Verses supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk, MEMOIR OF COWPER. -Formed by Nature, as by virtue form'd Unfelt before, and in one hallow'd theme, TRIBUTE TO THE MEMORY OF COWPER. WILLIAM COWPER was the eldest son of the Reverend John Cowper, Rector of Berkhampstead, in Hertfordshire, and was born at that place on the 15th of November, O. S. 1731. His family, which was ancient and respectable, was settled in Sussex in the reign of Edward the Fourth; and in 1641 Sir William Cowper was created a baronet, which dignity descended to his grandson, who left issue two sons. Sir William Cowper, the eldest, became Lord Keeper of the Great Seal to Queen Anne, by whom he was raised to the peerage, and by George the First was created Earl Cowper. Spenser Cow. per, the Earl's younger brother, was bred to the bar, and was made Justice of the Common Pleas in 1727. He had three sons, namely, William Cowper, Clerk of the House of Lords; John, the father of the Poet; and Ashley Cowper, a barrister, and one of the Clerks of Parliament, who left two daughters his coheirs, of whom Harriet was the wife of Sir Thomas Hesketh. The Reverend John Cowper, the second son of Judge Cowper, was chaplain in ordinary to the King, and married Ann, daughter of Roger Donne, of Ludham Hall, in Norfolk, Esq. a descendant, it is said, of the celebrated Dr. Donne, and by her had WILLIAM, the Poet, a son named John, who took orders, and other children who died young. When in his sixth year Cowper lost his mother, who died in childbed, in 1737, an event which is presumed to have had a fatal influence on his happiness through life. The filial tenderness with which he revered her memory was manifested many years afterwards, on receiving her portrait, and in the affecting lines which he addressed to it. That poem contains also a pleasing notice of his childhood, and of his remembrance of his early home. Soon after his mother's death he was sent to the school of Dr. Pitman, at Market Street, in Hertfordshire. In no instance was the error of not attending to the peculiar mental organization of a child before a particular plan of education 1 Hayley; but Cowper himself says, in a Memoir of his Early Life, that he was then sent to a considerable school in Bedfordshire.-8vo. 2nd Edit. 1816 was pursued more serious than in the case of Cowper. Possessed of a mind that shrunk from severity with a morbid sensitiveness, and endowed with faculties that required the most gentle culture to bring them to maturity, he was at once exposed to the discipline of a public school; and, as usual, was placed at the mercy of a stripling, who had purchased the right to be a tyrant by having first been a slave. "I was," he says, "singled out from all the other boys, by a lad about fifteen years of age, as a proper object upon whom he might let loose the cruelty of his temper, who, 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 I knew him by his shoe-buckles better than any other part of his dress." The boy's cruelty being at length discovered, he was expelled from the school, and Cowper was removed from it at the same time. Whatever may be said of the advantages of a public school, no reasonable person will assert that the same system of education is desirable in every case, without reference to the constitution, or capacity of the child; for the absurdity of such an argument would only be exceeded by pretending that a delicate exotic, if exposed to the wintry winds of our northern climate, will flourish with the same vigour as under its native sky |