of the Middle Temple, and articled for three years to a solicitor. During this time. he was intimate with the family of his uncle, Ashley Cowper, with whose daughters, Harriet and Theodora, he was to be found" from morning to night, giggling and making giggle." This was well enough, but when in 1752 he went to reside alone in the Temple, solitude made him morbid, and his old melancholy returned, in a religious form. He was called to the Bar in June 1754. The very proper refusal of Ashley Cowper to allow an engagement between the first cousins, William and Theodora, could not fail to render the life of the poet miserable; but this impossible courtship should have been nipped in its earlier stages. At the death of his father, in 1756, Cowper bought chambers in the Middle Temple, and began to contribute to current literature. He says that he "produced several half-penny ballads, two or three of which had the honour to become popular," but these have never been identified. A variety of causes, however, of which the dread of poverty was one, exasperated his neurosis, and in October 1763. just after his appointment to be Clerk of the Journals of the House of Lords, he became suicidally insane; on the 7th of December he was placed in an asylum at St. Albans, kept by a minor poet of some grace and an excellent physician, Dr. Nathaniel Cotton. His terrible Sapphics were written during this confinement. In the summer of 1765 he was considered to be so far cured that he was removed to lodgings in Huntingdon. Here he renewed his correspondence with a charming cousin, Lady Hesketh, and made some pleasant acquaintances, in particular that of a cultivated family of Unwins, into whose house he was taken as a paying guest later in the same year. In 1767 the elder Mr. Unwin was thrown from his horse, the children were dispersed, and it became natural for Mrs. Unwin and Cowper to take house together. Accordingly in September they removed to Orchard Side in Olney in Bucks. Here Cowper was greatly impressed by the character and conversation of the curate, John Newton, who persuaded the poet to help him in his parochial duties: Olney was a poor parish, without gentry, "and the poor poet was the only squire." Newton, however, had no sense of moderation; a young man of fiery Weston Lodge From a Drawing by John Greig I have taken, since you went, many of the walks which we have taken together, and none of them I believe, without thoughts of you. I have, though покадоодневному not a good memory in general, get a good local memory, and can recollect by the help of a treg or a stile, what you said on that particular spot, For this reason I purpose, when the Summer is come, to walk with a book in my pocket. What I read at my fire-side I forget, but what I read under a hedge or at the side of a pond, that pond and that had ge will always bring to my remembrance; and this is a sort of Memoria technica which I would recom-mend to you, did I not know that you recasion for it паста по From a letter of Cowper's strength and zeal himself, he had no pity upon his friend's nervous weakness, and under the strain of violent religious excitement Cowper went mad again. But before this Newton had persuaded Cowper to join him in the composition of the hymns which were first collected eight years later. In 1772 Cowper and Mrs. Unwin had determined to marry, but an outbreak of suicidal mania was the signal for an obscuration of his intellect for sixteen months, during all which time Mrs. Unwin nursed him with untiring devotion. It was found that nothing amused him so much as looking after animals, and his friends collected quite a menagerie round him at Old Orchard, and in particular the three classic hares. In 1779 the Olney Hymns were published, and with recovering mental serenity a new bloom seems to come over the intellect of Cowper, and he wrote, for the first time, with ease and fluency. There was little to be said in favour of an anonymous satire in verse, Antithelyphthora, but he was now, as he approached his fiftieth year, about to become a poet. His first volume of Poems, indeed, including Table Talk and many of his best shorter pieces, was not published until 1782. John Gilpin followed anonymously in 1783. By this time Lady Austen, a vivacious and cultivated widow, had made her appearance in Olney, and at her persuasion Cowper now began to write a poem upon a sofa": it turned into The Task, which was published in 1785. But, meanwhile, Cowper had 66 Cowper in his Study, with his favourite hare From a Drawing by Richard Westall been painfully forced to choose between an old friend and a new one; he renounced Lady Austen, and Mrs. Unwin regained her supremacy. The Task placed its author, with a bound, at the head of the poets of the age; it introduced many new friends to him, and it placed him in communication once more with his cousin, Lady Hesketh. She now became the most trusted of his correspondents, and, encouraged by her sympathy, Cowper began to translate Homer. His "dearest coz," Lady Hesketh, visited him in the summer of 1786, and with infinite delicacy helped him and Mrs. Unwin in the way of money, for they were now again threatened with poverty. It was at her instigation that they left Olney, and took a house at Weston-Underwood. Here the fanatic harshness of Newton and grief at the sudden death of William Unwin, his friend's son, brought on a fresh attack of insanity. Delayed by illness and melancholy, it was not until 1791 that the Homer saw the light. Cowper began to write once more with ardour, but the decline of Mrs. Unwin's faculties, ending in paralysis, clouded his intelligence again. He fought a losing battle against insanity, but for the remainder of his life he was practically a lunatic. In 1795 he was moved to Dunham Lodge,1 near Swaffham, and then into the town of East Dereham, where Mrs. Unwin died on the 17th of December 1796. Cowper lived on, with occasionally gleams of sanity, his occasional translations, done during these last days, showing no failure of The flinty soil in deed their feet annoys, and sudden sorrow hips their springing joys, and in any a pang experienced still within, At be not sad! although the lot be cast 4 ar from far the flock and in a distant waste; no Shepherds tents within thy view appear, But the chices shepherd is for ever hear, Thy tender sorrows and they plaintive strain I. low in a foreign land, but not in vails, Thy lears all four from a source divine a Savior thine. and wry drop bespeaks -found, "I was thus in Gideons fleece the dews were, and drought on all the drooping herbs around. Pray remember the poor this winter. Dec-15.1981. Why Cowper. MS. of the Bellman Verses Preserved in the British Museum power, until the 25th of April 1800. He was buried in Dereham Church, "named softly, as the household name of one whom God hath taken." His incomparably witty, tender, and graceful Letters were published, with his life, by Hayley in 1803. THE POPLAR FIELD. The poplars are fell'd; farewell to the shade 1 Erroneously called Dereham Lodge in the Dictionary of National Biography. |