Song-When all within is Peace............................... On the Loss of the Royal George.. On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bulfinch. The Poet's New Year's Gift. To Mrs. Throckmorton.. 239 To Mrs. King. On her kind Present to the Author..... 246 On Mrs. Montagu's Feather Hangings...... THE LIFE OF WILLIAM COWPER. THE Life of the virtuous and the unhappy, WILLIAM COWPER has employed the pen of more than one of his immediate friends; and the narrative has been enlarged by the minuteness of its details beyond the just claims and the proper interest of its subject. The days of Cowper were those of a melancholy recluse, suffering generally under the infliction of a disordered imagination; and the display of the smaller incidents of these days cannot surely be of any moment to the public either as instruction or entertainment. It is our purpose, therefore, to satisfy the reasonable curiosity of our readers with respect to the author of The Task,' without making any exhausting demand upon their patience or their time. The family of William Cowper was of distinguished eminence, for by his father (who was the son of Spencer Cowper, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and brother to the first Earl Cowper, the Chancellor of England) he was connected with the peerage of Britain, and from his mother (a descendant of the VOL. I. B celebrated Doctor Donne's) he derived a still prouder pedigree, and the blood which had once flowed in the veins of our third Henry, and consequently in those of the first haughty Norman, who established himself on the throne of our old Saxon monarchs. Our poet was the eldest son of the Reverend Doctor John Cowper, and was born at Great Birkhampstead in Hertfordshire, of which place his father was the rector, on the 15th of November, 1731. When he had just entered on his seventh year, he was deprived by death of his mother; and in his ninth he was placed by his father in the school of Westminster. To the roughness of a public school he was ill adapted by the delicate constitution of his mind; and it has been suggested that the first causes of that lamentable malady, which afflicted him through the several periods of his maturer life, might be traced to his treatment by his hardier and less feeling schoolfellows in this distinguished seminary of learning. At the age of eighteen he was articled to an attorney; and, three years afterwards, he was entered at the Inner Temple. But to the study of the law he was strongly opposed by inclination; and for the active prosecution of it at the bar he was disqualified by the feebleness of his nerves. He indulged, therefore, in the fashionable dissipation of the town; and became the associate of his old schoolfellows, Colman, Bonnel Thornton, and Lloyd, in their pleasures and in some of their literary undertakings. At this season of his life also, it is said that he contemplated marriage: but that the lady, who was the object of his love, after a long encouragement of his addresses, finally disappointed them. By the death of his father (in 1756) he came into the possession of very little, if of any fortune; and, as he could not hope for an income from the bar, it was necessary that his friends' interest should be exerted to obtain a subsistence for him. His friends were powerful, and they succeeded in procuring for him the lucrative offices of Reading Clerk and Clerk of the Private Committees in the House of Lords. But his insuperable timidity disqualified him for the discharge of the duties attached to these places; and he did not hesitate to resign them. Indulgent to his weakness, the kindness of his powerful friends was still active in his favour; and they soon stationed him as Clerk of the Journals, in the same House of the Legislature; an office in which it was supposed that his personal appearance before the assembled lords would not be required. This supposition, however, accidentally proving erroneous; and his presence being demanded that his fitness for his new duties might be ascertained, poor Cowper shrank from the trial; and, after a most painful struggle, which affected the sanity of his mind, he relinquished his place, and, with it, his last hope of worldly affluence. The state of disordered intellect, into which he now immediately fell, was of so decided a character as to make his removal to the care of Doctor Cotton, a scientific and benevolent physician resident at St. Albans, a measure of paramount necessity. By the skilful and tender management, which he experienced during eighteen months under the roof of this worthy man, our poet was sufficiently recovered to be reinstated in the community of social life. For general society, however, he felt himself to be unfit; and he retired to Huntingdon, without, as it would appear, any particular motives to determine his preference, for privacy and quiet. Here he soon became acquainted with the amiable family of the Unwins; and, the acquaintance growing into mutual attachment, he was admitted, about the close of 1765, as a boarder into their house; in which situation he found all the tranquillity which his diseased |