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.

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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

mind required, and all the enjoyment of which it was susceptible. If the intellectual malady of Cowper were not originally induced, it was certainly exasperated by the influence of perverted religion; and the heavenly balm of the wounded spirit, the great solace and the sole support of human wretchedness, became, with an altered nature, to our afflicted poet his torment and his bane. His disorder, however, admitted of frequent and long intermissions; and, for a considerable time after his departure from the college (as Dr. Cotton's house at St. Alban's was usually called), the vision of his mind seems to have been correct, and peace-the peace of God to have resided in his bosom. During this happy season, religion was in her proper office with him, pouring nectar into his cup, and making it to sparkle with life. But the religion of Cowper most unhappily was Calvinistic: and if the Christian faith be ever dangerous to the weakness of the human intellect, it is when this pure and kind faith is arrayed in darkness and in terrors not its own by the spirit of the gloomy Calvin.

The little family, in which our poet was now sheltered, consisted of Mr. Unwin, a clergyman, who received pupils into his house, his wife, Mrs. Unwin, an excellent and intelligent woman, an unmarried daughter, and a son, who was a student at Cambridge; and who, by soliciting and meriting the intimacy of Cowper, had first attracted him to the house of the Unwins. In the society of these amiable persons, into which Mr. Newton, a Calvinistic clergyman, the curate of the neighbouring parish of Olney, was received as a daily visitor and a confidential friend, our poet passed the brightest days of his sad and overshadowed life.

In 1767, the death of Mr. Unwin, in consequence of a fall from his horse, brought affliction into this little party; and, soon after this melancholy occur

rence, Mrs. Unwin removed to Olney with her family and with Cowper, who now constituted one of its inseparable members. Here his religious passion was fed by Mr. Newton, and here the friendship between these two zealous Christians became the more closely cemented. Here also did the unremitted and affectionate attentions of Mrs. Unwin to her interesting invalid gain a firmer hold upon his esteem, till he gave to her peculiar worth its full claim to the gratitude and the homage of his heart.

In the February of 1770 he was summoned to Cambridge to attend the death-bed of his beloved brother, the Rev. John Cowper, who expired in his arms on the twentieth of the succeeding month; and from the shock of this impressive scene he returned immediately to the consoling friendships and devotions of Olney.

Young Unwin was now ordained and had given himself to the church; and his sister had passed by marriage from her mother's into another family. The domestic party of Mrs. Unwin was, consequently, reduced to Cowper and herself; and it cannot surprise us that, under these circumstances, the attachment between these worthy characters, strengthened as it had been by a long mutuality of kind offices, should induce an offer of marriage from one of the parties and an acceptance of it from the other. But the completion of their union was disappointed by the relapse of the unhappy Cowper into that dreadful state of diseased mind from which he had in a great degree emerged during his residence with the Unwins. The attack of the malady, in the present instance, was fearfully, severe; and, during seven years, it pressed upon the wretched man with unmitigated force. If it subsequently relented, it never wholly withdrew; but continued to depress and harass its victim to the last moment of