BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE

OF

WILLIAM COWPER.

BY THE EDITOR.

WILLIAM COWPER was born, on the fifteenth of November 1731, in the rectory house at Great Berkhampstead, Hertfordshire. His father, John, rector of that place and one of the chaplains to George the Second, was the son of Spencer Cowper, chief justice of Chester, and judge in the Court of Common Pleas; and nephew to Earl Cowper, Lord Chancellor of England. His mother, Anne, daughter of Roger Donne, Esquire, of Ludham Hall, in Norfolk, was sprung from a family not less respectable, but most distinguished for having produced the witty and eloquent divine and poet of that name. Of seven children, William and John alone survived their parents. The mother died, at the age of thirty-four, in November 1737. The impression made by this bereavement on the spirits of her son was never effaced; at the distance of fifty years he assured a friend that scarcely a week passed in which he did not think of her; and the sight of her picture called forth such a strain of lamentation as the liveliest sense of his loss only could have awakened. On her death he was placed under the care of Dr. Pitman, of Market Street, a few miles distant from his home. Here he remained for two years, till a complaint in his eyes, that threatened him with blindness, made it necessary that he should be removed to the house of a female oculist in London. From hence, at the end of two years, he was put to school at Westminster, under Doctor Nichols, where, at the age of fourteen, the small-pox seized him, and had the effect of removing the imperfection in his sight, though his eyes always continued to be subject to inflammation. From this age, when he translated an elegy of Tibullus, he dated his first beginning to “dabble in rhyme." The Reverend Walter Bagot, who was one of his schoolfellows, and who, on a renewal of their intimacy in after life, became one of the steadiest and most zealous of his friends, told me that in those early days he prognos

ticated to Cowper his future excellence as a poet. One night, when they were at the playhouse together, Cowper pointed out to him a lady on whom he had fixed his affections, and whom he called his cousin. This was, no doubt, Theodora Cowper, to whom he addressed the love-verses that have been published since his death, and to whom her father forbade his being united on account of their being so nearly related in blood. Mr. Bagot was of opinion that the malady he afterwards laboured under, arose from disappointment in this affair; but such was his strong constitutional tendency to the disorder, that it would be difficult to determine what cause at first excited it.

On leaving school, he was articled for three years to Mr. Chapman, a solicitor; and in 1752, took chambers in the Temple, but made little progress in his legal studies. In 1756 he lost his father, who had married again, but left no family by his second wife. In the same year he contributed some papers to the " Connoisseur," a periodical work conducted by Colman and Thornton, his schoolfellows at Westminster.

In one of his letters, he speaks of having, while in the Temple, " produced several half-penny ballads, two or three of which had the honour to be popular." It is to be regretted that any such production by the author of John Gilpin should have perished. A more laborious, but less valuable work, in which he engaged, was a version of Voltaire's Henriade. Of this he translated four books for his brother, who had undertaken the task for the editor of the "Grand Magazine." On perusing the whole as it appears in that miscellany for the years 1759-60, I have not been able to discover any part that I could ascribe to Cowper, or that is equal to the few lines he wrote on the death of his favourite young friend, Sir William Russell.

At his father's death he found his means of support but scanty, and wanted resolution to attempt increasing them by professional exertions. Some powerful friends at this juncture obtained for him a nomination to the offices of reading-clerk and clerk of private committees to the House of Lords. He was now perplexed between his wish to accept these employments and his fear of being unequal to the duties of them, when another office of much less value, that of clerk of the journals to the same house, happened to fall vacant, and, in the hope of being more competent to fill it, he willingly exchanged for it the other two. Still his anxiety, though somewhat lessened, was far from being removed; a public exhibition of himself under any circumstances, to use his own words, was like mortal poison to him ; and when a dispute about his appointment rendered it necessary that he should appear before the lords in order to prove his competence, the dread came on him with such force that he lost his reason, and, if his own recollections of the case are to be trusted, made repeated attempts at self-destruction. It was now no longer safe to leave him in his own keeping; and accordingly, in December 1763, he was consigned to the care of Doctor Cotton, of St. Alban's, author of the "Visions in Verse," a physician, whose humanity and intellectual endowments well fitted him

for the management of those afflicted like Cowper. His own account of what he suffered, and of the sins by which he had provoked so terrible a visitation, is full of all the horrors that a disordered imagination could impart to it.

In about a year and a half he had recovered sufficiently to remove to Huntingdon, a place recommended as a desirable abode for him by its nearness to Cambridge, where his brother resided on a fellowship of Bene't College. At Huntingdon he soon contracted an intimacy with the family of the Reverend Mr. Unwin. The son of this gentleman, then a student at Cambridge, was so much interested by his appearance on seeing him at church, that one morning when the service was over he accosted him, and finding that his conversation answered to the expectations he had raised, gladly introduced him to the acquaintance of his parents. The father was a man of learning, good sense, and remarkable simplicity; the mother, though of station no higher than the daughter of a tradesman at Ely, was endowed with a well cultivated understanding, and, as Cowper termed it, the politeness of a duchess. From a frequent visitor, it was not long before he became their constant inmate: a change in his mode of life recommended not less by convenience than inclination; for in his lodgings he had already contrived to spend, in less than three months, a year's income. With what satisfaction to himself his days were now passed may be seen from the following passages in his letters: "March 11th, 1766. The lady in whose house I live is so excellent a person, and regards me with a friendship so truly Christian, that I could almost fancy my mother restored to life again, to compensate to me for all the friends I have lost and all my connexions broken." "October 20th, 1766. We breakfast commonly between eight and nine; till eleven we read either the scripture, or the sermons of some faithful teacher of those holy mysteries; at eleven we attend divine service, 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 permits, adjourn to the garden, where, with Mrs. Unwin and her son, I have generally the pleasure of religious conversation till teatime. If it rains, or is too windy for walking, we either converse within doors or sing some hymns of Martin's collection, and by the help of Mrs. Unwin's harpsichord, make up a tolerable concert, in which our hearts, I hope, are the best and most musical performers. After tea, we sally forth 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 generally make this exercise in the former part of the day, between 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. I need not tell you that such a life as this is consistent with the utmost cheerfulness, and accordingly we are all happy." He adds, that he had had serious thoughts about taking orders; but observes, that every new convert is

apt to think himself called upon for that purpose, and that it had pleased God, by means which there was no need to particularise, to give him full satisfaction as to the propriety of declining it.

When the death of the elder Unwin, by a fall from his horse, determined the widow to leave Huntingdon, Cowper resolved on accompanying her; and in the autumn of 1767, they fixed themselves at Olney, in Buckinghamshire, whither they were drawn chiefly by their esteem for Mr. Newton, curate of that place, and the author of many devotional works. In such society the fervour of Cowper's piety was not likely to be moderated. He joined, with more zeal than was consistent with the tranquillity so desirable for one of his temperament, in ministering to the spiritual and temporal wants of his poorer neighbours, by great numbers of whom he was unfortunately surrounded.

In March, 1770, he lost his brother, whom, during his last moments, he congratulated himself with having made a convert to his own views of religion.

But his mind was now strained beyond its due pitch. In about three years he was again attacked by insanity, which at last settled into the form of religious despair, made only more gloomy by the too lively and confident hopes that had preceded it. From this time to the end of his life there prevailed in his mind, with a few short intermissions, a dreadful persuasion that he was for ever ejected and shut out from the presence of his Maker. It was in vain that his friends endeavoured to reason him out of so fatal an error. No argument availed to shake him in the belief of his utter and irreversible reprobation. It was, indeed, present to his thoughts at different times with different degrees of intensity. Occasionally he could forget himself in the ordinary occupaticns or amusements of a secluded life, could divert himself with gardening, carpentering, or landscape-drawing, and enjoy his book or the company of his acquaintance and friends. But though, like Orestes pursued by the Furies, he was sometimes allowed a short respite, it was never, like him, in the temple; for not the least of his misery was, that he thought himself forbidden to enter a church or to pray. Yet during all this time he appears to have been rendered only the more gentle, beneficent, and strict in his conduct by the sufferings he underwent. He charges himself with no fault. He assigns no cause, and could have assigned none, for his rejection. All he had to say was, that "there was a mystery in his destruction, and that in time it would be explained." If we should seek for an instance to show the probability of a future life, from the unhappiness to which good men are exposed in the present, it would be difficult to fix on one more convincing than that of Cowper. In 1780, Newton exchanged Olney for another benefice, and, on quitting it, recommended him to the regard of Mr. Bull, a dissenting minister at Newport Pagnel, a man of humane and cheerful spirit, who was thenceforward his frequent visitor, and at whose suggestion he amused himself with translating the mystical poetry of Madame Guyon. With almost all his earlier friends, his intercourse had been broken

off by illness or absence. From Mr. Bagot I heard that he was for many years ignorant what had become of his old schoolfellow; and others, no doubt, remained in the same uncertainty as to his fate. His kinsman, Joseph Hill, the faithful and generous manager of his pecuniary concerns, was the only one of his youthful associates with whom he maintained a correspondence uninterrupted, except during the paroxysms of his disorder. Yet even to him he did not intimate his design of becoming an author, when the first volume of his poems, with a preface by Mr. Newton, was committed to the press in the summer of 1781. It was thus not till his fiftieth year that one of the most popular of English poets made his first appearance before the world.

He sent a copy of his book, with a letter, to Colman, and another to Thurlow, who had been his fellow-clerk with Chapman, the solicitor, and with whom he had lived on terms of great intimacy. Cowper predicted to him that he would one day be Lord Chancellor, and the prediction was now fulfilled. As to Colman, he had become a patentee of one of the playhouses, and was perhaps equally possessed with an opinion of his own importance. Neither of them noticed the gift or the letter; a neglect too galling to be endured patiently even by Cowper, who revenged himself in some verses bitterly satirical, lately published, for the first time, by Mr. Southey. Both made some reparation by subsequent kindness, but not, I fear, till the celebrity of the "Task" had made it an honour to be known to the writer.

In the same year he published anonymously Anti-Thelyphthora, a short poem in ridicule of a book called Thelyphthora by his cousin the Reverend Martin Madan, in which the lawfulness of polygamy had been gravely proposed for consideration. The poem has lately been discovered by the diligence of Mr. Southey, who has spared no pains to investigate every particular relating to Cowper.

His first volume had been composed principally during the preceding winter by the encouragement of Mrs. Unwin, who was well pleased to see him employed in any occupation that prevented his mind from preying upon itself. For the next, published in 1785, and which included the "Task," we are indebted to another female adviser, with whom accident brought him acquainted. This lady, the widow of Sir Robert Austen, being seen by him to enter with her sister, then living near Olney, into a shop opposite his window, engaged his attention so forcibly that he desired Mrs. Unwin to invite them to join their party at tea. The wish had no sooner been complied with than his natural diffidence made him repent having expressed it; but he soon found himself quite at ease with his new guest, whose manners and conversation proved to be no less attractive than her appearance. The familiarity, thus begun, speedily grew into so close an intimacy that Lady Austen became the tenant of the next house, and the inseparable companion of her new neighbours. For her voice, with which she accompanied her performance on the harpsichord, he wrote several of his songs; from her story of John Gilpin's adventure, he composed his admirable ballad; her playful