
the beneficiary to Lady Hesketh :

" I have a word or two more to say on the same sub-
ject. While this troublesome matter was in agitation,
and 1 expected little less than to be abandoned by the
family, I received an anonymous letter, in a hand utterly
strange to me, by the post. It was conceived in the
kindest and most benevolent terms imaginable, exhort-
ing me not to distress myself with fears lest the threat-
ened event should take place ; for that, whatever de-
duction of my income might happen, the defect should
be supplied by a person who loved me tenderly, and ap-
proved my conduct.

" I wish I knew who dictated this letter. I have seen,
not long since, a style most excessively like it."

74 William Cowper

Southey thinks he may have suspected
his cousin Harriet to be his benefactress,
adding — "And from her — or her sister
Theodora — no doubt it came."

Goldwin Smith utters our conviction
more strongly: "He can scarcely have
failed to guess that it came from Theodora."

Since Sir Thomas Hesketh had already
openly pledged himself to make good all
threatened deficiencies, it is extremely un-
likely that the wife, with whom his rela-
tions were most tender and confidential,
would take this clandestine course to reas-
sure her cousin of her support. Her silence
on the subject is almost positive proof that
she was in her sister's confidence, and
Cowper's forbearance in not pushing in-
quiries supports the conjecture.

For his sake we are thankful that he was
not forced to owe his daily living to the
woman who loved him so entirely and
truly and hopelessly, — and whom he had
half forgotten. We account the act, so
delicately, yet so bravely done, a credit to
humanity and a glory to her sex. After the
proffer of aid which was not accepted be-
cause the need for it did not arise, the soli-
tary woman shrinks back into the shade

Recovery and Conversion 75

from which she had emerged for one mo-
ment, and is not heard of again for ten
years. When, at last, dreary twilight was
settling upon the reason of her lover — once
that, and always — and his own words were
true in a sense he had not put into them in
writing of her to her sister ; — " If we were
to meet now, we should not know each
other ! " — she resigned to other hands the
keeping of the priceless souvenirs of a day
forever dead.

CHAPTER VII
LIFE IN HUNTINGDON— THE UNWINS

TO Cowper's residence in Huntingdon
we owe the first of the many hymns
that will endear him to Christian hearts in
all ages. He had, it is true, written while
yet at St. Albans a song of praise for his
restoration to mental health, and the yet
more blessed change that had come to his
spiritual nature, but it is stiff and artificial
beside the genuine poetry of the verses
penned in the serene gratitude of a heart at
peace with itself and in close communion
with Him Who had turned darkness — and
such darkness ! into light. This hymn
marked a new epoch in his experience and
in religious song:

Far from the world, O Lord, I flee
From strife and tumult far:
76

Life in Huntingdon 77

From scenes where Satan wages still
His most successful war.

The calm retreat, the silent shade

With prayer and praise agree,
And seem, by Thy sweet bounty, made

For those who follow Thee.

There, if Thy Spirit touch the soul,

And grace her mean abode,
Oh, with what peace, and joy, and love

She communes with her God.

There, like the nightingale, she pours

Her sdlitary lays;
Nor asks a witness of her song

Nor thirsts for human praise.

Author and Guardian of my life,

Sweet Source of light divine !
And — (all harmonious names in one)

My Saviour ! Thou art mine.

What thanks I owe Thee, and what love,

A boundless, endless store,
Shall echo through the realms above,

When time shall be no more.

The lines are lovingly familiar to thou-
sands of pious souls. As we read them,
memory sets them to the dear old tunes
crooned above our cradles, and sung with
joyous fervour in the assemblies of the
saints in many lands and tongues; — majes-

78 William Cowper

tic Ortonville; quaint old Mear, springing,
lark-like, from one cadenza to another to
the noble crescendo of the third line; or
"Dundee's wild, warbling measures"; —
sweet, tender and solemn reminiscences
that are, of themselves, a gracious excuse
for the repetition of the lyric here.

Furthermore, — as Southey justly ob-
serves,— ''Because of the circumstances
that gave rise to them, these poems belong
properly to the personal history of the
author." In harmony with the hymn, I
quote from a letter to his kind relative,
Major Cowper:

" As to my own personal condition, I am much happier
than the day is long, and sunshine and candle-light alike
see me perfectly contented. I get books in aboundance,
a deal of comfortable leisure, and enjoy better health, I
think, than for many years past. What is there want-
ing to make me happy ? Nothing, if I can but be as
thankful as 1 ought; and I trust that He who has be-
stowed so many blessings upon me will give me grati-
tude to crown them all."

As the shortening days of autumn abridged
the rides and walks that were indispensable
to comfort and health, the loneliness of his
retreat began to tell upon his spirits. The
"society of odd scrambling fellows like him-

Life in Huntingdon 79

self," who had diverted him upon first ac-
quaintance,— " a North-country divine,
very poor, but very good, and very happy,"
— a religious valetudinarian, who "drank
nothing but water, and ate no flesh," and
the one "gentleman, well-read and sensi-
ble," who had called upon him, — palled
upon the intellectual palate. He felt the
need of a real home, and affectionate, as
well as intelligent, companionship. Mis-
taking the natural sense of loss and longing
for falling-off in his love for Christ and dis-
relish for His service, he was on the verge
of religious despondency, when the great-
est blessing of his life was interposed to
avert it.

Walking, solitary and thoughtful, in an
avenue of trees after morning service one
Sunday, he was accosted by a young man
of pleasing address and countenance, who
introduced himself as William Unwin, and
a fellow-worshipper in the church Cowper
had just quitted. The family lived in the
neighbourhood, and had been silent wit-
nesses of Cowper's regular attendance upon
religious services, his reverent behaviour
during these, and his apparent loneliness.
The father was an elderly clergyman, who

80 William Cowper

eked out a slender income by preparing
young men for the University of Cambridge.
Cowper describes him as "a man of learn-
ing and good sense, and as simple as Parson
Adams." Of Mrs. Unwin, who was many
years her husband's junior, he says :

" His wife has a very uncommon understanding, has
read much, to excellent purpose, and is more polite than
a duchess. The son, who belongs to Cambridge, is a
most amiable young man, and the daughter quite of a
piece with the rest of the family."

The appearance, in a dull country neigh-
bourhood, of a bachelor, still under thirty-
five, prepossessing in person and unsocial
in habits, who set up a household of his
own, and had a private valet, was a tooth-
some morsel of Huntingdon gossip. The
Unwins had used their eyes and wits dili-
gently, and probably had gleaned some
items relative to the solitary's antecedents
that stirred their sympathies in his behalf.
William Unwin had wished to call upon
him, but his father opposed the friendly
design upon the ground that the newcomer
evidently preferred his own society to any
other. Something in the pensive, even de-
jected, air of the object of their kind so-

The Unwins 81

licitude and of neighbourhood curiosity,
impelled him on this Sunday noon to dis-
regard parental counsel and enter into con-
versation with the stranger. The talk turned,
almost immediately, upon religious topics;
Cowper learned that the young man was
of his own inclination and sentiments, read-
ing for orders, "being and having always
been, sincere in his belief and love of the
Gospel."

Young Unwin drank tea with his new
friend that afternoon, and invited him cor-
dially to visit at his father's house. This
call introduced him to mother and daughter;
he received and accepted an invitation to
dinner, and a few days later "met Mrs.
Unwin in the street and went home with
her." His account of the interview is
graphic, and especially interesting as con-
veying his earlier impressions of her whose
influence was to be, thenceforward, greater
than that of any other human creature in
shaping and colouring his life.

"She and I walked together, near two hours, and

had a conversation which did me more good than I

should have received from an audience of the first prince

in Europe. That woman is a blessing to me, and I

never see her without being the better for her company.
6

82 William Cowper

1 am treated in the family as if I were a near relation,
and have been repeatedly invited to call upon them at all
times. You know what a shy fellow I am. I cannot
prevail with myself to make so much use of this privi-
lege as I am sure they intend I should, but perhaps
this awkwardness will wear off hereafter.

" It was my earnest request, before 1 left St. Albans,
that wherever it might please Providence to dispose of
me, 1 might meet with such an acquaintance as 1 find in
Mrs. Unwin. . . .

" They see but little company, which suits me exactly.
Go when I will, I find a house full of peace and cordial-
ity in all its parts, and am sure to hear no scandal, but
such discourse, instead of it, as we are all better for."

In this frame of mind, he accounted as a
timely suggestion of ''the good providence
of God," the idea of taking the place in the
Unwin household of a pupil-boarder who
was leaving for the University. The state
of Cowper's pecuniary affairs was embar-
rassing, steadfast as was his faith that his
bread and water would be sure, and that
those who loved the Lord should not lack
any good thing. He was still in debt to
Dr. Cotton, and the stipend he had counted
upon to defray the obligation was collected
with difficulty from the tenant who had
succeeded him in his chambers. He jests
to Hill on "the impertinence of entering

The Unwins 83

upon a man's premises and using them
without paying for 'em," and in putting
the claim into his hands sighs, " Poor toad !
I leave him entirely to your mercy."

If his readiness to accept a pension, his
surprise when "the Colonel" and Ashley
Cowper demurred at his body-servant and
riding-horse, and the airy lightness that
postponed the discussion of money-matters
to a more convenient season, remind us un-
pleasantly of Harold Skimpole, it is yet
manifest, in many ways, that he was an
honest debtor and sincerely distressed at
the idea of defrauding another, or cramping
a creditor who had trusted him. As fast
as money came to him, he paid it out to
those to whom it was lawfully due, and,
with rueful humour, records that after three
months in his bachelor-hall, he had "con-
trived, by the help of good management
and a clear notion of economical affairs, to
spend the income of a twelve-month."

Ever as ingenuous as a child in unburden-
ing his mind to those he loved, he probably
enlightened the Unwins fully as to his per-
plexities and his revenues, and their know-
ledge of these had something to do with
the — to him — entirely satisfactory arrange-

84 William Cowper

ment entered upon between them. He re-
fers the scheme and the successful execution
of it to Divine guidance, and in this com-
fortable persuasion he was nearer right than
those who carp at "leadings" and argue
down "providential interpositions."

"Whoso will observe the wonderful
providences of God, shall have wonderful
providences to observe " — spake a wiser
than those who look no farther than to
second causes, and the natural processes of
sowing and reaping, for explanation of the
sublimest, as of the pettiest, enigmas of life.

Cowper writes in practical, sensible wise
to Joseph Hill of the intended change:

" I find it impossible to proceed any longer in my
present course without danger of bankruptcy. 1 have,
therefore, entered into an agreement with the Rev. Mr.
Unwin to lodge and board with him. The family are
the most agreeable in the world. They live in a special
good house, and in a very genteel way. They are all
exactly what I could wish them to be, and 1 know I
shall be as happy with them as 1 shall be on this side of
the sun. I did not dream of the matter till about five
days ago ; but now the whole is settled. I shall transfer
myself thither as soon as 1 have satisfied all demands
upon me here."

An extract from a letter of a much later
date confirms what has been said of the

The Unwins 85

Unwins' appreciation of his financial condi-
tion and his inaptness as a money-manager:

"I had not been ten months in the family
when Mrs. Unwin generously offered me
my place under her roof with all the same
accommodation (and undertook to manage
that matter with her husband,) at half the
stipulated payment."

Professor Goldwin Smith says, analyti-
cally :

" The two great factors in Cowper's life
were the malady that consigned him to
poetic seclusion, and the conversion to
Evangelicism, which gave him his inspira-
tion and his theme."

With due respect to this honoured au-
thority, I venture to cite as a third and
scarcely minor influence, his domestication
with the Unwins. Every principal event
in his history and many of (apparently) sec-
ondary importance, show this man to have
been of a singularly dependent nature, even
womanish in the reaching out of mind and
heart for some support that should protect
and cherish, while upholding and directing.
To borrow a nice, old-fashioned phrase, he
needed mothering. His passionate grief for
the mother whose image would have faded

86 William Cowper

from the recollection of most men under
the heat and storms of fifty years, is but
one proof of this ever-present, ever-clam-
orous need, not always comprehended by
himself. Strong men, like Churchill and
Lloyd, his Westminster boon-comrades,
Joseph Hill, John Cowper, most of all,
John Newton, recognised and used it as
they thought best for him, or for what they
wished to accomplish through him. Good,
true, devout women of the finest strain
felt and appreciated more justly that which
set him apart from the average Englishman,
and gave him an especial claim upon the
mother-sex.

This, we assume, and most reasonably,
is the keynote to an intimacy that has puz-
zled alike the writers who would think no
evil, and such as think only evil, and that
continually, of close friendships between
men and women. Cowper was outspoken
in the frank fearlessness of his feeling for
Mrs. Unwin while her husband lived, and
afterwards.

"Mrs. Unwin" — seven years older than
he — "has almost a maternal affection for
me, and I have something very like a filial
one for her, and her son and I are brothers."

The Unwins 87

And again: "The lady in whose house
he lived, was so excellent a person, and
regarded him with a friendship so truly
Christian, that he could almost fancy his
own mother restored to life again, to com-
pensate to him for all the friends he had
lost, and all his connexions broken."

The Unwins belonged to that wing of
"the Evangelicals," then turning the reli-
gious world upside down, that had re-
mained within the fold of the Established
Church, but held fellowship, in the unity of
faith, with the more radical branch led by
the Wesleys and Whitefield. In the con-
servative party, Martin Madan, Cowper's
early friend and kinsman, was prominent.
His sister, of the same way of thinking,
married her cousin, Colonel Cowper, who
was also a first cousin of William and John
Cowper. In the correspondence opened
between William and herself, soon after
his incorporation into the Unwin family,
we have a picture of the home-life that had
become his.

"How do you pass your time?" Mrs.
Cowper had asked, curious, no doubt, as
to the country ways of getting rid of the
short days and long evenings filled up for

88 William Cowper

her in London by godly visitors, church-
services, and charitable works.

11 As to amusements" — Cowper made haste to reply,
— " I mean what the world calls such, we have none.
The place indeed swarms with them, and cards and
dancing are the professed business of almost all the
' gentle ' inhabitants of Huntingdon. We refuse to take
part in them, or to be accessories to this way of murder-
ing our time, and by so doing have acquired the name
of Methodists.

" Having told you how we do not spend our time, I
will next say how we do. We breakfast, commonly,
between eight and nine. Till eleven, we read either the
Scriptures, or the sermons of some faithful preacher of
those holy mysteries ; at eleven, we attend divine serv-
ice, which is performed here twice every day, and from
twelve to three we separate, and amuse ourselves as we
please. During that interval, I either read in my own
apartment, or walk, or ride, or work in the garden. We
seldom sit an hour after dinner, but, if the weather per-
mits, adjourn to the garden, where, with Mrs. Unwin
and her son, I have generally the pleasure of religious
conversation till tea-time. If it rains, or is too windy
for walking, we either converse within-doors, or sing
some hymn of Martin's " (Madan's) " Collection, and by
the help of Mrs. Unwin's harpsichord, make up a tolera-
ble conceit, in which our hearts, I hope, are the best
and most musical performers. After that we sally forth
to walk in good earnest. Mrs. Unwin is a good walker,
and we have generally travelled about four miles before
we see home again. When the days are short, we
make this excursion in the former part of the day, be-

The Unwins 89

tween church-time and dinner. At night we read, and
converse, as before, 'till supper, and commonly finish
the evening, either with hymns, or a sermon, and, last
of all, the family are called to prayers.

" 1 need not tell you that such a life as this is consist-
ent with the utmost cheerfulness. Accordingly we are
all happy and dwell together in unity as brethren. . . .

" Blessed be the God of our salvation for such com-
panions and for such a life, — above all for a heart to
like it ! "

To the practical, latter-day Christian, en-
joined by conscience to be up and doing
his little all for his generation, ever on the
alert for opportunities to "make much of
his dear Lord," by making the sum of
human suffering less, and making the most
of talents committed to him for improve-
ment, and not for keeping only, — the sav-
ing clauses in this programme are the three
hours of study or writing, the work in the
garden, and the walk, during which the
trio may have come into touch with hum-
bler neighbours, or, perchance, with the
triflers who danced and gamed away the
hours which the Evangelicals believed that
they were improving.

It softens the outline of the monastic
routine to find Cowper intent upon garden-
ing, and eager to collect seeds and cuttings.

9o

William Cowper

" I study the arts of pruning, sowing and planting," he
writes to Mr. Hill, "and enterprise everything in that
way from melons down to cabbages. I have a large
garden to display my abilities in ; and were we nearer
London, I might turn higgler, and serve your honour
with cauliflowers and broccoli at the best hand."

The founder of the Franciscan order culti-
vated cabbages, and museums are radiant
with missals and rich in carvings wrought
by monastic brethren to fend off melan-
cholia and hypochondria, in the intervals of
masses and readings of religious homilies
and the Lives of the Saints.

CHAPTER VIII

MR. UNWIN'S DEATH— JOHN NEWTON — LIFE
AT OLNEY

THE name of the senior Unwin does not
appear in Cowper's diary of occupa-
tions and recreations. That worthy gentle-
man, in his dual profession of clergyman and
coach, had little leisure for "the calm re-
treat and silent shade " in which his boarder
sat with great delight. While the lecture
pieuse that succeeded breakfast proceeded,
he was in his gig on the way to his Cam-
bridge classes, or shut up in his study with
a pupil. If his voice were not joined with
the rest in " Madan's Collection," it was be-
cause he was too weary to play any role but
that of listener. On Sundays, he mounted
his horse at an early hour, to be in season
for morning service in his remote living of
Grimstone in Norfolk. We are surprised,
91

92 William Cowper

after Cowper's strictures upon the "gen-
tle" folks' frivolities, to read that Mrs.
Unwin's influence had removed her hus-
band from his parish to Huntingdon. "She
had liked neither the situation nor the
society of that sequestered place." One
at least of his brother-clergymen was se-
vere in criticism of his non-residence in
his cure of souls, pronouncing it "incon-
sistent with the piety of the Unwins to
have encouraged such a dereliction." In
yet harsher terms he interprets as "an evi-
dent dispensation " an event which "awe-
fully removed the stay of the family in the
very act of inconsistency."

On a Sunday morning early in July, 1767,
when Cowper had been nearly two years
with the Unwins, the old gentleman was
thrown from his horse on his way to Grim-
stone, and fractured his skull. He was
found in the road by some passers-by,
picked up and carried into the nearest house,
a mean cottage, about a mile from Hunting-
don. His family was summoned, but his
condition put all thought of removal out of
the question, and they remained with him
for five days, agonised witnesses of his
sufferings until these were ended by death.

Mr. Unwin s Death 93

Cowper never wasted words in writing to
Hill, and he told this story in few and
graphic phrases:

" At nine o'clock on Sunday morning, he was in per-
fect health, and as likely to live twenty years as either of
us, and before ten was stretched, speechless and sense-
less, upon a flock bed in a poor cottage where (it being
impossible to remove him.) he died on Thursday evening.
I heard his dying groans, the effect of great agony, for
he was a strong man, and much convulsed in his last
moments. The few short intervals of sense that were
indulged him he spent in earnest prayer, and in expres-
sions of a firm trust and confidence in the only Saviour.

" Our society will not break up, but we shall settle
in some other place; where, is, at present, uncertain."

In September he authorised his legal
friend to sell a hundred pounds' worth of
certain stocks Hill had in keeping for him,
stipulating that the sale should be kept
secret from his family. "It would prob-
ably alarm their fears upon my account,
and possibly once more awaken their re-
sentment."

Two months later, he wrote of an after-
thought characteristic of his tenderness of
heart and conscience:

" It seems to me, 'though it did not occur to me at
first, that you may be drawn into circumstances disagree-
able to your delicacy by being laid under the restraint of

94 William Cowper

secrecy with respect to the sale of this money. I desire,
therefore, that if any questions are asked about the man-
ner in which my arrears to you have been discharged,
you will declare it at once."

The monetary question was serious and
pressing after the sudden removal of the
"stay of the family." ''The special good
house " in Huntingdon must be given up,
and the "genteel way" of living be ex-
changed for a more modest.- William
Unwin was now in orders and was, shortly
afterward, appointed to a living in Essex.
Miss Unwin was engaged to be married to
a Yorkshire clergyman. The "society,"
reduced to two, was homeless, and at a
loss in what direction to migrate.

At this date we meet, for the first time, in
connection with William Co wper's, the name
of a man who was, mentally and physically,
and, it may be added, in moral force, so
directly his opposite that the thought of the
recognition on the part of either of the other
as his counterpart is an anomaly in the his-
toiy of celebrated friendships.

"I shall still, by God's leave, continue
with Mrs. Unwin, whose behaviour to me
has always been that of a mother to a son,"
said Cowper to his cousinly London corre-

John Newton 95

spondent within a week after Mr. Unwin's
death.

" We know not yet where we shall settle, but we trust
that the Lord Whom we seek will go before us, and
prepare a rest for us. We have employed our friends,
Haweis, Dr. Conyers of Helmsley in Yorkshire, and Mr.
Newton of Olney, to look out a place for us, but at
present are entirely ignorant under which of the three
we shall settle or whether under either.

" 1 have written to my Aunt Madan, to desire Martin
to assist us with his inquiries. It is probable we shall
stay here until Michaelmas."

As will be seen by the words "under
which," all three of the men to whom the
important change was referred were clergy-
men, and the ministry of an Evangelical
shepherd was the paramount consideration
with Mrs. Unwin and her adopted son.
The widow's personal relationship with
Rev. John Newton began only a few days
after her husband's violent taking-off. He
was, however, well known to her by repu-
tation, and interested in her son through
their common friend, Dr. Conyers.

The impression made by his call was
so pleasant that before Newton left the
house, the breaking-up of the family was
discussed freely with him, and he had
undertaken to look out a suitable abode for

96 William Cowper

them. Whatever report was rendered by
Haweis and Conyers of their inquiries and
the result of them, Newton's returns were
speedy and emphatic. He had secured the
very lodgings that they needed, and close
to the Vicarage of Olney, occupied by him-
self, the curate, in the non-residence of the
vicar. A gate in the garden-wall made the
grounds equally accessible to both families.
Some repairs must be made upon the house
selected for his new friends, and should
these not be finished by Michaelmas, the
Vicarage was open to them as a temporary
home.

Olney was, then, little better than a vil-
lage, situated upon the sluggish Ouse,
environed by flats, sodden and green after
spring and autumn rains, and malarial under
the summer suns. Besides their neighbours
in the Vicarage, there were no people in
the place above the rank of the shoemaker
and the landlord of a public-house, both of
whom applied for the tenement when
Cowper and Mrs. Unwin vacated it, after
many years of residence. Even then, Cow-
per owned that it was "an incommodious
nook," and the town "abominably dirty."
Goldwin Smith says that the house was

John Newton 97

''dismal, prison-like, and tumble-down,"
and in the immediate vicinity of the worst
part of the town. This last circumstance
commended the situation especially to John
Newton. That he was their nearest and
only neighbour was, to the new tenants,
and as long as he lived in Olney, an all-
sufficient reason for preferring it to any
other residence.

John Newton's antecedents are too
widely known to require recapitulation
here. The most prodigious feats and for-
tunes of a ''penny-dreadful" are tame by
comparison with the unvarnished facts of
his career. Infidel, blasphemer, constant
lover, and lawless son; sailor and deserter;
slave and slaver; the learner at his Dissent-
ing mother's knees of Scripture verses and
religious hymns; the student of Euclid and
Latin in an African desert, the sands for a
blackboard, a tattered Horace, and a copy
of the Vulgate, his only text-books ; —
finally, the humble convert of the Christ he
had reviled — the tale, as told by himself,
would fill twice the number of pages
allotted to this volume. "In the end,"
says a biographer, "he was ordained by
the Bishop of Lincoln, and threw himself

98 William Cowper

with the energy of a new-born apostle
upon the irreligion and brutality of Olney."
Another, that " Mr. Newton had

" ' A frame of adamant, a soul of fire.' "

They had not invented the term ''mus-
cular Christianity " then, or he would have
been the triumphant exponent of the school.
The industries of the fenny district were
lace-making and straw-work, even lads of
eighteen plaiting straw for a living; the
inhabitants were all ignorant, and all
wretchedly poor.

John Newton had entered upon his
charge in Olney in 1764. When Cowper
and his motherly guardian joined him, the
religious machinery he had set up was in
full swing, his zeal in the operation of the
same unabated. He interfused the soul of
his newly found friend with as much of a
portion of his fiery zeal as it would hold,
and set him to work out of hand. A worse
novitiate for the undertaking could hardly
be imagined than the peaceful, contemplat-
ive existence of the two years Cowper had
passed in Huntingdon. He had read much
there, but done no intellectual labour.
Meditation upon holy mysteries was a

John Newton 99

sedative, not a tonic ; constant intercourse
with the chosen few who, like himself,
"had a heart for such a life" and were
"consistently cheerful" throughout the
length of its monotonous flow, had in-
creased his native aversion to general so-
ciety and fostered native delicacy of taste
into fastidiousness. Mr. Newton had his
opinions upon the semi-monastic habits of
some of his brethren, and his opinions were
resolute upon every subject. Mysticism
was a synonym with him for indolence.
He could not away with it. Where God
had put a man, there was God's work for
him to do, and plenty of it. He should be
up and at it while the day lasted.

"If two angels came down from heaven
to execute a divine command, and one was
appointed to conduct an empire, and the
other to sweep a street in it, they would
feel no inclination to exchange employ-
ments," was one of his adages. In precept
and in practice he taught that the duty of
emperor and scavenger was action ! action !
action !

A man should undertake all that he
could by any possibility accomplish, and do
it with his might.

ioo William Cowper

"A Christian should never plead spirit-
uality for being a sloven. If he be but a
shoe-cleaner, he should be the first in the
parish."

With apothegms like these, he braced
the lax nerves of his coadjutor ; the sight
of the warrior who slept in his armour, and
fought all day, head erect, and nostrils
quivering with the joy of the fray, put
energy into the neophyte he had never
dreamed of until now. Newton's stalwart
personality got hold of the very soul of the
recluse. While still learning his trade, as it
were, he writes of a visit he had paid to St.
Albans, a place, he says, which he " visited
every day in thought." "The recollection
of what passed there, and the consequences
that followed it, fill my mind continually,
and make the circumstances of a poor,
transient, half-spent life so insipid and un-
affecting that I have no heart to think or
write much about them."

Under the impetus of this self-disgust, he
plunged into parish work of the most un-
pleasing kind. Acting as a sub-curate to
Newton, he spent much of the day in at-
tendance upon sick cottagers, hearkening
to the confessions of frightened, guilty

Life at Olney 101

souls, abject in the face of approaching
death, the witness, every hour, of squalid
poverty he could not relieve, and degra-
dation beyond redemption. Filth, rags,
— boorishness that returned railing for bless-
ing,— sickened him on every side, yet he
held bravely to the line of march designated
by his leader. He, whom the presence of
strangers silenced and made awkward,
trampled diffidence in the mire under his
feet, and led prayer-meetings, exhorting,
and " engaging " in audible petitions in the
name of his hearers.

A reverend eulogist tells us that which
makes the discharge of this self-imposed
duty at once pitiable and heroic :

"I have heard him say, that when he expected to
take the lead in social worship, his mind was always
greatly agitated for some hours preceding. But his trep-
idation wholly subsided as soon as he began to speak
in prayer ; and that timidity, which he invariably felt at
every appearance before his fellow-creatures, gave place
to an awful yet delightful consciousness of the presence
of his Saviour."

It was the public-school hardening sys-
tem over again, a good thing in its way,
perhaps. Only there are boys and boys,

102 William Cowper

and men and men, and minds have not all
the same poise.

Two, at least, of those who loved him,
felt, painfully, the peril involved in the
subversion of inborn tastes, and habits that
were the growth of years. Long afterward,
Lady Hesketh reminded her sister of the
misgivings they had had while apprentice-
ship and practice were going on:

" To such a mind — such a tender mind — and to such
a wounded, yet lively, imagination as our cousin's, I am
persuaded that eternal praying and preaching were too
much. Nor could it, I think, be otherwise. One only
proof of this I will give you, which our cousin mentioned,
a few days ago, in casual conversation. He was saying
that for one or two summers he had found himself under
the necessity of taking his walk in the middle of the day,
which, he thought, had hurt him a good deal. ' But,'
continued he, ' I could not help it, for it was when Mr.
Newton was here, and we made it a rule to pass four
days in the week together. We dined at one, and it
was Mr. Newton's rule for tea to be on the table at four
o'clock, for at six we broke up.'

" ' Well, then,' said I, ' if you had your time to your-
self after six, you would have good time for an evening's
walk.'

' No,' said he. ' After six we had service or lecture,
or something of that kind, that lasted until supper.'

" 1 made no reply, but could not, and cannot help
thinking, they might have made a better use of a fine

Life at Olney 103

summer's evening than by shutting themselves up to
make long prayers.

" I hope I honour religion, and feel a reverence for re-
ligious persons, but I do think there is something too
puritanical in all this. 1 do not mean to give you my
sentiments upon this conduct generally, but only as it
might affect our cousin. For him I do not think it could
be either proper or wholesome."

There is true pathos in the sisters' tender
mention of "our cousin," as if there were
but one for them amid the many of their
blood and name, and womanly wisdom in
Harriet's fears and conclusion.

John Newton was a Greatheart, whose
burning zeal and Christlike ministry to
God's poor and needy warranted the en-
thusiastic devotion of his acolyte. His mis-
take— made in love — was in insisting upon
putting such harness as his own upon Mr.
Fearing, and shouting for the battle between
him and Apollyon.

CHAPTER IX

QUIET LIFE AT OLNEY — DEATH OF JOHN COWPER
— OLNEY HYMNS — THIRD ATTACK OF IN-
SANITY

ANOTHER friend entertained views sim-
ilar to Lady Hesketh's as to the
propriety of the serious change in Cowper's
habits and occupations. Joseph Hill, a
popular lawyer, and, as we gather from
the tone of Cowper's letters to him, more
a man of the world than any other of his
present associates, was not to be shaken in
his love for the unordained curate by the
slackening and cooling of the Olney corre-
spondence. His invincible good humour
under the lectures incorporated in Cowper's
epistles, and his repeated proffers of pecuni-
ary assistance, are tokens of friendship of
the finest temper, and, more than the de-
votion of his religious intimates, show the
singular attraction the semi-recluse had for
those who had ever really known him.
104

3 ■

o s

X

Quiet Life at Olney 105

It is painful to see how Cowper's grow-
ing absorption in the round of labours ap-
pointed by his spiritual adviser withdrew
him, gradually, from such people as his
Cousin Harriet and her husband, and even
from his Evangelical kinspeople, Mrs. Cow-
per and the Madans. Goldwin Smith
quotes with sad sarcasm the epithet applied
by one biographer to the daily and monthly
routine of the Olney existence — "a decided
course of Christian happiness." Hill's lip
may have been wrung by a smile as caustic
in reading the reply to his many invitations
to his former chum to run up to the city as
his guest, make a round of visits among his
relations, and get a taste of some other air
than that in which he was vegetating.
The season was the winter of 1769 — Janu-
ary or February. The one promenade pos-
sible for the joint households of Newton
and Cowper was a gravel walk, thirty yards
long, raised above the mud on each side of
it, and on this it was Cowper's practice to
tramp for a given time, dumb-bells in hand.

" It affords but indifferent scope to the
locomotive faculty," he writes, "but it is
all we have to move on for eight months
of the year."

106 William Cowper

Beyond the walls of the Vicarage lay "a
populous place, inhabited chiefly by the
half-starved and the ragged of the earth,"
miserable in summer, utterly wretched in
winter. Yet we know Cowper too well
by now to question the sincerity of his
declaration that he " prefers his home to
any other spot of earth in the world."

He continues :

" My dear friend, I am obliged to you for your invita-
tion ; but, being now long accustomed to retirement,
which I was always fond of, I am more than ever un-
willing to revisit those noisy and crowded scenes which
I never loved, and which I now abhor. I remember you
with all the friendship I ever professed, which is as much
as I ever entertained for any man. But the strange and
uncommon incidents of my life have given an entire new
turn to my whole character and conduct, and rendered
me incapable of receiving pleasure from the same em-
ployments and amusements of which I could readily
partake in former days."

In the ensuing autumn he was sum-
moned away from home and parish to
stand at what was supposed to be the death-
bed of his brother John. A deceitful rally
of natural forces relieved William's anxiety
for some weeks. Then came a relapse,
and the elder brother hastened to Cambridge
to find the patient in great agony of body,

Death of John Cowper 107

and in mental depression best described by
his remark:

"Brother, I seem to be marked out for
misery. You know some people are so."

The positions of the two were now
strangely reversed. William became the
comforter :

" But that is not your case," he answered
confidently. "You are marked out for
mercy."

From that hour he never left his brother's
side, except for his meals, and to get a few
hours' sleep, until the spirit and body en-
tered into rest. A small pamphlet, which
the survivor was led by love for the de-
parted, and a sincere desire for the glory of
God and the edification of His saints, to in-
dite while the facts were fresh in his mind
is entitled Adelphi. It contains A Sketch
of the Character and an Account of the
last illness of the late Rev. John Cowper,
A.M., Fellow of Bennet College, Cambridge,
who finished his Course with Joy, 20 March,
1770.

The mortal struggle had lasted a whole
month and four days. Then, "the Lord in
Whose sight the death of His saints is pre-
cious, cut short his sufferings, and gave

io8 William Cowper

him a speedy and peaceful departure," and
the mourner returned to Olney to write
letters announcing the affliction to distant
friends and relatives, and, as I have said, to
sit down to a detailed narrative of what he
had witnessed while standing upon the
uncertain ground dividing the living from
the dead.

In the next twelvemonth Hill invited him
to London at least three times with the
same result as before. The third invitation
was declined in a few lines:

" Believe me, dear friend, truly sensible of your invita-
tion, 'though I do not accept it. My peace of mind is of
so delicate a constitution that the air of Loudon will
not agree with it. You have my prayers — the only re-
turn I can make for your many acts of still-continued
friendship."

The sentence I have italicised is ominous.
Southey's comment upon this and other
letters of the same date is of like spirit
with Professor Goldwin Smith's :

" These may have been written in a frame of ' settled
tranquillity and peace,' but it was a tranquillity that had
rendered his feelings of friendship torpid ; and if this
was ' the only sunshine he ever enjoyed through the
cloudy day of his afflicted life,' it was not the sunshine
of a serene sky."

Olney Hymns 109

Mr. Greatheart Newton's panacea for a
sorrowful heart and gloomy dreads was
work. His disciple's docility and heroic
self-sacrifice, in abandoning the study for
the parochial round of cottage visitations
and cottage prayer-meetings, had greatly
endeared him to the superior. One bio-
grapher intimates that Newton discerned
symptoms in his coadjutor's mien or talk
that suggested the propriety of some change
in his mode of life. With Greatheart, Life
and Action were synonyms. His one con-
cession to his weak brother's constitutional
idiosyncrasy was that he gave him different
work to do, and such as was more con-
genial to the natural bent of his mind.
Cowper was a scholar and a poet. The
little he had done in the literary arena be-
fore he fell in with Newton had given sat-
isfactory evidence of both these facts.
Newton was himself a man of learning, and
no mean writer of sacred verse. Witness
such lyrics as

" How sweet the Name of Jesus sounds
In a believer's ear,"

and others in general use and justly es-
teemed by all branches of the Church mili-

i io William Cowper

tant. His admiration of Cowper's talents
had kept pace with the profound affection
the latter had the rare gift of inspiring in all
his intimates. Therefore, asserts the chroni-
cler referred to just now, "he wisely
engaged him in a literary undertaking con-
genial with his taste, suited to his admirable
talents, and, perhaps, more adapted to alle-
viate his distress than any other that could
have been selected."

The obedient neophyte was bidden to
soften the poignancy of his grief for the
loss of his only brother, and to recuperate
nervous forces spent in that racking month
and four days in the valley of the shadow
of death, by collaborating with Newton in
the preparation of the Olney Hymns.

This collection, published by Newton after
the failure of his colleague's mental health,
was prefaced by an apology for the small
size of the volume, and the expression of
his reluctance to bring it out at all, " when
he had so few of his friend's hymns to in-
sert in the collection." For nearly half a
century it was the favourite hymnal of
Evangelical congregations in Great Britain
and the United States. I have no hesita-
tion in saying that Cowper's Olney hymns

Olney Hymns 1 1 1

— marked " C." in the earlier editions — won
for their author a warmer abiding-place in
the hearts of the devout worshippers in
Establishment and Chapel than the more
ambitious works that gave him a place in
the foremost rank of English poets.

" There is a fountain filled with blood,"

and

" O, for a closer walk with God ! "

have been translated into the language of
every land where the standard of the Cross
has been planted.

No one can read these and others of the
collection without feeling sure that the au-
thor enjoyed writing them, and that, up to
a certain period of time — or labour — the
change of mental air and scene was rather
beneficial than harmful. To this period be-
longs a hymn which, besides being the
most virile in tone and helpful in spirit,
contains more real poetry than any other
penned by him then, or ever. Every
stanza of

" God moves in a mysterious way "

is a gem of holy inspiration, and each has
been a leaf of healing to the stricken soul.

1 12 William Cowper

The moved imagination of one who had
lain in the pit and miry clay and had yet
been made, by sustaining grace, to stand
upright, searches for figures at once apt
and familiar, with which to strengthen his
afflicted brethren, tossed with tempests,
and not comforted. God

" plants His footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm."

The formation of the diamond in the hidden
mine ; dark clouds, growing big with mercy,
to break in blessing upon the boding watch-
ers' heads; the bitter bud that is to blossom
into sweetness — are so many variations of
the theme — "Trust in the Lord, at all times;
ye people, pour out your heart before Him:
God is a refuge for us. ' '

It is infinitely affecting to note that, as
the labour of love becomes a task, with
conscience as the whipper-in, the spirit is
keyed to a lower pitch; the cry of the
human becomes more distinct and plaintive.

" Where is the blessedness I knew? "

indicates disease, and he casts about for a
remedy.

Olney Hymns 1 13

11 The dearest idol I have known,
Whate'er that idol be,
Help me to cast it from Thy throne
And worship only Thee."

Introspection; analysis of hopes, of
doubts, of heart-sinkings, of formalism in
devotion — ah! it was a ghastly train that
followed him into his study each day, and
trooped about his bed at night, and would
not down for prayer and fasting.

He toiled upon the Hymn-book until
January, 1773, the glooms within the
prison-like dwelling near the Vicarage
heavier than the fogs lying low upon the
Ouse without, and confining his view to
the muddy streets and hideous row of
opposite houses. Whatever Mr. Newton
saw, he kept his own counsel and abated
naught of his faith in the final efficacy of
his catholicon. What more consoling than
meditation upon the truth of God's Word ?
what more helpful than to utter forth the
goodness of the Lord ?

What Mrs. Unwin saw — and dreaded
— we are not told, but we can guess
from what she did when, in after-days,
it fell to her to allot themes for him to
write upon.

1 14 William Cowper

One day in January, Cowper threw down
his pen, and "went mad again."

"With deplorable consistency," he re-
fused to go to church or the prayer-meetings
held in the "Great House" ; he would
neither pray himself nor have Mr. Newton
pray with him, and could not be induced
to set his foot in Mr. Newton's house.
Then — perhaps Mrs. Unwin had known of
it before — it came out that he had made an
attempt upon his life as long ago as October,
persuaded, Mr. Newton says, "through
the power the enemy had of impressing
his perturbed imagination, that it was the
will of God, he should, after the example
of Abraham, perform an expensive act of
obedience, and offer, not a son, but him-
self."

Might not this have been a variation of
the prayer deprecatory of

" The dearest idol I have known " ?

The Dean of St. Paul's, the

" most ingenious of poets, the most subtle of divines,
. . . whose reputation for learned sanctity had scarcely
sufficed to shelter him from scandal on the ground of
his fantastic defence of suicide, was familiar with the
idea of Death, and greeted him as a welcome old friend
whose face he was glad to look on long and closely."

Third Attack of Insanity 1 1 5

Thus Edmund Gosse of William Cowper's
great-grandfather.

"Mrs. Anne Cowper numbered among
her ancestors Dr. Donne, the poet," Thomas
Wright remarks. "It is pleasant to be able
to connect the one poet with the other."

Pleasure that is darkly equivocal when
we find Cowper, piteously unconscious of
the force of the confession, writing to his
cousin, Mrs. Bodham :

" There is in me more of the Donne than the Cowper ;
and 'though I love all of both names, and have a thou-
sand reasons to love those of my own name, yet I fee\
the bond of nature draws me vehemently to your side.
I was thought, in the days of my childhood, much to
resemble my mother ; and, in my natural temper, of
which, at the age of fifty-eight I must be supposed to
be a competent judge, can trace both her and my late
uncle, your father. . . . Add to all this, I deal
much in poetry, as did our venerable ancestor, the Dean
of St. Paul's, and I think I shall have proved myself a
Donne at all points."

Given to introspection as he was — this,
too, in ignorant imitation of the Dean of
St. Paul's, "whose life had been spent in
examining Man in the crucible of his own
alchemist fancy, anxious to preserve to the
very last his powers of unflinching spiritual

1 1 6 William Cowper

observation," — the doomed descendant de-
scried nothing in his complacent inspection
of the ancestral line to damp his satisfaction
in the discovery that he was a "Donne at
all points."

When he would have nothing more to
do with Mr. Newton, and took it into his
poor, ill-used brain that Mrs. Unwin hated
him, the perplexed and despairing twain
abandoned the theory of diabolical posses-
sion. Still, medical aid was not called in
until, three months afterward, he agreed to
spend a night in the Vicarage, and once
there, stubbornly refused to go home.
This sullen obstinacy almost lends a smack
of humour to the situation when coupled
with the Newtons' dismay. In the midst
of it all, however — the inconvenience, ex-
pense, and distress involved in the en-
tertainment of such a guest, — it must be
admitted that their hospitality was without
grudging, and that the patient was always
"our dear Mr. Cowper, one sent by the
Lord to Olney, where " — writes Mr. New-
ton— " he has been a blessing to many, a
great blessing to myself."

In March, Dr. Cotton was consulted and
advised blood-letting and certain drugs that

JOHN DONNE

'FROM OLD PRINT IN THE POSSESSION OF BEVERLY CHEW, ESQ.
OF NEW YORKl

Third Attack of Insanity 1 17

strengthened his body and made his insan-
ity worse. For sixteen months, five of
which were passed at the Vicarage, the
patient never smiled. Then, Mr. Newton
wrote with minuteness that testifies how
close and affectionate was the watch kept
upon his ward:

" Yesterday, as he was feeding the
chickens, — for he is always busy if he can
get out-of-doors — some little incident made
him smile."

In a few days after this first glint of hope,
Mrs. Unwin prevailed upon Cowper to re-
turn to his own house, and his long-suffer-
ing host heaved a grateful sigh.

" Upon the whole I have not been weary of my cross.
Besides the submission I owe to the Lord, I can hardly
do or suffer too much for such a friend. ... He
evidently grows better, though the main stress of his
malady still continues. He has been hitherto almost
exactly treading over again the dreary path he formerly
trod at St. Albans. Some weeks before his deliverance
there, he began to recover his attention which had long
been absorbed and swallowed up in the depths of despair,
so that he could amuse himself a little with other things.
Into this state the Lord seems now to have brought him ;
so that, 'though he seems to think himself lost to hope,
he can continually employ himself in gardening, and
upon that subject will talk as freely as formerly, 'though
he seldom notices other conversation ; and we can per-

1 18 William Cowper

ceive almost daily that his attention to things about him
increases."

His love of gardening and of dumb pets
was what wise doctors nowadays call a
" pointing of Nature." That much-abused
Mother, turning, as it were, in despair,
from the licensed fooling of those who pre-
sume to be her aides, prompts her afflicted
child to adventure his own cure. Southey
says that Cowper "understood his own
case well enough to perceive that anything
which would engage his attention without
fatiguing it must be salutary."

He looked after cucumbers, cabbages, ex-
otic myrtles, and indigenous stock-gilly-
flowers, fed the poultry, and brought up by
hand three young hares, "Puss, Tiny, and
Bess," making careful notes of their habits
and peculiarities. After his recovery he
wrote their biographies, — the most en-
chanting memoirs of four-footed folk ever
put upon paper for the delight of a dozen
generations of bipeds.

"I believe my name is up about the
country for preaching people mad," John
Newton once wrote to a friend, with sor-
rowful naivete at which we might, but
cannot, smile.

Third Attack of Insanity 1 19

" I suppose we have near a dozen " (in Olney) "in
different degrees, disordered in their heads. This has
been no small trial to me, and I have felt sometimes as
I suppose David might feel when the Lord smote
Uzzah for touching the ark. ... I trust there is
nothing in my preaching that tends to cast those down
who ought to be comforted."

He might have enlarged the prayerful
hope into a wish that his eyes might be
opened to discern the wisdom of apportion-
ing burdens to the bearers, and the folly of
breaking stones upon the road with a
sculptor's mallet.

CHAPTER X

THE FATAL DREAM — CONVALESCENCE — FIRST
VOLUME OF POEMS

TO what may be called the Olney lunacy
of our unhappy subject belongs the
story of the Fatal Dream well told by Mr.
Wright in his Life of William Cowper.

" One night, toward the end of February, he crossed
the line that divided a life of hope from a life of despair.
He had a Terrible Dream in which ' a Word ' was
spoken. What the dream was he does not tell us. Nor
does he tell us the 'word,' 'though from his various
references to it and his malady, we know its import.
' Actum est de te ; periisti ' (It is all over with thee ;
thou hast perished) was the thought ever uppermost in
Cowper's mind.

" It was revealed to him, as he thought, from heaven,
that the God that made him, had doomed him to ever-
lasting torment ; that God had even regretted that He
had given existence to him. So deeply, indeed, was
this engrained in his mind that, for many years, he
1 20

The Fatal Dream 121

never offered a prayer — did not even ask a blessing on
his food; his argument being that he ' had no right to do
so.'"

Had John Cowper lived a decade longer,
he would probably have been a fellow-
sufferer with his more imaginative brother.
John's hallucination was the vision of a
gypsy peddler who had prophesied that he
would not outlive his thirtieth year.

"These fancies were," observed one
writer, "but too surely indications of the
same constitutional malady which so often
embittered the existence of his brother."

And, still, not one of them — patients,
physicians, pastor, or friend — recalled and
set in its proper place the gruesome figure
of John Donne, wrapped in his winding-
sheet, his feet in the burial-urn, — the man
who cried out with his last breath, as it
would seem in visionary rapture, "I were
miserable if I might not die," — the divine
who preached his own funeral sermon, and,
when his mental powers were in their
prime, defended suicide.

While Cowper resumed, to some extent,
his correspondence with such friends as
Hill and William Unwin, sixteen months
from the beginning of his third attack of

122 William Cowper

dementia, two years elapsed before he was
again in a normal state of mind.

Still obeying the beckoning finger of Na-
ture, he passed many hours a day in the open
air, building and glazing a miniature green-
house, hardly larger than a modern Wardian
case, and stocking it with pineapples.

"I am pleased with a frame of four lights, doubtful
whether the few pines it contains will ever be worth a
farthing ; amuse myself with a greenhouse which Lord
Bute could take upon his back and walk away with ; and
when I have paid it the accustomed visit and watered it,
and given it air, I say to myself — ' This is not mine. 'T is
a plaything lent me for the present. I must leave it
soon."'

The morbid strain blended with every-
thing he wrote or said.

" My mind had always a melancholy cast,
and is like some pools I have seen, which,
though filled with black and putrid water,
will nevertheless, in a bright day, reflect
the sunbeams from their surface."

Important things had come to pass in the
small section of the outer world in which
he was immediately interested, while he
was lost to it.

His first note after his long silence has a
reference to his uncle Ashley's recovery

Convalescence 123

from a serious illness. " Having suffered
so much by nervous fevers myself I know
how to congratulate him upon his recov-
ery," is a curious passage, as indicating
ignorance of the real cause of his own
protracted invalidism. "Other distempers
only batter the walls; but they creep si-
lently into the citadel, and put the garrison
to the sword."

Sir Thomas Hesketh's death drew him
still farther out of the black shell of un-
wholesome self-absorption. The worthy
Baronet's friendship for his wife's favourite
cousin shows him to have been a man of
generous sympathies and superior to petty
jealousies.

" I knew," writes Cowper, "that I had a place in his
affections, and from his own information, many years
ago, a place in his will ; but little thought that, after the
lapse of so many years, 1 should still retain it. His re-
membrance of me, after so long a season of separation,
has done me much honour and leaves me the more reason
to regret his decease."

An old Westminster school-fellow, Thur-
low, in whose company he used to visit
No. 30 Southampton Row, had been made
Lord Chancellor; a fire had burned up a
dozen houses in Olney, and caused much

124 William Cowper

suffering among the poor thus made poorer;
Mr. Newton's effort to lessen the chances
of another conflagration by preventing the
celebration of Guy Fawkes's day, when
candles and torches often kindled the
thatched roofs, was the occasion of a riot
and a hubbub of threats against the curate
and his house; the first edition of Olney
Hymns was published and making its way
slowly into favour with the churches.
Lastly, and more important than all other
changes put together, Mr. Newton had
exchanged Olney for a London living.

* * If I were in a condition to leave Olney,
too, I certainly would not stay in it,"
Cowper aroused himself to write to Mrs.
Newton, March 4, 1780, while the smart of
the separation was still fresh.

''It is not attachment to the place that binds me
here, but an unfitness for every other. I lived in it
once, but now I am buried in it, and have no business
with the world on the outside of my sepulchre. My
appearance would startle them, and theirs would be
shocking to me."

With the key of his after-life in our hand
we see significance in another letter, penned
after the spring weather had fairly opened,
the jasmine and honeysuckle in his small

Convalescence 12s

garden were in flower, and the hedges in
the fields about Olney were white with
"the May."

" I deal much in ink, but not such ink as is employed
by poets and writers of essays. Mine is a harmless
fluid, and guilty of no deceptions but such as may pre-
vail without the least injury to the person imposed upon.
I draw mountains, valleys, wood, and streams, and
ducks and dabchicks. I admire them myself, and Mrs.
Unwin admires them, and her praise and my praise, put
together, are fame enough for me."

Every writer who has undertaken a bio-
graphy of William Cowper has become his
lover before the task was half done. His
ingenuousness, his pain, and his patience,
the vein of sportive humour darting across
his darkest fancies like a fantastic zigzag of
gold thread ; the depth and constancy of
his affections, the sweetness of his sub-
mission to reproof when dealt by one he
loved — are so many anchors cast into our
hearts. If other appeal to our sympathies
were needed, it is made in the perception of
the injury done to what Lady Hesketh ten-
derly terms — "the wounded and lively im-
agination of our cousin," by the heroic
treatment resorted to for the cure of those
wounds and the repression of that vivacity.

126 William Cowper

It costs us a conscious effort to do simple
justice to one so thoroughly good, so really
great as John Newton, while we dwell
upon this dark age of his friend's experi-
ence. He meant so well, and loved his
stricken colleague so fondly that we draw
back from acceptance of the harsh citation
of the Curate of Olney as the instrument of
the pitiable ruin that overtook his devoted
disciple. Yet we cannot shut our eyes to
the truth that their relations nearly resem-
bled those of confessor and penitent, and
that to write to, or talk with, Mr. Newton
was the signal for that introversion of the
spiritual vision which is most to be dreaded
in the religious hypochondriac. It was in-
finitely safer for Cowper to be drawing dab-
chicks for Mrs. Unwin's inspection than to
be holding his heart in the hollow of his
hand, as a magician pours the magic ink
into his palm, and to shorten mental and
spiritual sight with peering into the black
pool.

At mid-summer of this same year (1780)
he wrote to his ghostly father:

" I wonder that a sportive thought should ever knock
at the door of my intellects, and still more that it should
gain admittance. It is as if Harlequin should intrude

Convalescence 127

himself into the gloomy chamber where a corpse lies in
state. His antic gesticulations would be unseasonable at
any rate, but more especially so if they should distort
the features of the mournful attendants with laughter.

" But the mind, long wearied with the sameness of a
dull, dreary prospect, will gladly fix its eyes on anything
that may make a little variety in its contemplations,
'though it was but a kitten playing with its tail."

A twentieth-century specialist in diseases
of the mind would unhesitatingly prescribe
the kitten, and lay stress upon friskiness as
a desideratum. A hundred and almost
a score years agone, a woman's love found
out the scientist's secret, and womanly tact
reduced it to practice.

As another winter drew near with the
certain prospect of such miseries as a cessa-
tion of all gardening and country walks
and such al fresco sights as hawthorn
hedges, billowing fields of corn, hay-mak-
ing, nest-building and swallow-flights, —
that had diverted the convalescent's atten-
tion from the images in the aforementioned
inky pool, — Mrs. Unwin led him on to
fashion other things than scratchy drawings
with the pen he was beginning once more
to love. How gradually and how artfully
he was lured into the belief that the notion

128 William Cowper

and the motion were his own, we are left
to imagine for ourselves.

The letter to Mr. Newton, dated on the
shortest day in the now gloomy year (Dec.
21, 1780) breaks the news that he is again
writing poetry. Mr. Newton has told him
an anecdote in his last letter, over which
Cowper and Mrs. Unwin ''sincerely
laughed." Such natural amusement, and
the telling of it, was nothing new by now
to him who had recorded (in 1774) with
tears of joy, the first smile after sixteen
months of gloom. Mr. Newton had ex-
pressed to his correspondent his joyful con-
fidence in the completeness of a recovery
they all spoke of as "a deliverance from
the power of the Adversary."

" Your sentiments with respect to me are exactly Mrs.
Unwin's. She, like you, is perfectly sure of my deliver-
ance, and often tells me so. I make but one answer,
and sometimes none at all. That answer gives her no
pleasure and would give you as little ; therefore, at this
time I suppress it. It is better, on every account, that
those who interest themselves so deeply in that event
should believe the certainty of it than that they should
not. It is a comfort to them, at least, if it is none to
me, and, as I could not if I would, so neither would I,
if I could, deprive them of it. . . .

" At this season of the year and in this gloomy, un-

First Volume of Poems 129

comfortable climate, it is no easy matter for the owner
of a mind like mine to divert it from sad subjects, and
fix it upon such as may administer to its amusement.
Poetry, above all things, is useful to me in this respect.
While I am held in pursuit of pretty images, or a pretty
way of expressing them, I forget everything that is irk-
some, and, like a boy that plays truant, determine to
avail myself of the present opportunity to be amused,
and to put by the disagreeable recollection that I must,
after all, go home and be whipped again.

"It will not be long, perhaps, before you will receive
a poem called The Progress of Error. That will be
succeeded by another, in due time, called Truth.
Don't be alarmed ! I ride Pegasus with a curb. He
will never run away with me again. I have even con-
vinced Mrs. Unwin that 1 can manage him, and make
him stop when I please."

The barometer of his spirits rose steadily
during the progress of the labour he once
more delighted in. A letter to William Un-
win, his first friend in the family, written
on Christmas-eve, has the old ring of boy-
ish fun.

"Your poor sister! — she has many good qualities,
and upon some occasions gives proof of a good under-
derstanding. But as some people have no ear for music,
so she has none for humour. Well, — if she cannot laugh
at our jokes, we can, however, at her mistakes, and in
this way she makes us ample amends for the disappoint-
ment. Mr. Powley is much like herself : if his wife
overlooks the jest he will never be able to find it. They

130 William Cowper

were neither of them born to write epigrams or ballads,
and I ought to be less mortified at the coldness with
which they entertain my small sallies in the way of
drollery, when I reflect that if Swift himself had had no
other judges, he would never have found one admirer."

His private correspondence became again
voluminous, and his letters on every sub-
ject are perfect of their kind. He makes
comedies of the trivial happenings in Olney
where, as he had once said, ''occurrences
were as scarce as cucumbers at Christmas " ;
he sends rhymed thanks for gifts of fish
and oysters from London, and a doggerel
inscription with a cucumber of his own
raising; tells of long tramps through the
snow in January; takes lively interest in
the details of printing and publishing, — and
on May i, 1781, thus apprises William Un-
win of the completion of the work that has
kept his head above the black waters:

" On the press, and speedily will be published, in one
volume, octavo, price three shillings — Poems by Wil-
liam Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esqr. You may sup-
pose, by the size of the publication, that the greatest part
of them have been long kept secret, because you, yourself,
have never seen them. But the truth is that they are,
most of them, except what you have in your possession,
the produce of the last winter. Two-thirds of the com-
pilation will be occupied by four pieces, the first of

First Volume of Poems 1 3 1

which sprang up in the month of December, and the
last of them in the month of March. They contain, I
suppose, in all, about two thousand and five hundred
lines, and are known, or to be known in due time, by
the names of Table Talk — The Progress of Error —
Truth — Expostulation. Mr. Newton writes a Preface,
and Johnson is the publisher. . . . Johnson has
heroically set all peradventures at defiance, and takes
the whole charge upon himself. So out I come ! "

Each of the two thousand and five hun-
dred lines passed under Mr. Newton's eyes
before it went to the press. Such as he ob-
jected to as savouring of unseemly levity, or
as too "strong" for a refined Christian
taste, were humbly expunged, or gratefully
altered by the author.

Goldwin Smith's comment upon this
censorship and the manner thereof is so
replete with dry humour that I transcribe,
and s//#scribe to, it:

"Newton would not have sanctioned any poetry
which had not a distinctly religious object, and he re-
ceived an assurance from the poet that the lively passages
were introduced only as honey to the rim of the medic-
inal cup to commend its healing contents to the lips of
a giddy world. The Rev. John Newton must have been
exceedingly austere if he thought the quantity of honey
used was excessive."

The publisher, on the other hand, insisted

132 William Cowper

that Mr. Newton's preface should be with-
drawn, "not for containing anything of-
fensively peculiar, but as being thought too
pious for a world that grew more foolish
and more careless as it grew older."

There are lines in the thin volume that
will live while the literature they adorn is
read. As might have been expected, the
effect of the whole was that of drab-tinted
didacticism. The chief good wrought by
them was their leverage in rescuing their
author from the morass of religious melan-
choly, and setting him upon the sunny
levels of active employment and healthful
association with his fellow-man.

Evangelical circles received the Poems
doubtfully — when they received them at
all — as being satirical where they should
have been homiletical. Mr. Newton's pre-
face might have ballasted the otherwise
crazy shallop, but this Johnson could not
foresee. Literary critics took the author
more seriously than he wished to be taken,
ignoring the poetic principle which our
anointed eyes can discern here and there,
and bestowing a sort of bored praise upon
the moral precepts inculcated in the "dull
sermon in indifferent verse." Moralists

First Volume of Poems 133

like Franklin, and reformers like Cobden,
approved the work and said as much ;
William Unwin wrote that his wife had
laughed and cried over it; the Rev. William
praised cordially, and dispraised discrimin-
atingly, and the publisher saw enough
that was promising in his careful perusal of
the proof-sheets to move him to the ex-
pressed wish that the author would keep
his pen busy.

The thistle-down of circumstance which
was the germ of the second volume must
be left for another chapter.

CHAPTER XI

MRS. UNWIN — LADY AUSTEN — JOHN GILPIN

SOUTHEY, the most voluminous, if not
the most painstaking, of Cowper's
biographers, denies doggedly that any
thought of marriage ever entered into the
mutual relations of the poet and Mrs. Un-
win. The one argument he adduces in
support of the assertion is the positive
knowledge that " no such engagement was
either known or suspected by Mr. Newton,"
and the extreme improbability that it could
have been concealed from him had it
existed.

Mr. Goldwin Smith voices the opinion of
every other writer who has dealt with the
subject, and of those who were personally
cognizant of the romantic intimacy — in
some respects unlike any other platonic
affection that has furnished a theme for
history:

134

Mrs. Unwin 135

"It seems clear, notwithstanding Southey's assertion
to the contrary, that they at one time meditated mar-
riage, possibly as a propitiation to the evil tongues which
did not spare even this most innocent connexion, but
they were prevented from fulfilling their intention by a
return of Cowper's malady. They became companions
for life. Cowper says they were as mother and son to
each other ; but Mrs. Unwin was only seven years older
than he. To label their connexion would be impossible,
and to try to do it would be a platitude. In his poems
Cowper calls Mrs. Unwin ' Mary ' ; she seems always to
have called him 'Mr. Cowper.' It is evident that her
son, a strictly virtuous and religious man, never had the
slightest misgiving about his mother's position."

The concise summing up of the case cov-
ers it so well that a minor chronicler may
well be diffident in the thought of subjoin-
ing a reflection or two in confirmation of
the truth thus established.

Mrs. Powley, Mrs. Unwin's only daugh-
ter, a modest, well-educated girl, as virtu-
ous and religious as her brother, and fondly
attached to her mother, became the wife
of an Evangelical clergyman, strict to rigid-
ity in his principles and prejudices, the last
man of Mrs. Unwin's circle who would
have condoned an association he regarded
as questionable. Mrs. Powley disapproved
of the money spent by her mother in bear-
ing her part of the expense of "Orchard

\}6 William Cowper

Side" — the Olney home, — but " esteemed
Cowper as a man," and, up to Mrs. Un-
win's death, the relations between her and
the Powleys continued affectionate and
cordial.

John Newton and his wife were the con-
stant companions of their next-door neigh-
bours, and no thought of evil in that quarter,
— or even the semblance of evil — seems to
have entered their minds. Messages to and
from Mrs. Unwin went back and forth in
Cowper's letters to the husband and wife
after their removal to London. The know-
ledge of Mrs. Unwin's vigilant guardian-
ship over their beloved friend was the
greatest comfort Newton had in his separa-
tion from the convalescent.

Newton's successor in the Olney curacy
was Thomas Scott, afterwards extensively
known through Scott's Commentary of the
Bible, still a text-book in some theological
seminaries, and a prime authority in family
and Bible-class in the last generation. Al-
though of Newton's school of thought, he
was not attractive to Cowper, now super-
sensitive from the effects of his recent ill-
ness. With excellent judgment Newton
did not oppose his patient's disinclination

Mrs. Unwin 137

to transfer to the new incumbent the con-
fidence that had existed between pastor
and pupil. He therefore introduced and
commended Cowper to a dissenting min-
ister in the near neighbourhood, the Rev.
William Bull. The two affiliated at sight
and forthwith became friends. "Mr. Bull
is an honest man," was Cowper's first
encomium. Subsequently he says, " he is
a Dissenter, but a liberal one " ; writes to
him as " Carissime Taurontm," invites him
to smoke in his greenhouse whenever he
will, borrows from and lends him books,
and when Mr. Bull is ill, entreats him and
his wife to "come to us, and Mrs. Un-
win shall add her attentions and her skill
to that of Mrs. Bull. We will give you
broth to heal your bowels, and toasted rhu-
barb to strengthen them, and send you back
as brisk and cheerful as we wish you to be
always."

From the letters that passed freely be-
tween the dissenting divine and his friend
it is plain that the former was not backward
in priestly admonition when he thought it
was needed.

" Both your advice and your manner of
giving it are gentle and friendly, and like

138 William Cowper

yourself," writes Cowper in 1782, after Mr.
Bull had urged upon him the duty of
prayer.

This upright man and his "virtuous and
religious " helpmeet were Mrs. Unwin's
firm friends and frequent visitors.

Nothing is clearer than that the best peo-
ple who witnessed the life led by the pair,
"so singularly joined," as we say, saw
nothing unnatural, much that was com-
mendable, and perhaps more that was
highly desirable, in the unlabellable con-
nexion. They may have become so used
to the sight of it as not to marvel with the
exceeding admiration which is ours, over
those sixteen months of heroic patience, of
tenderness that was unspeakable, and faith
in Heaven's mercy and the might of human
love that was sublime, — during which God's
earth had but one all-mastering interest for
this delicately bred woman — the dumbly
despairing maniac considered by all but
herself as past cure. He would let no one
else minister to his wants, yet persisted in
the belief that she, too, was against him,
and hated her hotly for it. Other women
have gone to the gates of death, and some
have passed joyfully through them, for

Mrs. Unwin 139

love's sake. Mary Unwin voluntarily en-
tered hell and stayed there for a year-and-a-
half upon the barest hope that hers might
be the hand that would lead her best be-
loved forth, in God's good time.

What manner of person was the heroine
of the unique love-story ?

I write this page with her picture before
me, a full-length portrait disfigured by the
costume and the artistic taste of that day.
She sits under a tree in the garden of the
Olney Vicarage, the conventional broad-
brimmed garden-hat upon her lap, one hand
raised, pointing at nothing with a conven-
tional index-finger. Her forehead is un-
usually high and broad ; the eyes are large
and gentle; the face a fine oval; the feat-
ures are delicately moulded; the space be-
tween the brows bespeaks courage, and of
a fine order. The portrait may, or may not.
convey to us a just idea of William Cow-
per's housekeeper, his mother, his rescuing,
sustaining, and inspiring angel. We pass
from the contemplation to a longer study
of another and a pen-picture — what may
be called a half-length sketch — the fidelity
of which is not open to question.

A woman's portrait of another woman is

140 William Cowper

seldom egregiously flattered unless painter
and subject are more than merely good
friends. When Harriet Hesketh sat down
to give her impressions of Mary Unwin to
her most confidential correspondent, she
had known the mistress of the Olney re-
treat well for many weeks, having been
continually in the society of her cousin and
his hostess with the best possible advant-
ages of studying the latter's character and
manners. She evidently chooses her words
with care:

"She is very far from grave. On the contrary she is
cheerful and gay, and laughs de ton cceur upon the
smallest provocation. Amidst all the little puritanical
words which fall from her, de temps en temps, she seems
to have by nature a great fund of gayety. Great indeed
it must have been not to have been totally overcome by
the close confinement in which she has lived, and the
anxiety she must have undergone for one whom she cer-
tainly loves as well as one human being can love another.
I will not say she idolises him, because that she would
think wrong. But she certainly seems to possess the
truest regard and affection for this excellent creature,
and, as 1 before said, has, in the most literal sense of
the words, no will, or shadow of inclination, but what
is his. . . .

" When she speaks upon grave subjects, she does ex-
press herself with a puritanical tone, and in puritanical
expressions, but on all other subjects she seems to have

Mrs. Unwin 141

a great disposition to cheerfulness and mirth, and, in-
deed, had she not, could not have gone through all she
has. I must say, too, that she seems to be very well-
read in the English poets, as appears by little quotations
which she makes from time to time, and has a true
taste for what is excellent in that way. There is some-
thing truly affectionate and sincere in her manner. No
one can express more heartily than she does, her joy to
have me at Olney ; and, as this must be for his sake, it
is an additional proof of her regard and esteem for him."

Mr. Newton paid a visit to his former
cure of souls pending the publication of
the Poems, being the guest, while there,
of Cowper and Mrs. Unwin, and bringing
into their home, with the bracing breeziness
of his personality, a flavour of London and
life that made his departure a depressing
regret.

u When you came, I determined as much as possible
to be deaf to the suggestions of despair ; that if I could
contribute but little to the pleasure of the opportunity,
I might not dash it with unseasonable melancholy, and,
like an instrument with a broken string, interrupt the
harmony of the concert,"

said Cowper's first letter after his friend's
return to London.

In the same epistle he remarks that "Mrs.
Unwin suffered more upon the occasion
than when you first took leave of Olney."

142 William Cowper

The melancholy of the reactionary quiet
was brightened by the flutter of a fashion-
able woman across the front windows of
the Unwin-Cowper house as a butterfly
might stray into a work-room. She was
the sister of a clergyman's wife resident at
Clifton, the next village to Olney, and was
now on a visit to her. The two had an
errand at a shop opposite to Mrs. Unwin's,
and Cowper, strolling, aimless and restless,
up and down the parlour, chanced to see
the stranger, and asked, interestedly, who
she was.

Mrs. Unwin, surprised and pleased at the
question, replied that she was Lady Austen,
a baronet's widow, and lived in London.
She was further gratified by Cowper's re-
quest that she would call the ladies in and
invite them to tea. He put such force upon
his shyness as to remain where he was un-
til they entered, and to engage in conver-
sation with Lady Austen, and, the visit
over, escorted the sisters all the way to
Clifton.

"She is a lively, agreeable woman; has
seen much of the world, and accounts it a
great simpleton — as it is," he wrote to
Newton, some days afterward. "She

Lady Austen 143

laughs, and makes laugh, and keeps up a
conversation without seeming to labour
at it."

A fortnight more took to London and to
William Un win's parsonage a lively descrip-
tion of a picnic to "the Spinnie," where
the party dined in the root-house, Lady
Austen's lackey and a boy from the Unwin
house having "driven a wheelbarrowful of
eatables and drinkables to the scene of our
Fete Champetre."

Then the greenhouse is converted into a
summer parlour,

" by far the pleasantest retreat in Olney. We eat,
drink, and sleep where we always did; but. here we
spend all the rest of our time, and find that the sound of
the wind in the trees, and the singing of birds are much
more agreeable to our ears than the incessant barking of
dogs and screaming of children. Not to mention the
exchange of a sweet-smelling garden for the putrid
exhalations of Silver End."

"The myrtles ranged before the windows
made the most agreeable blind imaginable,"
and Lady Austen one of the most agreeable
companions.

11 A person who has seen much of the world and un-
derstands it well, has high spirits, a lively fancy and
great readiness of conversation, introduces a sprightliness

144 William Cowper

into such a scene as this, which, if it was peaceful be-
fore, is not the worse for being a little enlivened. . . .
The present curate's wife " — Mrs. Scott — " is a valuable
person, but has a family of her own, and 'though a
neighbour, is not a very near one."

Finally, William Unwin is presented in
London to Lady Austen, who

"loves everything that has any connexion with your
mother. She is, moreover, fond of Mr. Scott's preach-
ing, wishes to be near her sister, and has set her heart
upon one of the ' two mansions ' that form the Unwin
dwelling. It is to be repaired and fitted up with the
furniture from her London house ; a door is to be opened
in the garden wall, and the two households are to form
one family, in effect."

As might have been foreseen, the beauty
of the plan was marred by occasional mis-
understandings : a capricious humour of
Lady Austen's ; a confidential agreement
between Cowper and Mrs. Unwin that " her
vivacity was sometimes too much for them.
Occasionally, perhaps, it might refresh and
revive them, but it more frequently ex-
hausted them." On the whole, however,
and in spite of one decided " tiff," followed
by a reconciliation between the ladies,
ushered in by a flood of tears and a French
embrace on the part of Lady Austen — all
ran blithely for several months.

Lady Austen 145

The other half of Orchard Side— "that
part of our great building" (prison-like and
tumble-down) "which is at present occu-
pied by Dick Coleman, his wife, child, and
a thousand rats " — was, after due consider-
ation, pronounced untenable for a woman
of fashion, however evangelically inclined.
The Vicarage was not occupied by the
Scotts, and Lady Austen set up her house-
hold gods there. "A smart, stone build-
ing, well-sashed, but much too good for
the living," in Cowper's opinion, it was
thronged with reminiscences of the New-
tons and of their neighbour's perverse resid-
ence in it, during his lunacy. The field
intervening between the garden-wall of
Orchard Side and that of the Vicarage is
known to this day as the "Guinea Field,"
Newton and Cowper having paid a guinea
yearly for the right of way through it. A
gate was cut in each wall, and a well-beaten
footpath ran across the field from one to
the other.

" Lady Austen and we pass our days al-
ternately at each other's chateau," Cowper
tells William Unwin, merrily. "In the
morning I walk with one or the other of
the ladies, and in the afternoon, wind

146 William Cowper

thread. Thus did Hercules, and thus prob-
ably did Samson, and thus do I."

He may have been holding a skein for the
lively talker, one afternoon, when, observ-
ing him to be more grave and silent than
common, she dashed into a rattling recital
of the story of John Gilpin, one of the ab-
surd stories that had amused her in her
childhood. She told and acted it so well
that Cowper lay awake that night laughing
over it, and had worked it into a ballad by
the time he arose in the morning.

" You tell me that John Gilpin made you
laugh tears," wrote the author to William
Unwin, "and that the ladies at Court are
delighted with my Poems. Much good
may they do them ! "

The knowledge that he was thought of
and with admiring pleasure beyond the
horizon of Olney was, nevertheless, stimu-
lus to fancy and incentive to action. The
thrill and glow of the new springtime of his
life was in every nerve and vein. And
Lady Austen, if sometimes too vivacious to
the sober pair in the summer or the winter
parlour, was a strengthening cordial when
taken at the right time and in the right
way. She has the credit of having talked

John Gilpin 147

over the disaster of the Royal George
(which went down in a calm sea, with all
on board) until the poet's imagination took
fire and he produced the verses which have
brought the story down to us. Encouraged
— as she might well be — by the notable
success of these ventures, she essayed a
bolder.

" On her first settlement in our neighbourhood, I made
it my particular business (for at that time I was not em-
ployed in writing, having published my first volume and
not begun my second) to pay my devoirs to her lady-
ship every morning at eleven. Customs very soon be-
come laws. 1 began The Task, for she was the lady
who gave me the Sofa for a subject."

This quotation from a letter written in
1786 to Lady Hesketh will be continued
presently. From other sources we have a
glimpse of the scene of Lady Austen's mem-
orable proposal — how important neither
she nor her hearer suspected. During one
of his morning visits, half-reclining on her
sofa, a coquette's favourite throne in a day
when high-backed chairs and backless
stools were the seats in common use, she
bantered Cowper upon his laziness. Why
did he not fall to work upon something
really worthy of his genius, — an epic, or a

148 William Cowper

sustained poem in blank verse, after the
manner of other really great poets ? Half-
laughing, half-impatient, her guest replied
that " he could not think of a subject."

" You should never be at a loss for sub-
jects," she retorted. "They are to be
found everywhere."

"Perhaps you can give me one?" as
carelessly as he had spoken before.

She let her white hand fall upon the arm
of her sofa.

" I can and I will. Write upon my Sofa."

Within the hour the first lines were
penned:

" I sing The Sofa — I who lately sang
Faith, Hope and Charity. . . .
August and proud
Th' occasion, for the Fair commands the song."

CHAPTER XII

LADY AUSTEN'S FLIGHT — RENEWED CORRE-
SPONDENCE WITH LADY HESKETH

"PO captivating was Lady Austen's so

O ciety both to Cowper and Mrs.
Unwin," says one record, ''that these in-
timate neighbours might be almost said to
make one family, as it became their custom
to dine always together, alternately, in the
houses of the two neighbours."

Cowper writes of the same period to
William Unwin:

" From a scene of the most uninterrupted
retirement, we have passed at once into a
state of constant engagement. Not that
our society is much multiplied. The addi-
tion of an individual has made all this
difference."

We have heard of the luncheon at the
Spinnie, the thread-winding, and the daily
eleven-o'clock call. We have to thank her
149

i5o William Cowper

who inspired The Task for the prettiest
picture of a home-evening in all literature,
and which was outlined and filled in from
the life of the joint family in the winter
succeeding the beginning of a poem that
was to make the author, at last, famous.

" Now, stir the fire, and close the shutters fast ;
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa 'round,
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer, but not inebriate, wait on each, —
So, let us welcome peaceful evening in.

This folio of four pages, happy work !

Which not even critics criticise, that holds

Inquisitive attention while I read,

Fast-bound in chain of silence, which the fair,

'Though eloquent themselves, yet fear to break ; —

What is it but a map of busy life,

Its fluctuations and its vast concerns ? "

The picture is perfect in all its parts. We
have Mrs. Unwin's parlour, which was also
Cowper's study; the round central table,
littered with books and papers, the shaded
lamp drawn to his left elbow; his face,
illuminated with thought, his quivering
nostrils and shining eyes, as he reads to
the spellbound women the pages written
since last night's sitting. Without, fogs

Lady Austen's Flight 1 5 1

and chill and the dead silence of a stagnant
country-town have dominion over the flat
landscape. Everything of warmth and
light and cheer to be found in the wide and
weary world is enfolded in the pulsing
heart of this home.

What kept Lady Austen in Olney after
the novelty of her new caprice wore off ?
The query will descend past our generation
to others as inquisitive and as puzzled.
She had lived in France and in London;
she had money, plenty of society of her
own sort, and liberty to travel and to dwell
where she pleased. Cowper, afterwards a
distinguished man, was known to but a
small section of the then circumscribed
literary world. If it pleased her humour to
patronise a poet, and her vanity to captivate
the shy genius who shunned the face of
most men and all women save one, she
paid dearly for the indulgence by giving up
her town-house and town-friends to im-
mure herself for a whole year in Olney.

That she was "an admirer of Mr. Scott
as a preacher, and of your two humble
servants now in the greenhouse, as the
most agreeable creatures in the world," and
had, at first sight, fallen violently in love

152 William Cowper

with William Unwin's mother, does not, in
the eye of cool, reasonable lookers-on at
the little drama, begin to account for the
freak.

Her portrait, "in the character of La-
vinia," gives us a really beautiful woman,
whose sentimental languish of eyelids and
lip-lines and head does not shut out the
strong possibilities of coquetry discernible
in mouth and eyes. She was a spoiled
child of fortune who liked her own way,
and would strain many points to get it.
And still the marvel remains that she
thought it worth her while to strain any
one of them as far as the fenny regions of
the Ouse and the muddy little town in
which she folded her bright wings for all
those months.

We are not stunned, therefore, and
scarcely startled, by reading a letter to Wil-
liam Unwin, date of July 12, 1784, in which,
after stating that his sister, Mrs. Powley,
has left Olney that evening after a visit to
her mother, and sends a message to her
brother, he continues:

" You are going to Bristol. A lady, not long since
our very near neighbour, is probably there ; she was
there very lately. If you should chance to fall into her

LADY AUSTEN IN THE CHARACTER OF LAVINIA

FROM A DRAWING BY W. HARVEY FROM THE ORIGINAL BY ROMNEY

Lady Austen's Flight 153

company, remember, if you please, that we found the
connexion on some accounts an inconvenience ; that we do
not wish to renew it, and conduct yourself accordingly.
A character with which we spend all our time should be
made on purpose for us. Too much, or too little, of
any single ingredient spoils all. In the instance in ques-
tion, the dissimilitude was too great not to be felt
continually, and consequently made our intercourse
unpleasant.

" We have reason, however, to believe that she has
given up all thoughts of a return to Olney."

Hayley says in so many words that Lady
Austen hoped that Cowper would marry
her, and that Mrs. Unwin's jealousy of his
liking for the newcomer broke off the con-
nexion. This may be true so far as the
wish and expectation of an offer of mar-
riage from the engaging genius she had
taken up went with the fascinating widow.
That she cared to espouse an impecunious
man of fifty-three, who had been thrice
deranged, and would be prevented by a
dread of a recurrence of the disorder from
ever entering her world of gay society, — is
preposterous. It is quite within the limits
of likelihood that her thirst for admiration
tempted her on to a flirtation with the
recluse. Like all of her class, a conquest
was a conquest, however undesirable the

i $4 William Cowper

victim. Cowper wrote charmingly com-
plimentary lines to her; his conversation
was entertaining and, to a woman of her
sense and education, instructive, and he
was on the high road to Fame, thanks,
mainly, to her discovery of his abilities and
the inspiration of her companionship. It
was not a contemptible quarry that she
hawked at, after all, and the chase was
something out of the ordinary line of net-
setting and beau-catching.

As a fellow-woman, I confess to a mis-
chievous curiosity to know what changes
flitted over the sparkling countenance of
one of the eloquent Fair —

" Fast-bound in chain of silence " —

as the readings proceeded, until these lines
were rendered in Cowper's best manner:

" And, witness, dear companion of my walks,
Whose arm this twentieth winter 1 perceive
Fast-locked in mine, with pleasure such as love,
Confirmed by long experience of thy worth
And well-tried virtues, could alone inspire —
Witness a joy that thou hast doubled long.
Thou know'st my praise of Nature most sincere,
And that my raptures are not conjured up
To serve occasions of poetic pomp,
But genuine — and art partner of them all."

Lady Austen's Flight 155

A sober resume of the rise, progress, and
fall of the Austen influence in Olney is
given by Cowper in the confidential letter
to Lady Hesketh from which quotation was
made in the last chapter, and we have no
reason to doubt that he told the whole
truth — as far as it was known to him.
Love-making and marriage were matters
he had dismissed finally, and most sensibly,
from his thoughts. If Lady Austen needed
other proof of this than she must have had
in the thorough understanding existing be-
tween the couple now in the twentieth
year of their unique companionship, it is a
pity she could not have read in this epistle
to his best-beloved cousin how insidiously
and surely The Task ousted from the poet's
mind and heart her who had implanted
the germ of the poem.

" Being once engaged in the work, I be-
gan to feel the inconvenience of my morn-
ing attendance" (i.e., the eleven-o'clock
visit to the " other house ") — is a sharp and
unintentionally cruel stroke.

" We had seldom breakfasted ourselves 'till ten, and
the intervening hour was all the time that I could find
in the whole day for writing, and occasionally it would
happen that the half of that hour was all that I could

156 William Cowper

secure for that purpose. But there was no remedy.
Long usage had made that which at first was optional, a
point of good manners, and consequently of necessity,
and I was forced to neglect The Task, to attend upon
the Muse who had inspired the subject. But she has ill
health, and before I had quite finished the work, was
obliged to repair to Bristol.

" Thus, as I told you, my dear, the cause of the many
interruptions that 1 mentioned, was removed, and now,
except the Bull that I spoke of, we seldom have any
company at all."

Wise Lady Austen ! When she had be-
come "the cause of the many interrup-
tions," she found Olney damp and the
"other house" incommodious for an in-
valid, and discreetly effaced herself.

Commentator Scott dispatched the tale
of the rupture, which served Mrs. Scott
and the Olney people for gossip for many
a long day, in a scathing sentence:

"Who can be surprised that two women
should be continually in the society of one
man, and quarrel sooner or later with each
other ? "

How unjust the critical divine's judgment
was in one particular case, however astute
the conclusion drawn from observation of
such triangular alliances in the general, we
shall see, by and by.

Lady Austen's Flight 157

Goldwin Smith has a graceful word of
dismissal for the baronet's widow from the
stage of our biography:

''Whatever the cause may have been,
this bird of paradise, having alighted for a
moment in Olney, took wing, and was
seen no more."

In a letter to William Unwin, written a
year after Lady Austen's flitting, Cowper
says:

" I was in low spirits, yesterday, when your parcel
came and raised them. Every proof of attention and
regard to a man who lives in a vinegar-bottle is welcome
from his friends on the outside of it. . . . I have
had more comfort, far more comfort in the connexions I
have found within the last twenty years than in the
more numerous ones that I had before.

"(Memorandum. — The latter are almost all Unwins
or Unwinisms.)

" You are entitled to my thanks also for the facetious
engravings of John Gilpin. A serious poem is like a
swan ; it flies heavily, and never far. But a jest has the
wings of a swallow that never tire, and that carry it
into every nook and corner."

One copy was a carrier-pigeon, and,
"homing," brought back to him "the
days he had thought he should see no
more." Lady Hesketh had lived much out
of England for the past decade ; the corre-

158 William Cowper

spondence between Cowper and herself
had been interrupted for seven years, first
by his third and protracted illness, and then
by his steady conviction that he had no
right to hold frequent communication with
the partners of what he considered his days
of worldliness and sin. John Gilpin gal-
loped through the length and breadth of
the United Kingdom, and could not escape
the eyes of two women who read every
line from ''our cousin's" pen. Harriet's
heart bounded with joy at "seeing that he
could once more indulge a playful temper,
and sport upon light subjects as he had
been wont to do in former days." While
the glad impulse was upon her, she wrote,
recalling herself to him in the old strain of
sisterly tenderness.

Cowper's heart broke bounds in the gush
of love and memory thus evoked:

"We are all grown young again!" he
cried, and rushed on in the old impetuous
fashion to tell her what had come to him,
what he had been doing, and where, and
with whom, he had been living for a score
of years, during which he had " recollected
with the greatest pleasure a thousand scenes
in which our two selves have formed the

Renewed Correspondence 159

whole of the drama." He paid a feeling
tribute to Sir Thomas, and added that his
generous provision for his widow ''was
the last, and the best proof he could give
of a judgment that never deceived him
when he would give himself leisure to
consult it."

11 I have lived these twenty years with Mrs. Unwin
to whose affectionate care of me it is, under Providence,
that I live at all. But I do not account myself happy in
having been, for thirteen of those years, in a state of
mind that has made all that care and attention necessary;
an attention and a care that have injured her health, and
which, had she not been uncommonly supported, must
have brought her to the grave.

"lam delighted with what you tell me of my uncle's
good health."

(So the " mushroom" had survived the
storms and heats of another score of years!)

11 . . . Happy, for the most part, are parents who
have daughters. I rejoice particularly in my uncle's feli-
city, who has three female descendants from his little
person who leave him nothing to wish for upon that head.

" My dear cousin, dejection of spirits, which I sup-
pose may have prevented many a man from becoming
an author, made me one. 1 found constant employment
necessary, and therefore take care to be constantly em-
ployed. Manual occupations do not engage the mind
sufficiently, as I know by experience, having tried many.
But composition, especially of verse, absorbs it, wholly.

160 William Cowper

I write, therefore, generally three hours in the morning,
and in the evening, I transcribe. I read also, but less
than 1 write, for I must have bodily exercise, and never
pass a day without it."

Lady Hesketh was now a rich woman,
and made, in her reply to this letter, in-
quiries as to her recovered relative's finan-
cial condition, inquiries couched in the
most tactful, affectionate language, and
which were answered gratefully. From
this answer we learn that Mrs. Unwin's
income doubled that of her adopted son.
Also, that he had not "grown gray so
much as that he had grown bald."

" No matter! " — the pen rattles on at the
old boyish rate.

u There was more hair in the world than ever had the
honour to belong to me. Accordingly, having found
just enough to curl a little at my ears, and to intermix
with a little of my own, that still hangs behind, I appear,
if you see me in an afternoon, to have a very decent
head-dress, not easily distinguished from my natural
growth, which, being worn with a small bag, and a
black riband about my neck, continues to me the charms
of my youth, even on the verge of age.

''P. S. That the view 1 give you of myself may be
complete, I add the two following items : That 1 am in
debt to nobody, and that I grow fat."

CHAPTER XIII

GIFTS FROM " ANONYMOUS" — LADY HESKETH'S
ARRIVAL IN OLNEY

NOT more than half-a-dozen letters had
passed between the cousins after the
renewal of their correspondence when
Cowper writes of an anonymous letter he
had received, full of kind words and en-
closing a cheque for a handsome sum.
After long poring over it, and careful com-
parison of the handwriting and style with
other manuscripts, he struck upon the sus-
picion that his uncle Ashley Cowper may
have been the nameless benefactor, and
wrote to Lady Hesketh, asking if she were
not of his opinion. This note of inquiry
ends with, "Farewell, thou beloved daugh-
ter of my beloved anonymous uncle." Un-
fortunately for us, Lady Hesketh's letters
have not been preserved. Their destruc-

161

1 62 William Cowper

tion was an irreparable loss to contempo-
raneous literature and biography. Her
reply to this query, of whatever character,
seems to have disabused Cowper's mind of
the idea that he had his uncle to thank and
to love for letter and gift. It did not further
elucidate the mystery, for in three weeks
more he wrote:

" Anonymous is come again. May God bless him,
whosoever he may be, as I doubt not that He will.

" A Certain Person said on a certain occasion (and He
never spake a word that failed) ' Whoso giveth you a
cup of cold water in My name, shall, by no means, lose
his reward.' Therefore, anonymous as he chooses to
be upon earth, his name, I trust, will hereafter be found
written in Heaven. But when great princes, or charac-
ters much superior to great princes, choose to be incog-
nito it is a sin against decency and good manners to
seem to know them. I, therefore, know nothing of
Anonymous but that I love him heartily and with most
abundant cause. Had I opportunity I would send you
his letter, 'though, yourself excepted, I would indulge
none with a sight of it. To confide it to your hands
will be no violation of the secrecy that he has enjoined
upon himself and consequently upon me. . . .

" He proceeds to tell me that, being lately in company
where my last work was mentioned, mention was also
made of my intended publication.* He informs me of
the different sentiments of the company on that subject,

* A translation of Homer upon which he was then

Gifts from "Anonymous" 163

and expresses his own in terms the most encouraging, but
adds, that having left the company and shut himself up
in his chamber, an apprehension seized him lest, perhaps
the world should not enter into my views of the matter,
and the work should seem to come short of the success
that I hope for, the mortification might prove too much
for my health, yet thinks that, even in that case, I may
comfort myself by adverting to similar cases of failure
where the writer's genius would have insured success, if
anything could have insured it, and alludes in particular
to the fate and fortune of the Paradise Lost.

" In the last place he gives his attention to my cir-
cumstances, takes the kindest notice of their narrowness,
and makes me a present of an annuity of five hundred
pounds. In a P. S. he tells me, a small parcel will set
off by the Wellingborough coach on Tuesday next,
which he hopes will arrive safe.

" I have given you the bones, but the benignity and
affection which is the marrow of those bones, in so
short an abridgment, I could not give you."

The mysterious parcel arrived duly, and
is thus acknowledged:

" Olncyjan. 31, ij86.

" It is very pleasant, my dearest cousin, to receive a
present so delicately conveyed as that which I received
so lately from Anonymous. But it is also very painful
to have nobody to thank for it.

" I find myself, therefore, driven by stress of neces-
sity, to the following resolution, viz. that I will consti-
tute you my Thank-receiver-general for whatsoever gift I
shall receive hereafter, as well as for those that I have

164 William Cowper

already received from a nameless benefactor. I, there-
fore, thank you, my cousin, for a most elegant present,
including the most elegant compliment that ever poet
was honoured with ; for a snuff-box of tortoise-shell,
with a beautiful landscape on the lid of it, glazed with
crystal, having the figures of three hares in the foreground,
and inscribed above with these words, — The Peasant's
Nest, and below with these, — Tiny, Puss and Bess.

" For all and every one of these, I thank you, and,
also, for standing proxy on this occasion. Nor must I
forget to thank you, that so soon after I had sent you
the first letter of Anonymous, I received another in the
same hand.

" There ! now I am a little easier."

After the receipt of another letter, with
the promise of a second token of remem-
brance to be sent by coach, Cowper writes
in a graver strain. There is an accent so
nearly approaching reverence in the fervour
of his gratitude that one might almost sus-
pect that he had penetrated the secret of
the disguise contrived between the sisters.
He stands, with bared and bowed head,
before the veiled Anonyma, dumb in the
dawning conception of a love that had borne
everything and expected nothing.

"Who is therein the world that has, or thinks he
has, reason to love me to the degree that he does? But
it is no matter. He chooses to be unknown, and his
choice is, and ever shall be, so sacred to me, that if his

Gifts from " Anonymous " 165

name lay on the table before me, reversed, I would not
turn the paper about that 1 might read it. Much as it
would gratify me to thank him, I would turn my eyes
away from the forbidden discovery. I long to assure
him that these same eyes, concerning which he expresses
such kind apprehensions, lest they should suffer by this
laborious undertaking, are as well as I could expect them
to be if I were never to touch either book or pen. . . .
' ' 'Though I believe you, my dear, to be in full pos-
session of all this mystery, you shall never know me,
while you live, either directly, or by hints of any sort,
to attempt to extort, or steal the secret from you."

He had at least one good reason for
suspecting his correspondent's knowledge
of, if not complicity in, the gracious and
beautiful mystery. One of the anonymous
letters referred to a poem, seen in manu-
script by Lady Hesketh, and by no one
else, except the author. As it had not
been published when the letter was written,
duller wits than Cowper's could have laid
hold of the clue thus inadvertently cast out.

"It is possible," he wrote, still guardedly and rever-
ently, "that between you and Anonymous there may
be some communication. If that should be the case, I
will beg you just to signify to him, as opportunity may
occur, the safe arrival of his most acceptable present,
and my most grateful sense of it."

After reading all this, we do not need

1 66 William Cowper

Southey's deduction to rivet our own con-
viction :

''Who but Theodora could it have been
who was thus intimate with Lady Hesketh,
and felt this deep and lively and constant
regard for Cowper?"

What Mrs. Unwin thought on the sub-
ject,— and she had views of her own upon
all that related to the man who could never
be her lover or husband, yet was more
than friend or son, — we are left to conject-
ure. While the cousins' letters flew back
and forth, fast and faster, as the project of
Lady Hesketh's removal to Olney blossomed
into a certain hope, she "sits knitting my
stockings at my elbow, with an industry
worthy of Penelope herself. You will not
think this an exaggeration when I tell you
that I have not bought a pair these twenty
years, either of thread, silk or worsted."

Complete refutation of Lady Austen's
declaration that Mrs. Unwin's jealousy of
the poet's intimacy with their charming
neighbour caused the rupture between
them, is found in Mrs. Unwin's eager sec-
onding of Cowper's invitation to his cousin
to make the third in their home-group.

"You are the first person for whom I

Lady Hesketh's Arrival 167

have heard Mrs. Unwin express such feel-
ings as she does for you," Cowper said,
when preparations for Lady Hesketh's com-
ing were at their height.

11 She is not profuse in her professions, nor forward to
enter into treaties of friendship with new faces, but when
her friendship is once engaged, it may be confided in
even unto death. She loves you, already, and how
much more will she love you before this time twelve-
month ! I have, indeed, endeavoured to describe you to
her, but perfectly as I have you by heart, I am sensible
that my picture cannot do you justice. I never saw one
that did. Be what you may, you are much beloved,
and will be so at Olney, and Mrs. Unwin expects you
with the pleasure that one feels at the return of a long
absent, dear relation ; that is to say, with a pleasure
such as mine. She sends you her warmest affections."

The glory of an English May was abroad
in the country, the season he loved as
heartily as he hated January.

"There will be roses, and jasmine and honeysuckles,
and shady walks, and cool alcoves, and you will partake
them with us. I want you to have a share of every-
thing that is delightful here, and cannot bear that the
advance of the season should steal away a single pleasure
before you can come to enjoy it."

His letters at this date fairly sparkle with
the new happiness of communion, after
long abstinence, with one of his own blood.

1 68 William Cowper

He dreams of the meeting with his favourite
kinswoman, dearer than any sister could
have been — and he had never known a
sister's love.

"Sitting in our summer-house, I saw you coming
towards me. With inexpressible pleasure, I sprang to
meet you, caught you in my arms, and said: 'Oh, my
precious, precious cousin ! may God make me thankful
that 1 see thy face again! ' Now, this was a dream, and
no dream ; it was only a shadow while it lasted, but
if we both live, and live to meet, it will be realised
hereafter."

He had already told her, and reiterated it,
that he was more than happy in the success
of his literary ventures.

" My heart is as light as a bird on the subject of
Homer. ... To write was necessary for me. I
undertook an honourable task, and with honourable in-
tentions. It served me for more than two years as an
amusement, and as such, was of infinite service to my
spirits. . . . Fame is neither my meat, nor my
drink. I lived fifty years without it, and, should 1 live
fifty more, and get to heaven at last, then I shall not
want it."

"I am now revising the Iliad. . . . How glad
shall I be to read it over, in an evening, book by book,
as fast as I settle the copy, to you and to Mrs. Unwin !
She has been my touchstone always, and without refer-
ence to her taste and judgment I have printed nothing.
With one of you at each elbow, 1 should think myself
the happiest of poets."

Lady Hesketh's Arrival 169

After much tribulation in the matter of
house-hunting, and numberless delays con-
sequent upon the defection of coachmakers,
carpenters, and carriers, Lady Hesketh, her
furniture, her carriage and horses, — a nov-
elty in the humble neighbourhood, — were
taken to Olney by the middle of June.
Cowper's delight in preparing for, and
awaiting, her coming was tremulous to
ecstasy, and, as might have been expected,
was succeeded by depression.

" My spiiits broke down with me under the pressure
of too much joy," he wrote to William Unwin, " and
left me flat, or. rather melancholy, throughout the day,
to a degree that was mortifying to myself, and alarming
to her. But 1 have made amends for this failure since,
and in point of cheerfulness, have far exceeded her ex-
pectations, for she knew that sable had been my suit
for years. . . .

" She has been with us near a fortnight. She pleases
everybody, and is pleased in her turn, with everything
she finds at Olney ; is always cheerful and sweet-tem-
pered, and knows no pleasure equal to that of com-
municating pleasure to us, and to all around her. This
disposition in her is the more comfortable, because it is
not the humour of the day, a sudden flash of benevo-
lence and good spirits, occasioned merely by a change
of scene, but it is her natural turn, and has governed all
her conduct ever since I knew her first. We are conse-
quently happy in her society, and shall be happier still
to have you to partake with us in our joy. . . .

170 William Cowper

"I am fond of the sound of bells, but was never
more pleased with those of Olney than when they rang
her into her new habitation. It is a compliment that
our performers upon these instruments have never paid
to any other personage (Lord Dartmouth excepted) since
we knew the town. In short, she is, as she ever was,
my pride and my joy, and I am delighted with every-
thing that means to do her honour."

He told the same tale, in a calmer tone,
to John Newton, when the excitement of
the arrival had subsided.

" I feel myself well content to say, without any en-
largement on the subject, that an inquirer after happi-
ness might travel far, and not find a happier trio than
meet every day either in our parlour, or in the parlour
at the Vicarage."

Lady Hesketh had taken the quarters
vacated by Lady Austen's flitting. My
fellow-lovers of romance in real life will
find it easy to forgive me for transcribing
here two extracts, the last I shall offer,
from the very few letters of Lady Hesketh
that have escaped the unfortunate destruc-
tion lamented awhile ago. Both, I am
thankful to say, are to her sister Theodora,
and are strong circumstantial evidence, — if
it were needed, — that she kept Anonyma
fully acquainted with every particular of
her present life.

Lady Hesketh s Arrival 171

" I am sure a little variety of company and a little
cheerful society is necessary to him. Mrs. Unwin seems
quite to think so, and expresses the greatest satisfaction
that he has, within the last year, consented to mix a
little more with human creatures. As to her, she does
seem, in real truth, to have no will left on earth but for
his good, and literally no will but his. How she has
supported (as she has done !) the constant attendance
day and night which she has gone through for the last
thirteen years, is to me, I confess, incredible. And, in
justice to her, I must say, she does it all with an ease
that relieves you from any idea of its being a state of
sufferance. She speaks of him in the highest terms ;
and by her astonishing management, he is never men-
tioned in Olney but with the highest respect and
veneration."

And again :

" Our friend delights in a large table and a large
chair. There are two of the latter comforts in my par-
lour. I am sorry to say that he and I always spread
ourselves out on them, leaving poor Mrs. Unwin to find
all the comfort she can in a small one, half as high
again as ours, and considerably harder than marble.
However, she protests it is ' what she likes ' ; that she
1 prefers a high chair to a low one, and a hard to a soft
one,' — and 1 hope she is sincere. Indeed I am persuaded
she is.

" Her constant employment is knitting stockings,
which she does with the finest needles I ever saw ; — and
very nice they are, — the stockings, I mean. Our cousin
has not, for many years, worn other than those of her
manufacture. She knits silk, cotton, and worsted.

172 William Cowper

" She sits knitting on one side of the table in her
spectacles, and he, on the other, reading to her (when
he is not employed in writing) in his. In winter, his
morning studies are always carried on in a room by
himself ; but as his evenings are usually spent in the
winter in transcribing, he, usually, I find, does them
vis-a-vis to Mrs. Unwin. At this time of the year, he
writes always in the morning in what he calls his
'boudoir.' This is in the garden ; it has a door and a
window ; just holds a small table with a desk and two
chairs ; but 'though there are two chairs, and two per-
sons might be contained therein, it would be with a de-
gree of difficulty. For this cause — as I make a point of
not disturbing a poet in his retreat, — 1 go not there."

Both of these extracts were found in the
parcel of poems and other MSS. treasured
by Theodora Cowper and published after
her death in the volume of Poems : Early
Productions, etc.

CHAPTER XIV

mr. newton's reproof of "worldly gay-
eties " — removal to weston lodge

IN a letter dated August 5, 1786, Cowper
wrote to Newton of other and im-
portant projected changes in the Olney
household:

" You have heard of our proposed removal. The
house that is to receive us is in a state of preparation,
and when finished, will be smarter and more commodi-
ous than our present abode. But the circumstance that
chiefly recommends it is its situation. Long confine-
ment in the winter, and indeed for the most part in the
autumn, too, has hurt us both. . . . Had I been con-
fined in the Tower, the battlements would have furnished
me with a larger space. You say well that there was a
time when 1 was happy at Olney, and I am now as
happy at Olney as I expect to be anywhere without the
presence of God. Change of situation is with me not
otherwise an object than as both Mrs. Unwin's health
and mine may happen to be concerned in it. A fever
of the slow and spirit-oppressing kind seems to belong

173

174 William Cowper

to all except the natives who have dwelt in Olney many
years, and the natives have putrid fevers. . . .

"1 no more expect happiness at Weston than here, or
than I should expect it, in company with felons and out-
laws, in the hold of a ballast-lighter. . . .

"In the mean time I embrace with alacrity every
alleviation of my case, and with the more alacrity, be-
cause whatever proves a relief to my distress, is a cor-
dial to Mrs. Unwin, whose sympathy with me, through
the whole of it has been such, that, despair excepted,
her burden has been as heavy as mine. Lady Hesketh,
by her affectionate behaviour, the cheerfulness of her
conversation, and the constant sweetness of her temper,
has cheered us both ; and Mrs. Unwin not less than
me. By her help we get change of air and scene,
though still resident at Olney ; and by her means
have intercourse with some families in this country,
with whom, but for her, we could never have been
acquainted."

The county families were the Throck-
mortons of Weston Hall, distant about a
mile and a half from Olney, and "the
Wrightes, the Chesters, and other people
of position and fashion," who were at-
tracted to Orchard Side by the growing
fame of the author of The Task and Lady
Hesketh's personal attractions.

The new house was to be Weston Lodge,
selected by Lady Hesketh and set in order
under her supervision, as a more salubrious

Preparations for Removal 175

abode for her often-ailing kinsman than
"the cheerless, prison-like edifice" in the
village. As Cowper put it in another let-
ter, "She stoops to Olney, lifts us from
our swamp, and sets us down on the ele-
vated ground of Weston Underwood."

The prospect of the flitting and the so-
ciety of his cousin wrought marvellous
changes in his mood. One significant
token of the improvement was his resump-
tion, of his own accord, of the habit of
saying grace at dinner; another, his ac-
ceptance of invitations to call upon, and
to dine with, the Throckmortons. The
thought of living upon the border of
pleasure-grounds in which he might ram-
ble in winter as in summer; the sight of
the noble park outlying the gardens of Wes-
ton Hall and the Lodge, where he might
live during the daylight hours, dreaming,
reading, or writing, as the humour seized
him, and the roomy cheerfulness of the
proposed dwelling, a "mansion" in his
eyes, were the best tonics the ingenuity of
affection could have devised.

Preparations for removal went on apace.
The "famous parlour" was dismantled,
and, we may be sure, not without many a

176 William Cowper

twinge of regret, and even an occasional
misgiving. As the visitor of to-day sees
it, it is a plain, square room of moderate
size (about thirteen feet from wall to wall).
Two windows open upon the street, now
neatly paved, and no longer dismal. One
looks through them upon the windows of
the draper's shop visited by Lady Austen
on the memorable afternoon of Cowper's
first interview with her. His table and
chair used to stand before the window
nearest the fireplace. "I write upon a
card-table; we breakfast, dine, and sup
upon a card-table," he wrote to Newton.
"It still holds possession of its function
without a rival."

Mr. Wright adds:

" In this room Cowper read aloud of an evening while
the ladies plied their crochet-hooks or knitting-needles ;
here he wrote both letters and poetry ; in this room his
hares gambolled, his linnets twittered, and his dog
Mungo defied the thunder and lightning. Here, when
there was no other means of getting exercise, he and
Mrs. Unwin played battledoor and shuttlecock, while
Lady Austen fingered the harpsichord ; here he was told
the story of John Gilpin ; in this room he read the ballad
at the breakfast-table."

Next to the parlour, the most interesting
spot upon the now-deserted premises is the

Preparations for Removal 177

tiny summer-house, in which a man of
ordinary stature cannot stand erect. It is
scarcely larger than a sedan-chair; a worm-
eaten bench fills one side, a window an-
other, the rickety door a third. A square
stand, with a drawer in it, is by the win-
dow, and upon it a grotesque wig-block,
brown with years, the identical form upon
which Cowper's wig used to be shaped
and dressed. In the floor is a trap-door,
hiding a hole where were kept Mr. Bull's
pipes and tobacco, ready for his next visit
to his friend and crony.

The greenhouse has disappeared, and
the gate in the wall has been built up, as
has that in the wall of the Vicarage garden,
but the walks of both gardens are lined with
the dear old-fashioned flowers that flour-
ished here in Newton's and in Cowper's
day; the boxwood hedge encompassing the
wee cupboard of a "boudoir" may have
sprung from roots which occupied the self-
same space then. The place is redolent with
memories, and each memory is a romance.

The happy flurry of getting the "man-
sion " ready, and the pleasing pain of unset-
tling the old home, were rudely interrupted
by a communication from Mr. Newton.

178 William Cowper

We get a history of the whole disagreeable
affair from a letter written to William Un-
win after the Olneyites had had time to
view the subject from all sides.

" This day three weeks your mother received a letter
from Mr. Newton which she has not answered, nor is
likely to answer hereafter. It gave us both much con-
cern, but her more than me ; I suppose my mind being
necessarily occupied in my work, I had not so much
leisure to browse upon the wormwood that it contained.
The purport of it is a direct accusation of me, and of
her an accusation implied, that we have both deviated
into forbidden paths, and lead a life unbecoming the
Gospel ; that many of my friends in London are grieved
and the simple people in Olney astonished ; that he
never so much doubted of my restoration to Christian
privileges as now ; in short, that I converse too much
with people of the world, and find too much pleasure in
doing so. He concludes with putting your mother in
mind that there is still an intercourse between London
and Olney, by which he means to insinuate that we
cannot offend against the decorum that we are bound to
observe, but the news of it will most certainly be con-
veyed to him. . . . We do not at all doubt it. We
never knew a lie hatched at Olney that waited long for
a bearer. . . .

" What are the deeds for which we have been repre-
sented as thus criminal ? Our present course of life
differs in nothing from that we have both held these
thirteen years except that, after great civilities shown us,
and many advances made on the part of the ' Throcks,'
we visit them. We visit also at Gayhurst. That we

Mr. Newton's Reproof 179

have frequently taken airings with my cousin in her car-
riage, and that I have sometimes taken a walk with her
on a Sunday evening, and sometimes by myself ; which,
however, your mother has never done. These are the
only novelties in our practice ; and, if by these proced-
ures, so inoffensive in themselves, we yet give offence,
offence must needs be given. God and our own con-
sciences acquit us, and we acknowledge no other judges.

"The two families with whom we have kicked up
this ' astonishing ' intercourse are as harmless in their
conversation as can be found anywhere. And as to my
poor cousin, the only crime that she is guilty of against
the people of Olney is that she has fed the hungry,
clothed the naked, and administered comfort to the sick.
Except, indeed, that by her great kindness, she has given
us a little lift in point of condition and circumstances,
and has thereby excited envy in some who have not the
knack of rejoicing in the prosperity of others. And this
I take to be the loot of the matter.

" My dear William, I do not know that I should have
tested your nerves and spirits with this disagreeable
theme, had not Mr. Newton talked of applying to you
for particulars. . . . You are now qualified to in-
form him as minutely as we ourselves could, of all our
enormities."

Four days afterward, Cowper wrote to
Newton, and in an altogether different
tone. The fine breeding of the gentleman,
and the forbearance of the genuine Christ-
ian, are conspicuous in every line. There
is no haste in vindicating himself and his
fellow-accused from the unjust charge; he

180 William Cowper

does not reproach their mentor for his
readiness to believe in, and to convict his late
parishioners of, the worst of the allegations
brought against them. The dignified sad-
ness of what even Newton must have ac-
cepted as a more than satisfactory defence
must have smitten the unjust judge with
remorse such as should befall one who,
even unwittingly, has offended one of
" these little ones."

After congratulating his correspondent on
his recent "agreeable jaunt," and safe re-
turn to his home and work, and expressing
his sincere gratification at Mrs. Newton's re-
covery after a "terrible fall," Cowper goes
on to speak of Newton's "letter to Mrs.
Unwin, concerning our conduct, and the
offence taken at it in our neighbourhood."

" If any of our serious neighbours have been ' aston-
ished ' they have been so without the smallest real
occasion. Poor people are never well employed even
when they judge one another ; but when they under-
take to scan the motives and estimate the behaviour of
those whom Providence has exalted a little above them,
they are utterly out of their province and their depth.
They often see us get into Lady Hesketh's carriage, and
rather uncharitably suppose that it always carries us to
a scene of dissipation — which it never does. . . ."

A dozen lines tell to what places and

Mr. Newton's Reproof 1 8 1

upon what errands the offensive chariot-
and-pair conveys the two delinquents, and
three suffice to dispose of the assertion
that the Weston and Gayhurst associations
are hurtful to Christian character and
influence.

11 It were too hazardous an assertion even for our cen-
sorious neighbours to make that, because the cause of
the Gospel does not appear to have been served at
present, therefore it never can be in any future inter-
course we may have with them. In the mean time I
speak a truth, and, as in the sight of God, when I say
that we are neither of us more addicted to gadding than
heretofore. We both naturally love seclusion from com-
pany, and never go into it without putting a force upon
our disposition ; at the same time I will confess, and
you will easily conceive, that the melancholy incident to
such close confinement as we have long endured finds
itself a little relieved by such amusements as a society so
innocent affords. . . .

"We place all the uneasiness that you have felt for
us upon this subject to the cordial friendship of which
you have long given us proof. But you may be assured,
that, notwithstanding all rumours to the contrary, we are
exactly what we were when you saw us last ; — I, miser-
able on account of God's departure from me which I
believe to be final ; and she seeking His return to me in
the path of duty, and by continual prayer."

Lady Hesketh, in nowise daunted by the
pelting hail of Olney gossip, and the thun-
der-storm of Mr. Newton's displeasure,

1 82 William Cowper

persevered in her missionary labours until
she saw the pair of friends installed in the
handsome and convenient residence of
Weston Underwood, handsome and com-
modious in this more luxurious age.

Cowper describes it to one correspond-
ent with forced moderation as "comfort-
able in itself, and my cousin, who has
spared no expense in dressing it up for us,
has made it genteel."

To the wife of his lifelong friend, Joseph
Hill, he speaks more enthusiastically of the
orchard opposite the Lodge, which enabled
them "to look into a wood, or rather to be
surrounded by one. The village is one of the
prettiest I know ; terminated at one end by
the church tower, seen through the trees,
and at the other, by a very handsome gate-
way, opening into a fine grove of elms."

Lady Hesketh left them for London the
middle of November. In a letter of the
26th Cowper sings the praises of his " man-
sion " in a strain that must have delighted
her generous heart. The parlour was
" even elegant," the study

" on the other side of the hall neat, warm, and silent,
and a much better study than 1 deserve if 1 do not pro-
duce in it an incomparable edition of Homer.

Removal to Weston Lodge 183

" I think every day of those lines of Milton, and con-
gratulate myself upon having obtained, before 1 am
quite superannuated, what he seems not to have hoped
for sooner :

" ' And may at length my weary age
Find out the peaceful hermitage.'

. . . You must always understand, my dear, that
when poets talk of cottages, hermitages, and such like
things, they mean a house with six sashes in front, two
comfortable parlours, a smart staircase, and three bed-
rooms of convenient dimensions. In short, such a house
as this."

The benevolent fairy's good offices did
not cease with the change from "the old
prison and its precincts " to airy Weston
Underwood, with its orchard in front and
great gardens in the rear, and its outlook
over three parishes to the undulating line
of blue hills twenty miles away. Without
consulting either of the inmates of the new
home, she added twenty pounds a year to
their income from her own purse, secured
double the amount from a titled relative,
and ten pounds from a son of the poet's
early friend, Major Cowper.

One day in December, Cowper extended
his afternoon walk to Olney and Orchard
Side. The house was still tenantless, and

184 William Cowper

he entered to be chilled and saddened to
the heart by the squalid loneliness of par-
lour and bedrooms.

"Never did I see so forlorn and woeful
a spectacle. Deserted of its inhabitants, it
seemed as if it could never be dwelt in for-
ever. The coldness of it, the dreariness
and the dirt, made me think it no inapt re-
semblance of a soul that God has forsaken."

Always harking back to the haunting
horror lurking at the bottom of his soul !

This was written to Newton. Was the
dreary imagery a more gracious sign in the
stern pastor's sight than the tale of drives
between hedge-rows, and Sunday after-
noon strolls along the winding Ouse, and
social evenings in the fine library of Wes-
ton Hall? "The human mind is a great
mystery," says another letter to the same
spiritual guide. We adopt the words in a
different sense, and with an application
of which the uncompromising Greatheart
never dreamed.

CHAPTER XV

DEATH OF WILLIAM UNWIN — HOMER AND HARD
WORK — GATHERING CLOUDS

WILLIAM UNWIN paid a visit of sev-
eral days to Orchard Side in Au-
gust, 1786. He was never in better health
and spirits, and he was always the life of
the quiet house while there. Cowper had
no dearer friend, and his mother's heart
took continual delight in the rare moral,
mental, and spiritual gifts of her only son.

On the day after his departure to his own
home, whilst the poet, Mrs. Unwin, and
Lady Hesketh were seated quietly together,
this last made the remark, "Now, we
want Mr. Unwin !" her reason, Cowper
observes, for saying so, being that they had
spent near half an hour together without
laughing — an interval of gravity that seldom
occurred when Mr. Unwin was present.
. 185

1 86 William Cowper

To his fund of natural animal spirits and
keen sense of humour, young Unwin joined
great sweetness of disposition, and abound-
ing charity of judgment that made his wit
stingless and his presence a benediction to
all who knew him.

In one of the latest letters Cowper wrote
to him, he calls him

" my mahogany box, with a slit in the lid of it, to
which I commit my productions of the lyric kind, in
perfect confidence that they are safe and will go no fur-
ther. ... If you approve my Latin, and your
wife and sister my English, this, together with the ap-
probation of your mother, is fame enough for me."

Lady Hesketh eagerly embraced the op-
portunity of engaging William Unwin as a
tutor for her son, a lad about twelve years
of age, and was on the point of placing the
little Hesketh in the family of his future
guardian when the young man fell a victim
to a brief, violent attack of putrid fever.
The sad event occurred on November 29th,
before Cowper and Mrs. Unwin were fairly
settled in Weston Underwood.

"There never was a moment in Unwin's life when
there seemed to be more urgent need of him than the
moment in which he died," wrote Cowper to Lady

Death of William Unwin 187

Hesketh. And to John Newton ; — " I cannot think of
the widow and children that he has left without a heart-
ache that I remember not to have felt before. . . .
Mrs. Unwin begs me to give her love to you, with
thanks for your kind letter. Hers has been so much a
life of affliction that, whatever occurs to her in that
shape has not, at least, the terrors of novelty to embitter
it. She is supported under this, as she has been under
a thousand others, with a submission of which I never
saw her deprived for a moment."

In these and in other letters of this date,
he evidently put deliberate force upon the
expression of his afflictions. As we read
them the image rises again and again before
us of a man fighting away from an en-
croaching dread, pushing back with both
hands a grisly Thing, from the sight of
which he averts his face and closes his eyes.
He welcomes visitors as earnestly as he
had formerly shunned them; Mrs. Throck-
morton, who had offered to be "my lady
of the ink-bottle this winter," spent many
forenoons in his study, copying his MSS.
after he had polished and recast them to
his mind; Mrs. Unwin put aside her own
grief to act as his amanuensis when no
other was at hand ; he accepted the homage
of a young artist who knew most of his
published poems by heart, had him to tea,

1 88 William Cowper

once and again, and exchanged ''spick-
and-span new verses " with him for really
clever drawings from the artist's pencil.
The Throckmortons were Roman Catholics,
a circumstance that had no inconsiderable
weight in Mr. Newton's disapproval of his
late parishioner's altered manner of life.

Cowper tells Lady Hesketh, late in
December, that

"the good Padre shall positively dine here next week,
whether he will or not. I do not at all suspect that his
kindness to Protestants has anything insidious in it
any more than I suspect that he transcribes Homer for
me with a view to my conversion. He would find me a
tough piece of business, I can tell him ; for when I had
no religion at all, I had yet a terrible dread of the Pope.
How much more now ! 1 should have sent you a longer
letter, but was obliged to devote last evening to the
melancholy employment of composing a Latin inscription
for the tombstone of poor William. . . .

" Homer stands by me, biting his thumbs, and swears
that, if 1 do not leave off directly, he will choke me
with bristly Greek that shall stick in my throat forever."

Echoes from those who were praising
the rising poet afar off reached his " her-
mitage." A third edition of his work was
in print, and the post brought him daily
tributes, printed and epistolary, from ad-

Homer and Hard Work 189

mirers who only lacked encouragement to
become devotees:

" A lady unknown addresses the 'best of men' ; . . .
an unknown gentleman has read my ' inimitable poems'
and invites me to his seat in Hampshire ; another incog-
nito gives me hopes of a memorial in his garden, and a
Welsh attorney sends me his verses to revise, and oblig-
ingly asks —

" ' Say, shall my little bark attendant sail,
Pursue the triumph and partake the gale? '

I could pity the poor woman who has been weak
enough to claim my song. Such pilferings are sure to be
detected. I wrote it, I suppose, four years ago. The
Rose in question was a Rose given to Lady Austen by
Mrs. Unwin, and the incident that suggested the subject
occurred in the room in which you slept at the Vicarage,
which Lady Austen made her dining-room."

Reference is here made to verses often
attributed to Mrs. Barbauld and of slight
poetic merit, if, indeed, they possess any :

" The rose had been washed, just washed in a shower,
Which Mary to Anna conveyed ;
The plentiful moisture encumbered the flower,
And weighed down its beautiful head."

He wrought diligently upon Homer up
to the middle of January, 1787, — the month
which he had imagined was fraught with

190 William Cowper

peculiar dangers for him, ever since the
January of 1773, when he succumbed to
the Olney lunacy. Upon the 13th he
wrote to Mr. Newton an apology for spend-
ing so much time upon a translation in-
stead of upon original poetry. He was

" hunted into the business by extreme distress of spirits,
and had found a sort of jejune consolation in it.

' ' Let my friends, therefore, who wish me some little
measure of tranquillity in the performance of the most
turbulent voyage that ever Christian mariner made, be
contented that, having Homer's mountains and forests
to windward, 1 escape, under this shelter, from the force
of many a gust that would almost overset me. As to
fame, and honour, and glory that may be acquired by
poetical feats of any sort, God knows, that if 1 could
lay me down in a grave with hope at my side, or sit
with hope at my side in a dungeon all the residue of my
days, I would cheerfully wave them all."

The letter closes with an incidental allu-
sion to his " experience of thirteen years of
misery," the length of time that had elapsed
since he had the Fatal Dream. The anni-
versary of this visitation was close upon
him when he penned a disquisition upon
dreams as portents, or means of instruction
or admonition, apropos of the case of a
Mrs. Carter, cited by Lady Hesketh. After
pointing out to his cousin that " God in old

Gathering Clouds 191

time spoke by dreams," he concludes:
"The same need that there ever was for
His interference in this way there is still,
and ever must be, while man continues
blind and fallible, and a creature beset with
dangers which he can neither foresee, nor
obviate."

The constrained calmness of which I
spoke just now is most marked in a note
which follows upon the mention of a week
of fever and sleeplessness that had obliged
him to intermit his work of translation.

" Homer's battles cannot be fought by a man who
does not sleep well, and who has not some degree of
animation in the day-time. — I walk constantly, that is
to say, Mrs. Unwin and I together ; for at these times I
keep her continually employed, and never suffer her to
be absent from me many minutes. She gives me all her
time, and all her attention, and forgets there is another
object in the world.''

She sent for Dr. Grindon, an Olney sur-
geon, the day on which this letter was
written (January 18, 1787), and he left a
phial containing two ounces of tincture of
valerian, then esteemed a sovereign remedy
for nervousness and insomnia.

On or about the dreaded 24th, Cowper
hanged himself in the study he had extolled

192 William Cowper

as "neat, warm, and silent." Mrs. Unwin
entered just in time to cut him down. A
second attempt at suicide was frustrated
by Mr. Bull's providential appearance upon
the scene.

After this interposition Cowper saw no-
body but Mrs. Unwin for six months. The
dark spirit was in full possession of the
long-racked mind. The manful fight had
ended in utter defeat.

He was apparently well and sane for be-
tween two and three months, before he re-
opened communication with Mr. Newton.
In the earlier part of his letter he confides
to his friend that he had been for thirteen
years under an odd delusion respecting his
(Newton's) identity.

11 The acquisition of light, — if light it may be called
which leaves me as much in the dark as ever on the
most interesting subjects — releases me, however, from
the disagreeable suspicion that 1 am addressing myself to
you as the friend whom I loved and valued in my better
days, when, in fact, you are not that friend, but a
stranger. . . . You will tell me, no doubt, that the
knowledge I have gained is an earnest of more and more
valuable information, and that the dispersion of the
clouds, in part, promises, in due time, their complete
dispersion. 1 should be happy to believe it, but the
power to do so is at present far from me. Never was

Gathering Clouds 193

the mind of man benighted to the degree that mine has
been. The storms that have assailed me would have
overthrown the faith of every man that ever had any,
and the very remembrance of them, even after they have
long passed by, makes hope impossible.

" Mrs. Unwin, whose poor bark is still held together,
'though shattered by being tossed and agitated so long
at the side of mine, does not forget yours and Mrs. New-
ton's kindness on this last occasion. Mrs. Newton's
offer to come to her assistance, and your readiness to
have rendered us the same service, could you have hoped
for any salutary effect of your presence, neither Mrs.
Unwin nor myself undervalue, nor shall presently forget.
But you judged right when you supposed that even your
company would have been no relief to me : the com-
pany of my father or my brother, could they have
returned from the dead to visit me, would have been
none to me. . . .

" This last tempest has left my nerves in a worse con-
dition than it found them ; my head especially, 'though
better informed, is more infirm than ever."

A glimpse of the remedial measures re-
sorted to a century ago for the cure of a
mind diseased, and the elimination of a
rooted imaginary sorrow, is afforded in
another letter to Lady Hesketh:

u Those jarrings that made my head feel like a broken
egg-shell, and those twirls that I spoke of have been re-
moved by an infusion of the bark which I have of late
constantly applied to. I was blooded, indeed, but to
no purpose, for the whole complaint was owing to relax-
J3

194

William Cowper

ation. But the apothecary recommended phlebotomy
in order to ascertain that matter, wisely suggesting that
if I found no relief from bleeding it would be a sufficient
proof that weakness must necessarily be the cause. "(!)

CHAPTER XVI

SIX PEACEFUL, BUSY YEARS — MRS. UNWIN'S ILL-
NESS— SAMUEL TEEDON — VISIT TO EARTHAM

COWPER'S sudden, and apparently
complete, recovery from what he
used to speak of, in connection with " the
dreadful seventy-three," as "the more
dreadful eighty-six," was succeeded by six
years of almost perfect mental health and
what approximated tranquillity.

He was no longer a shy recluse. The
last visitor whom he received before his ill-
ness was Samuel Rose, a young English-
man and a warm admirer of his poems, and
to him was addressed the first letter written
after he emerged from the darkness. "A
valuable young man, who, attracted by the
effluvia of my genius, found me out in my
retirement last January twelvemonth," he
writes playfully to Lady Hesketh in 1788.

195

196 William Cowper

"I have not permitted him to be idle, but
have made him transcribe for me the twelfth
book of the Iliad"

The kindness of the Throckmortons be-
guiled him into visiting them frequently
and into inviting them to frequent the
Lodge in their turn.

It was of this halcyon period that it was
written: "The great charm of the social
gatherings at Weston Hall was the table-
talk, to which, of course, Cowper was the
chief contributor."

Another authority confirms what seems
to us to need confirmation when we carry
in mind our preconceived picture of the
reserved, diffident student, avoiding the
face of his fellow-man and selecting his
pew in the gallery of the Olney church,
where he could neither see the preacher,
nor be seen by him :

" It was not so much what Cowper said, as the way
he said it — his manner of relating an ordinary incident —
which charmed his auditory, or convulsed them with
merriment. Moreover, they knew that something de-
lightful was coming before it came. His eyes would
suddenly kindle and all his face become lighted up with
the fun of the story before he opened his mouth to speak.
At last he began to relate some ludicrous incident, which
'though you had yourself witnessed it, you had failed to

Six Peaceful Years 197

recognise as mirthful. A bull had frightened him, and
caused him to clear a hedge with undue precipitation.
His ' shorts ' became seriously lacerated, and the conster-
nation with which their modest occupant had effected
his "retreat home — holding his garment together in order
that his calamity might escape detection — was made
extravagantly diverting."

He wrote a mock-heroic poem upon this
same bull, rhyming letters and riddles to
London friends, read and answered epistles
from unknown readers of his popular books,
received presents from, and welcomed to
the hermitage, new acquaintances like Mrs.
King, a clergyman's wife, who had been a
friend of John Cowper, and opened a corre-
spondence with his brother, after reading
The Task, etc.

We borrow from Samuel Rose's letter to
his sister a pleasing sketch of the daily liv-
ing at Weston Underwood from 1787 to
1789:

" Here I found Lady Hesketh, a very agreeable, good-
tempered woman, polite without ceremony, and suffi-
ciently well-bred to make others happy in her company.
I here feel no restraint, and none is wished to be inspired.
We rise at whatever hour we choose ; breakfast at half-
after nine, take about an hour to satisfy the sentiment,
not the appetite— for we talk, — good heaven ! hozv we

198 William Cowper

talk ! and enjoy ourselves most wonderfully. Then we
separate, and dispose of ourselves as our different inclin-
ations point. Mr. Cowper to Homer, Mr. Rose to
transcribing what is already translated, Lady Hesketh to
work and to books alternately, and Mrs. Unwin who,
in everything but her face is a kind angel sent from
heaven to guard the health of our poet — is busy in
domestic concerns. At one, our labours finished, the
poet and 1 walk for two hours. I, then, drink most
plentiful draughts of instruction which flow from his lips,
instruction so sweet, and goodness so exquisite that one
loves it for its flavour. At three we return and dress,
and the succeeding hour brings dinner upon the table,
and collects again the smiling countenances of the family
to partake of the neat and elegant meal. Conversation
continues until tea-time, when an entertaining volume
engrosses our thoughts until the last meal is announced.
Conversation again, and to rest before twelve, to enable
us to rise again to the same round of innocent pleasure."

The Iliad was finished September 2}, 1 788.
On September 24, Cowper began the trans-
lation of the Odyssey. The continued strain
had begun to be felt by him, eager though
he seemed to plunge into the new enterprise.

He confesses, October 30: " Let me once
get well out of these long stories, and if I
ever meddle with such matters more, call
me, as Fluellen says, — 'a fool and an ass,
and a prating coxcomb.' "

December 20, found the Iliad receiving

Mrs. Unwin's Illness 199

its last polish, the Odyssey " advanced in a
rough state to the ninth book."

"My friends are some of them in haste
to see the work printed, and my answer to
them is — ' I do nothing else, and this 1 do,
day and night. It must in time be finished."

Two Januaries had passed without calam-
ity. As if a malicious fate were bent upon
keeping alive superstitious dreads of the
month and especially of the neighbourhood
of the awful twenty-fourth day, Mrs. Un-
win narrowly escaped death by fire on the
twenty-first of January, 1788. Her night-
clothes took fire from the snuff of a candle
she thought she had extinguished, and but
for her presence of mind in gathering up
her blazing skirts and plunging them into
water, she must have been burned to death
before help could reach her.

Upon January 29, 1789, Cowper writes
to Mrs. King of another and more serious
mishap:

" I have more items than one by which to remember
the late frost. It has cost me the bitterest uneasiness.
Mrs. Unwin got a fall on the gravel-walk covered with
ice, which has confined her to an upper chamber ever
since. She neither broke, nor dislocated any bones, but
received such a contusion below the hip as crippled her

200 William Cowper

completely. She now begins to recover after having
been as helpless as a child for a whole fortnight, but so
slowly at present that her amendment is, even now,
almost imperceptible."

Mr. Wright gives an extract pertinent to
this accident from one of the many unpub-
lished Cowper letters he has rescued from
oblivion. The date is January 19, the day
of Mrs. Unwin's fall:

" I have been so many years accustomed
either to feel trouble or to expect it, that
habit has endued me with that sort of forti-
tude which I remember my old schoolmas-
ter, Dr. Nicholl, used to call the passive
valour of an ass."

This especial trouble was the beginning
of the end for her whose sublimity of self-
devotion to her hapless charge strikes us
dumb with wondering reverence. In many
of the letters written by Cowper that year
he alludes to her slow recovery of health
and activity.

He writes to Newton, December 1, 1789,
that

" Mrs. Unwin's case is, at present, my only subject
of uneasiness that is not immediately personal, and
properly my own. She has almost constant headaches;
almost a constant pain in her side, which nobody under-

Mrs. Unwins Illness 201

stands, and her lameness, within the last year, is very
little amended."

During the next January (1790) he says,
— also to Mr. Newton :

"Twice has that month returned upon
me, accompanied by such horrors as I have
no reason to suppose ever made part of the
experience of any other man. I accordingly
look forward to it with a dread not to be
imagined."

Again the dreaded season passed without
notable casualty, and the February anniver-
sary of the Fatal Dream. Instead of sorrow,
the latter month brought him the gift of
his mother's picture, to which we owe the
most exquisite lyric to which his pen ever
gave birth, and one of the most beautiful
and touching in any language.

"I had rather possess it than the richest
jewel in the British crown," he breaks
forth to Lady Hesketh in describing his
treasure. "I remember her, young as I
was when she died, well enough to know
that it is a very exact resemblance of her,
and as such to me it is invaluable."

To his cousin and early playfellow, the
donor, he speaks yet more passionately :

ioi William Cowper

" I received 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.''

Of the poem, "written not without
tears," he says he had more pleasure in
writing it than any other that he had ever
produced, one excepted.

" That one was addressed to a lady whom I expect in
a few minutes to come down to breakfast, and who has
supplied to me the place of my own mother — my own
invaluable mother ! these six-and-twenty years. Some
sons may be said to have had many fathers, but a
plurality of mothers is not common."

The sonnet here referred to was that
beginning —

11 Mary ! I want a lyre with other strings,
Such aid from heaven as some have feigned they drew,
An eloquence scarce given to mortals, new
And undebased by praise of meaner things."

Mrs. Unwin had so far recovered her
spirits, if not her strength, as to be able to
communicate an important, and evidently
to her an exciting, bit of literary news to
Cowper's cousin, Mrs. Balls, October 25,
1791.

Literary Projects 203

The translations of the Iliad and the
Odyssey, although little known and less
cared for by the readers and critics of our
generation, were most favourably received
by the public of the seventeen-nineties, and
cleared a thousand pounds for the author,
besides earning him a gratifying access of
fame. Reactionary depression was sure to
follow his long-sustained labour and the ex-
citement of successful publication. What
to turn his hand to next was a vexed ques-
tion. He needed rest and relaxation, yet
was keenly alive to the dangers of intro-
spective indolence.

" Many different plans and projects are recommended
to me," he says. "Some call aloud for original verse,
others for more translation, and others for other things.
Providence, 1 hope, will direct me in my choice, for
other guide I have none, nor wish for another."

What Mrs. Unwin hailed as a plain indi-
cation of the Divine will shortly presented
itself :

" Ever since the close of his translation," she wrote to
Mrs. Balls, " 1 have had many anxious thoughts how
lie would spend the advancing winter. Had he followed
either of the three professions in his earlier days, he
might have been not only laying the foundation, but
also raising the fabric of a distinguished character, and

204 William Cowper

have spent the remaining portion of his life in endeav-
ouring to maintain it. But the life of a mere gentle-
man very few, or any, are equal to support with credit
to themselves, or comfort to their friends. But a gra-
cious Providence has dissipated my fears on that head.
After a warm and strong solicitation he has been pre-
vailed upon to stand forth as an editor of the most
splendid and magnificent edition of Milton that was ever
offered to the public. His engagement is to translate all
the Latin and Italian poems, to select the most ap-
proved notes of his predecessors in that line, and add
elucidations and annotations on the text as he sees
proper. Fuseli is to furnish paintings for the thirty
copper-plates, and Johnson, the bookseller, has taken
upon himself to provide the first artists for engraving.
This work will take your cousin, upon his own compu-
tation, about two years."

A singular complication of what the
toiler named ''the Miltonic Trap" was the
influence of Samuel Teedon, an Olney
schoolmaster, upon Cowper's decision.
Without being illiterate, Teedon was nar-
row of intellect, provincial, and a fanatic.
While his neighbour in Olney, Cowper had
amused himself with the pedagogue's fan-
tasies and overweening self-conceit. He
enjoyed "stuffing" him upon one of his
many visits, at another "felt the sweat
gush out upon his forehead " at Teedon's
tactless flattery of himself (Cowper). • By

Samuel Teedon 205

degrees, and by ways we cannot compre-
hend, both Mrs. Unwin and Cowper began
to have confidence in Teedon's oracles —
viz., his intuitions, especial answers to
prayer, and even direct revelations from
Heaven in voices and visions.

" No suspicion of knavery attaches to him, for he was
a simple-hearted creature," says Southey. " As they"
— Mrs. Unwin and the poet — " would have him to be a
sort of high priest incog, such he fancied himself to
be, and consulted his internal Urim and Thummim with
happy and untroubled confidence."

We cannot escape the suspicion that Mrs.
Unwin's excellent sense and clear judg-
ment were yielding to the terrible pressure
laid upon her through six-and-twenty years,
now that her firm health was no longer the
ally of her brain and nerves, — when we
read that "the earliest notice of these piti-
able consultations relates to the proposed
edition of Milton." It runs thus:

"Mrs. Unwin thanks Mr. Teedon for his letters, and
is glad to find the Lord gives him so great encouragement
to proceed by shining on his addresses and quickening
him by His word. Mrs. Unwin acknowledges the
Lord's goodness, which is mixed with the many and
various trials He sees fit to visit his servants with."

A week later:

2o6 William Cowper

"Mrs. Unwin has the satisfaction of informing Mr.
Teedon that Mr. Cowper is tranquil this morning, and
that, with this which Mr. Teedon receives, a letter by
the post, decisive of his undertaking the important busi-
ness, will go by the same messenger. . . . Mr. Cowper
and Mrs. Unwin are agreed that it was hardly possible
to find out a reference to the great point in Mr. Teedon's
first letter. His second favour elucidated the whole,
and removed all doubts. They hope Mr. Teedon will
continue to help them with his prayers on this occasion."

Mr. Wright supplies the key to these
notes:

" When the question arose whether or not he should
undertake the editorship of Milton, it was Teedon that
Cowper consulted, and Teedon, after much prayer,
obtained from Heaven that it was certainly expedient
that the poet should engage in the work. Cowper's
doubts now vanished."

The important undertaking was well un-
der way in November, 1791. One day in
December, as Mrs. Unwin sat by the fire-
side, and Cowper toiled at his desk in the
cozy study at Weston Underwood, she
called out faintly, "Oh, Mr. Cowper!
don't let me fall ! "

He sprang to her side in time to catch
her as she fell forward.

" For some moments," he relates to Mrs. King (Janu-
ary 26, 1792), "her knees and ankles were so entirely
disabled that she had no use of them, and it was with

Visit from William Hayley 207

the exertion of all my strength that I replaced her in her
seat. Many days she kept her bed, and for some weeks
her chamber, but at length, has joined me in my study.
Her recovery has been extremely slow, and she is still
feeble, but, I thank God, not so feeble but that I hope
for her perfect restoration in the spring. "

In March the same correspondent is told:
"Mrs. Unwin, I thank God, is better,
but still wants much of complete restora-
tion. We have reached a time of life when
heavy blows, if not fatal, are at least long
felt."

In May, a pleasure Cowper had long an-
ticipated with eagerness was granted to
him, — a visit from William Hayley, the
poet, translator, and essayist, whose Life
of William Cowper testifies to the justice
of his appreciation of his friend, the rich-
ness and delicacy of his imagination, and
the sterling qualities of a friendship of which
Cowper had written to him before their
meeting: "God grant that this friendship
of ours may be a comfort to us all the
rest of our days, in a world where true
friendships are rare, and especially where,
suddenly formed, they are apt soon to ter-
minate."

During Hayley's stay at Weston Lodge,

208 William Cowper

Mrs. Unwin had a paralytic stroke, and
remained alarmingly ill for several hours.
Relieved partially and beyond the expecta-
tions of her friends, she yet remained a
confirmed invalid.

July 9, 1792, saw an appeal for time sent
to Johnston, the publisher:

" It is not possible for me to do anything that demands
study and attention in the present state of our family.
I am the electrician ; I am the escort into the garden ; I
am wanted, in short, on a hundred little occasions that
occur every day in Mrs. Unwin's present state of infirm-
ity. . . . The time fixed in your proposals for pub-
lication meanwhile steals on, and I have lately felt my
engagement for Milton bear upon my spirits with a pres-
sure which, added to the pressure of some other private
concerns, is almost more than they are equal to."

In August, moved rather by the hope that
the change might benefit Mrs. Unwin than
by the hope of any enjoyment he might
himself draw from the expedition, Cowper
accepted Hayley's urgent invitation to his
beautiful country home, called by Gibbon
"the little Paradise of Eartharm"

The journey was made by carriage and
occupied nearly three days; the scenery of
Sussex through which they drove was
superb to the eyes of the two Lowlanders;
they were received with affectionate hospi-

Samuel Teedon's Influence 209

tality in what Cowper says was " the most
elegant mansion he ever inhabited," and
were made "as happy as it was in the
power of terrestrial good to make us."

The jarring tone in an otherwise charm-
ing tale is a paragraph in a letter to Samuel
Teedon, the first written after their arrival:

" I had one glimpse — at least, I was willing to hope
it was a glimpse — of heavenly light by the way, an
answer, 1 suppose, to many fervent prayers of yours.
Continue to pray for us, and when anything occurs
worth communicating, let us know.

"I am yours with many thanks for all your spiritual
aids."

Teedon wrote one hundred and twenty-
six letters to Cowper, who, in the school-
master's lately discovered Diary, is styled
"the squire," and sixty to " Madam " — his
title for Mrs. Unwin — in the interval divid-
ing August, 1 79 1 , from February, 1 794. The
parasite who developed into the teacher
paid the grateful twain ninety-two visits in
the same time. These are likewise recorded
in his diary, the queer production of a
queerer man, but one who was, in his own
opinion as in that of his infinitely better-
bred and -educated disciples, the peculiar
favourite of Heaven.

CHAPTER XVII

HOMER — ''MY MARY ! " — FAMILIAR DEMON —
MRS. UNWIN'S DEATH — THE END

THE delights of the Eartham visit were
succeeded after the return to Weston
by a brief season of depression in Mrs. Un-
win's physical state, and by a menace of
what Cowper notes, as "my old disorder
— nervous fever."

"At present" (October 18, the date of
a letter to John Newton)

"I am tolerably free from it, — a blessing for which I
believe myself partly indebted to the use of James's
powders taken in small quantities, and partly to a small
quantity of laudanum taken every night, but chiefly to
a manifestation of God's presence vouchsafed to me a
few days since, transient, indeed, and dimly seen,
through a mist of many fears and troubles, but sufficient
to convince me, at least while the enemy's power is a
little restrained, that He has not cast me off forever."

The "manifestation" is more minutely

210

Homer 211

described in a letter to the invariable Tee-
don:

"On Sunday, while I walked with Mrs.
Unwin and my cousin in the orchard, it
pleased God to enable me once more to ap-
proach Him in prayer, and I prayed silently
for everything that lay nearest my heart
with a considerable degree of liberty."

A few days thereafter he declares his
purpose "to continue such prayer as I can
make."

To Hayley he wrote at the same time:
"I am a pitiful beast, and in the texture of
my mind and natural temper, have three
threads of despondency to one of hope."

While these subterranean fires smoul-
dered, he played the man in a gallant effort
to go on with the Miltonic engagement,
and allowed himself no relief from the
drudgery other than he found in "playing
push-pin with Homer," — i.e., revising and
annotating a second edition of his transla-
tion of the Iliad. His eyes began to trouble
him early in 1793, yet we find him, in No-
vember of that year, rising before day,
" while the owls are still hooting, to pursue
my accustomed labours in the mine of
Homer."

212 William Cowper

The year had been busy, but uneventful
save for the slow, ceaseless burning of the
hidden fires, and the record of their varia-
tions in the letters to the Olney seer. The
poet's list of friends and worshippers had
grown steadily, and his gracious courtesy
to one and all showed the thoroughbred,
as the tenderness of his inimitable letters,
and the play of humour which he knew
would please his correspondents, illustrated
his kindness of heart.

In one of the last letters he ever wrote to
Teedon, he makes griefful note of the old
" nervous fever," a malady his friends knew
Well enough by this time to dread above all
other ailments:

" In this state of mind, how can I write? It is in
vain to attempt it. I have neither spirits for it, as I
have often said, nor leisure. Yet vain as I know the
attempt must prove, I purpose in a few days to renew it.

" Mrs. Unwin is as well as when I wrote last, but,
like myself, dejected. Dejected both on my account
and on her own. Unable to amuse herself with work
or reading, she looks forward to a new day with de-
spondence, weary of it before it begins, and longing for
the return of night."

When he renewed his literary work it
was to tell the same story more at length
and in language that has wrung thousands

"My Mary!" 213

of hearts with sympathetic sorrow. The
lines To Mary stand next to the incom-
parable tribute to his mother, in pathos,
beauty, and heart-break :

The twentieth year is well-nigh past,
Since first our sky was overcast,
Ah, would that this might be the last !
My Mary !

Thy spirits have a fainter flow,
I see thee daily weaker grow —
'T was my distress that brought thee low,
My Mary !

Thy needles, once a shining store,
For my sake, restless heretofore,
Now rest disused and shine no more,
My Mary !

For, though thou gladly wouldst fulfil
The same kind office for me still,
Thy sight now seconds not thy will,

My Mary !

And still to love, 'though prest with ill,
In wintry age to feel no chill.
With me is to be lovely still,

My Mary !

But ah ! by constant heed I know
How oft the sadness that 1 show
Transforms thy smiles to looks of woe,
My Mary !

214 William Cowper

And should my future lot be cast
With much resemblance to the Past —
Thy worn-out heart will break at last,
My Mary !

Alarmed by the reports of the melancholy
changes in the home she had set up at
Weston Underwood under such auspicious
circumstances, Lady Hesketh paid a visit
to her cousin, choosing, at his suggestion,
the beginning of winter, and planning to
remain over the fateful month of January.

" I found," she writes, "this dear soul the absolute
nurse of this poor lady who cannot move out of her chair
without help, nor walk across the room unless supported
by two people. Added to this, her voice is almost
wholly unintelligible, and as their house was repairing
all the summer, he was reduced, poor soul ! for many
months to have no conversation but hers."

The society of his good genius wrought
the wonted spell upon Cowper's spirits for
a little while. The winter evening readings
were resumed, and Jonathan Wild, with
other cheerful books forwarded by Samuel
Rose, were enjoyed and discussed.

The familiar demon descended upon his
prey with sullen power in January. For
six dreary days the possessed man sat "still

Familiar Demon 215

and silent as death," in his study, refusing
all nourishment other than a morsel of
bread dipped in wine and forced upon him
three times a day by his attendants. This
self-imposed " penance for his sins" was
interrupted by his physician's kindly strata-
gem. Mrs. Unwin was, with some difficulty,
so far aroused as to become his accomplice.
It was "a fine morning," she quavered
forth, and she "thought it would do her
good to walk."

" Cowper immediately arose, took her
by the arm, — and the spell which had fixed
him to his chair was broken. This appears
to be the last instance in which her influ-
ence over him was exerted for good."
Hayley, summoned by Lady Hesketh, joined
his efforts to hers to induce the sufferers to
try the effect of a removal from Weston to
Norfolk — to the seashore — to any place
that promised change of thought and
healthful air for the worn-out bodies.

" He now does nothing but walk incessantly back-
wards and forwards either in his study or his bed-cham-
ber," Lady Hesketh wrote to a confidential correspondent,
May 5, 1795. "Can 1 find room to tell you Mrs. Un-
win had another attack the seventeenth of last month ?
It affected her face and voice only. She is a dreadful

216 William Cowper

spectacle ; yet within two days she has made our
wretched cousin drag her 'round the garden."

Mr. John Johnson, Cowper's kinsman,
better known through the poet's letters as
"Johnny of Norfolk," came to Hayley's
and Lady Hesketh's help, and the difficult
task was effected of removing the partially
sane pair from the asylum to which they
clung. They were assured confidently that
they should return within a few weeks,
perhaps within a few days. But Cowper
pencilled, July 22, upon the white wooden
shutter of his bedroom, what showed that
he, at least, was not deceived on this head.

" Farewell, dear scenes forever closed to me ;
Oh! for what sorrows must 1 now exchange ye ! "

The day of departure was probably de-
layed for some reason, for below July 22
is set down in the same minute characters,
—28, 1795.

Lady Hesketh had remained, unshrink-
ingly, at her post until now.

The visitor to Weston Lodge (otherwise
Weston Underwood) may still see the
clumsy couplet upon the inner blind of the
window overlooking the gardens conse-

Departure from Weston Lodge 217

crated by the poet's work and walks during
nearly ten years. At the top of the second
garden is a summer-house erected upon the
site of that constructed by "Sam," who,
'Maying his own noddle and the carpenter's
noddle together, built a thing fit for Stow's
Gardens.

Beware of buildings ! I intended

Rough logs and thatch, and thus it ended."

Below the lame couplet upon the blind,
between which and our eyes a slow mist
gathers, as we look from the peaceful bow-
ers and plantations back to the faint pen-
cillings, other lines were inscribed by the
same hand at the same time. A stupid
housemaid scrubbed them away, a hundred
years ago.

" Me miserable ! how could I escape
Infinite wrath and infinite despair ?
Whom Death, Earth, Heaven and Hell consigned to

ruin,
Whose friend was God, but God swore not to aid me."

"Sam," the faithful henchman, copied
them from the shutter after his master had
gone.

Among the halting-places made by Mr.

2\8 William Cowper

Johnson in his pious pilgrimage with his
helpless patients was the house of Mrs.
Bodham, the donor of "My Mother's
Picture." Everywhere the travellers were
welcomed affectionately, and when they
reached Mundesley on the Norfolk coast,
Cowper was so nearly restored to reason
as to begin " the last series of his letters to
Lady Hesketh." For a while he constrains
himself to write of what he sees, and to
avoid talk of what he feels. Through this
surface composure there breaks up, from
time to time, a hot jet of bitter waters
from the tormented depths:

" I have been tossed like a ball into a far country
from which there is no rebound for me."

"With Mrs. Unwin's respects, I remain the forlorn
and miserable being I was when I wrote last."

"Oh wretch! to whom death and life are alike
impossible ! "

"All my themes of misery may be summed in one
word ; — He who made me regrets that ever He did.
Many years have passed since 1 learned this terrible truth
from Himself."

Mr. and Mrs. Powley came from their
Yorkshire parsonage to visit Mrs. Unwin
while she was in Mundesley, and Cowper
listened without objection to the chapter

Mrs. Unwin's Death 219

from the Bible read by Mr. Powley to his
mother-in-law every morning before she
left her bed. Cowper's physical condition
was undoubtedly improved by the sea air
and change of scene, and Hayley's hopes
arose high.

"God grant," he says, "that he may soon smile
upon us all, like the sun new risen. I have a strong
persuasion on that subject, and feel convinced myself
(I know not how) that the good old lady's flight to
heaven will prove the precursor of his perfect mental
recovery."

Late in October, 1 796, the party left the
seashore for Mr. Johnson's home in East
Durham, a Norfolk market town. Mrs.
Unwin was confined to her bed from the
first of December, and on the morning of
the seventeenth of that month was known
by all to be dying. Nothing had been said
to Cowper of her condition, but his first
question of the servant who opened his
blinds on that morning was — " Is there life
above-stairs ? "

At the usual hour for his morning visit,
he went to the dying woman's room, and
remained until noon. He had been below-
stairs but half an hour when the news was

220 William Cowper

brought to Mr. Johnson, who was reading
Fanny Burney's Camilla aloud to him, that
Mrs. Unwin was dead.

Cowper received the news " not without
emotion," but astonished his kinsman by
asking him presently to "go on reading."
"This was no sane composure," Southey
informs us unnecessarily. Soon the sur-
vivor was seized with a horror of his
friend's premature burial.

"She is not actually dead. She will
come to life again in the grave and undergo
the agonies of suffocation, and on my
account. I am the occasion of all that she,
or any other creature upon earth, ever did,
or could, suffer."

When, in compliance with his request,
his kinsman led him to the death-room, he
stood gazing upon the marble face for
some moments, then "flung himself to the
other side of the room with a passionate
expression of feeling."

Her name never passed his lips again.

In 1797, the cloud of listless despondency
lifted so far from Cowper's spirit that he
yielded to an artful temptation placed in
his way by Johnson in the shape of sundry
commentaries upon Homer left upon Cow-

The Castaway 221

per's table, all open at the place where his
translation had stopped, a year before.

He settled down to work upon the revi-
sion of his own manuscript, and wrought
patiently at it until March, 1799. On the
20th of March he wrote his last and saddest
poem — The Castaway:

Obscurest night involved the sky ;

Th' Atlantic billows roar'd,
When such a destin'd wretch as I,

Wash'd headlong from on board,
Of friends, of hope, of all bereft,
His floating home forever left.

No braver chief could Albion boast,

Than he with whom he went,
Nor ever ship left Albion's coast,

With warmer wishes sent.
He loved them both, but both in vain,
Nor him beheld, nor her again.

Not long beneath the 'whelming brine,

Expert to swim, he lay ;
Nor soon he felt his strength decline,

Or courage die away ;
But waged with death a lasting strife,
Supported by despair of life.

He shouted : nor his friends had failed

To check the vessel's course,
But so the furious blast prevail'd,

That, pitiless perforce,
They left their outcast mate behind,
And scudded still before the wind.

m William Cowper

Some succour yet they could afford,
And such as storms allow,

The cask, the coop, the floated cord,
Delay'd not to bestow ;

But he (they knew) nor ship, nor shore,

Whate'er they gave, should visit more.

Nor, cruel as it seem'd, could he
Their haste himself condemn,

Aware that flight in such a sea
Alone could rescue them ;

Yet bitter felt it still to die

Deserted, and his friends so nigh.

He long survives, who lives an hour

In ocean, self-upheld :
And so long he, with unspent power,

His destiny repell'd ;
And ever, as the minutes flew,
Entreated help, or cried — " Adieu ! "

At length, his transient respite past,
His comrades, who before

Had heard his voice in every blast,
Could catch the sound no more.

For then, by toil subdued, he drank

The stifling wave and then he sank.

No poet wept him ; but the page

Of narrative sincere,
That tells his name, his worth, his age,

Is wet with Anson's tear.
And tears by bards or heroes shed
Alike immortalise the dead.

The End 223

1 therefore purpose not, or dream,

Descanting on his fate,
To give the melancholy theme

A more enduring date :
But misery still delights to trace
Its semblance in another's case.

No voice divine the storm allay'd,

No light propitious shone,
When, snatched from all effectual aid,

We perish'd — each alone :
But I, beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

The end of the long, inscrutable agony-
was drawing on, slowly but surely. No
man ever had more devoted friends, and in
his last months he found in his attendant,
Miss Perowne, "one of those excellent be-
ings whom Nature seems to have formed
expressly for the purpose of alleviating the
sufferings of the afflicted. " She could in-
duce him to take medicine he would receive
from no one else, and Mr. Johnson seconded
her " with an equal portion of unvaried
tenderness and unshaken fidelity."

January, 1800, passed without sensible
aggravation of his gravest symptoms, and
Hayley's rekindling hopes were fanned by
the receipt (February 1) of a revised copy
of certain lines of the Iliad as translated

224 William Cowper

by Cowper, " written in a firm but delicate
hand," in fulfilment of Hayley's desire that
one word should be altered.

Cowper never took pen in hand again.
Dropsy set in early in February. Before
the end of March, he kept his room all day,
and, until after breakfast, his bed.

" How do you feel ? " asked the physician
one day.

"Feel!" with a look of untranslatable
meaning. rt I feel unutterable despair. ' '

Lady Hesketh was too infirm in health to
come to him. Hayley was in close attend-
ance upon his own dying son. Samuel
Rose hastened to Cowper's bedside, but
his presence brought no comfort.

The 19th of April dawned upon eyes
that Mr. Johnson was sure would never see
the sun rise again. Breaking the crust of
reserve, he spoke to his kinsman of the
certainly approaching change, and urged
upon him the truth that " in the world to
which he was hastening, a merciful Re-
deemer had prepared unspeakable happiness
for all His children, . . . and therefore
for him."

Cowper heard the exhortation half
through, then burst into a vehement en-

The End 225

treaty that his kinsman would not seek to
delude him with false hopes to which he
could not listen. For five days longer he
lay silent — never sullen — but calm in the
apathy of despair. If he suffered physically,
he made no moan, and the blinded spirit
had ceased to grope in the rayless night
enveloping it.

Once, during the night preceding his
dissolution, he spoke. Miss Perowne,
finding his pulse low and his feet and hands
cold, would have had him swallow a cordial.
He put it aside, resolutely :

" What can it signify ? "

His tongue never framed another sen-
tence. He passed away in sleep, without
sound or struggle, on the afternoon of April
2^, in the sixty-ninth year of his age.

Mr. Johnson has left on record a sentence
that falls upon our hearts like the calm of
a summer sunset after a day of hurrying
clouds, sobbing gusts, and wild rains:

"From that moment, 'till the coffin was
closed, the expression into which his coun-
tenance had settled was that of calmness
and composure, mingled, as it were, with
holy surprise."

Mr. Wright sets, in close connection with

226 William Cowper

this blessed clause, the fact that Cowper
believed in the return of disembodied spirits
to the earth.

" In this sense, I suppose," he had said to Newton,
" there is a heaven upon earth at all times, and that the
disembodied spirit may find a peculiar joy arising from
the contemplation of those places it was formerly con-
versant with, and, so far at least, be reconciled to a
world it was once so weary of, as to use it in the
delightful way of thankful recollection."

May we not believe, and thank God for
the fancy, that the sweet mother who had
so long had all her other children with her
in Heaven was graciously permitted to
bear to this "afflicted soul, tossed with
tempest, and not comforted," the tidings
that he was a partaker in the " unspeakable
happiness " he had despaired of attaining ?
Did the welcome to the joy of the Lord he
had never ceased to love while he believed
himself shut out forever from His presence,
awaken the " holy surprise " which brought
back youth and comeliness to the face
marred by the awful and mysterious sor-
row, as fearsome as it is incomprehensible
to us ?

Lady Hesketh, faithful unto death, and
beyond it, erected above her cousin the

The End 227

monument in Dereham Church. Two
anonymous friends placed there a tablet
to the memory of Mrs. Unwin, who sleeps
at his side.

Hayley wrote the inscription upon each :

IN MEMORY OF

WILLIAM COWPER, ESQ.

BORN IN HERTFORDSHIRE, 1 73 1.

BURIED IN THIS CHURCH, l800.

Ye, who with warmth the public triumph feel
Of talents dignified by sacred zeal,
Here, to devotion's bard devoutly just,
Pay your fond tribute due to Cowper's dust.
England, exulting in his spotless fame,
Ranks with her dearest sons his favourite name.
Sense, fancy, wit, suffice not all to raise
So clear a title to affection's praise:
His highest honours to the heart belong,
his virtues form'd the magic of his song.
1

IN MEMORY OF

MARY,
WIDOW OF THE REV. MORLEY UNWIN,

AND MOTHER OF

THE REV. WILLIAM CAWTHORNE UNWIN.

BORN AT ELY, 1 724.

BURIED IN THIS CHURCH, 1 796.

Trusting in God, with all her heart and mind,

This woman proved magnanimously kind ;

Endured affliction's desolating hail,

And watched a poet through misfortune's vale.

Her spotless dust angelic guards defend,

It is the dust of Unwin, Cowper's friend.

That single title in itself is fame,

For all who read his verse revere her name.

CHAPTER XVIII
cowper's writings

AS literary fame is made and maintained
in our age of rush and sensational
novelties, it is hard to comprehend the place
occupied in the world of letters, a century
ago, by the shy, morbid Cowper. His
personality had nothing to do with his
literary career. In fact, the two were so
utterly dissociated that the reader of his
Life cannot link the portrait therein depicted
with virile lines which have set him among
the masters of English verse ; and they are
disposed to receive doubtfully the asser-
tion that he was the popular poet of his
generation.

The Olney Hymns and the domestic
scenes — without parallel in grace, tender-
ness, and feeling — given to us in The Task
made him welcome and beloved in every
228

Cowper's Writings 229

Christian home; the perfect structure of
his sentences, the aptness of his imagery,
the simplicity and force of his diction, have
made him a classic, and a model to students
who would also be scholars.

His writings in prose and in poetry will
remain ''wells of English undefiled " while
authors acknowledge the duty they owe to
our noble vernacular. As a humble learner
in this school, I shall consider myself amply
repaid for the labour bestowed upon the
preparation of this book, if I can divert the
attention of one admirer of turgid and
erotic modern verse to the purer pleasures to
be drawn from perusal of the works, of one
whose genius was never perverted to base
uses, with whom Art was never divorced
from Conscience.

To this end I append a partial list of
publications that appeared in Cowper's life-
time. His posthumous works added little
to his reputation, and are interesting merely
as side-lights upon his individual history.

Olney Hymns (1779). These have been
sung around the world and translated into
fifty foreign languages and dialects.

Anti-Thelyphthora (1781). A satirical
reply to Martin Madan's Thelyphthora. It

230 William Cowper

was issued anonymously, and never claimed
openly by Cowper. He is said to have
spoken of it as "a mistake, if not a folly."

Poems, by William Cowper, Esq., of the
Middle Temple (1782).

Tale of Three Pet Hares, Puss, Tiney and
Bess. This first appeared in the June
number of Gentleman 's Magazine (1783).

The Task — A Poem in Six Books; Tiro-
cinium, and John Gilpin, in one volume

(■785).

Translations from Homer (1791).

Poems: containing Lines to My Mother's
Picture, Dog and Water Lily, and other
short poems of less note (1798).

Essays written (1756) for The Connois-
seur, and other periodicals, were exhumed
after the author became famous, as were
his early translations of Horace, The
Odyssey, etc.

A thin volume of Early Productions was
issued in 1825, a quarter-century after his
death. The circumstances attending the
publication are given in full in former
chapters of this Biography.

INDEX

A
Anne, Queen, 9

Austen, Lady, 142-147, '49, «5I> '53, »55-!57, 166,
170, 176, 189

B
Balls, Mrs., 202, 203
Barbauld, Mrs., 189
Birkhampstead, Great, 1, 3, 9, 10, 32
Bodham, Mrs. Anne, 17, 115, 218
Bourne, Vincent, 20, 21
Bristol, 152, 156

Bull, Rev. William, 137, 138, 177, 192
Burney, Fanny, 220

Cambridge, 27,91, 107
Camilla, 220
Carter, Mrs., 190
Castaway, The, 221
Catfield, 17
Chesters, The, 174
Chronicle, The St. James, 30
231

232 Index

Churchill, 30, 86

Clifton, 142

Coleman, Dick, 145

Coleman, Mr., 30

Connoisseur, The, 31

Conyers, Dr., 95, 96

Cotton, Dr., 61-63, 65~^7> 7°, 82, 1 16

Cowper, Anne, 1-3, 13, 115

Cowper, Ashley, 24-27, 37, 71, 72, 83, 122, 161

Cowper, Colonel and Mrs., 87, 105

Cowper, Harriet, 25, 38

Cowper, Rev. John (D.D.), 1, 2, 9, 11, 23, 31

Cowper, Rev. John Or.), 3, 7, 27, 35, 54, 55, 57, 63-
65, 72, 86, 106, 121, 197

Cowper, Major, 46, 47, 53, 54,67, 69, 70, 78, 183

Cowper, Spencer, 9

Cowper, Theodora, 25-29, 38-40, 58, 74, 166, 170, 172

Cowper, William, birth, infancy, and childhood, 1-1 1 ;
school-days, 12-23 5 law-studies, love-affair, and
father's death, 24-34 ; hereditary glooms, Dr. John
Donne's influence, first lunacy, 35-49 ; second lun-
acy and attempted suicide, 50-61 ; life in asylum,
recovery, and conversion, 62-75 ; life in Hunting-
don, first meeting with the Unwins, 76-90 ; John
Newton and Olney, 91-103 ; Olney Hymns, death
of John Cowper, third attack of insanity, 104-1 19;
the "Fatal Dream," convalescence, first volume
of poems, 120-133 '■> Lady Austen's influence, 134-
148 ; writes The Task, and renews communication
with Lady Hesketh, 149-160 ; gifts from " Anony-
ma," and literary life at "Orchard Side," 161-
172 ; removal to Weston Lodge, 173-184; death
of William Unwin, Homer and hard work, 185-

ndex 233

Cowper, William — Continued

194; calm, busy life at Weston Lodge, Samuel
Teedon, 195-209 ; Mrs. Unwin's death, Cowper's
last days, 210-227 > ^st of published works, 228-
230

Cowper, Sir William, 9

D

Dartmouth, Lord, 22, 170

Dereham Church, 227

Dickens, Charles, 13

Disney, Mr., 16

Disney, Mrs., 16

Disneys, The, 17

Donne, Anne, 17, 42

Donne, Castres, 1 7

Donne, Elizabeth, 17

Donne, Harriet, 17

Donne, Rev. John (D.D.), 1, 2, 42, 45, 1 15, 121

Donne, Roger, 1,17

Durham, East, 219

E

Eartham, 208, 210

Edgeworth, Miss, 13

Ely, 227

G
'Gayhurst, 178, 181

George the First, 9

George the Royal, 147

Gilpin, John, 146, 157, 158, 176

Gosse, Edmund, 43, 44, 115

Grimstone, 91, 92

Grindon, Mr., 191

Guinea Field, The, 145

234 Index

H

Hastings, 22

Haweis, Rev. Mr., 95, 96

Hayley, William, 153, 207,208, 211, 219, 223, 224,
227

Henriade, The, ^

Hertfordshire, 227

Hesketh, Lady, 25, 38, 48, 58, 60, 64, 67, 69, 72-74,
102-104, I25» M0* '47> l55i 1 57, 160, 161, 165—
167, 169, 170, 174, 180-182, 185-188, 190, 193,
195, 197, 198, 201, 214-216, 218, 224, 226

Hesketh, Sir Thomas, 60, 69, 72, 73, 123, 159

Hill, Joseph, 70, 84, 86, 90, 93, 104, 105, 108, 121, 182

Homer, 168, 182, 188-191, 198, 211, 220

Huntingdon, 70, 76, 92, 94

I
Iliad, The, 35, 168, 196, 198, 203, 223

J

Johnson, Mr. John, 216, 218-220, 223-225
Johnston (publisher), 131, 132, 208

K

King, Mrs., 197, 199, 206

L

" Lavinia," 152

Lloyd, 86

London, 2, 24, 44, 49, 88, 108, 124, 130, 141, 143, 178,

182
Ludham Hall, 1

Index 235

M

Madan, Martin, 56, 57, 66, 87, 88, 91, 95

Madans, The, 105

Margate, 48, 49

Milton, 183, 204, 206, 208

Mundesley, 218

Mungo, 176

My Mary, Address to, 213

N

Newton, Mrs., 124, 193

Newton, Rev. John, 86, 95-100, 102, 103, 105, 109,
no, 113, 114, 116-118, 124, 126, 128, 131, 132,
134, 136, 141, 142, 170, 173, 176-181, 184, 187,
188, 190, 192, 200, 201, 210, 211, 226

Newtons, The, 145

Nicholls, Dr., 40, 41, 200

Norfolk, County of, 1, 91, 215, 218, 219

Odyssey, The, 36, 198, 199, 203

Ohiey Hymns, 110, 124

Olney, Manor of, 22

Olney, Town of, 95-98, 104, 105, 116, 120, 123-125,
130, 136, 140-143, '46, 151-153, 155-157, 166,
167, 169-171, 173-175, '78, 179, 181, 183, 190,
191 , 196, 204, 212

Olney, The Vicarage of, 138, 145, 170, 177

Orchard Side, 135, 145, 174, 183, 185

Ouse, The, 96, 152, 184

236 Index

Peasant's Nest, The, 164
Perowne, Miss, 223, 225
Powley, Mrs., 129, 135, 152, 218
Powley, Rev. Mr., 129, 219
Powleys, The, 136
" Puss, Tiny, and Bess," 118, 164

R

Richmond, Duke of, 20

Robin, The gardener, 6, 13

Rose, Samuel, 195, 197, 198, 214, 224

Russell, Sir William, 22, 38

Scott, Mrs., 144, 156

Scott, Rev. Thomas, 136, 144, 151, 156

Scotts, The, 145

Silver End, 143

Smith, Professor Gold win, 9, 12, 74, 96, 105, 108, 131

'34, '57
Sofa, The, 147, 148

Southey, Robert, 32, 78, 108, 134, 135, 205
Spinney, The, 143, 149
St. Albans, 61, 63, 64, 67, 76, 82, 100, 117
St. Paul's, Dean of, 2, 42, 114, 115

Task, The, 147, 150, 155, 156, 174, 197
Teedon, Samuel, 204-206, 209, 212
Temple, The, 30
Throckmortons, The, 174, 175, 178, 188, n

Index

2}

01

u

Unwin, Miss, 94

Unwin, Mrs. Mary, 80-82, 85, 86, 88, 92, 94-96, 1 1 3,
114, 117, 125-128, 134-142, 144, 149, iso, 153,
159, 160, 166-168, 171-174, 176, 180, 18s, 187,
189, 1 91-193, 198-200, 202, 203, 205-212, 215,
218-220, 227

Unwin, Rev. Morley, 80, 84, 91, 92, 227

Unwin, William Cawthorne, 31, 79-81, 94, 121, 129,
•30, 133, i43->46, 149, 152, 157, 169, 178, 185,
186, 227

Unwins, The, 71, 76, 80, 82, 83, 85, 87, 92, 142

W

Walton, Izaak, 2

Westminster School, 17, 19-22, 24, 30, 40

Weston Hall, 174, 175, 184, 196

Weston Lodge, 174, 175, 181, 207, 210, 215

Weston Underwood, 175, 182, 183, 186, 197, 206, 214

Wright, Mr. Thomas, 29, 120, 176, 200, 206, 225

Wrightes, The, 174

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so rapidly that we have not time to have done with our admira-
tion for one before the next one is encountered. . . . Long-'
forgotten heroes live once more ; we recall the honored dead_ to
life again, and t!ic imagination runs riot. Travel of this kind
does not weary. It fascinates." — New York Times.

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York and London