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WILLIAM COWPER

WILLIAM COWPER was born at the rectory of Great Berkhampstead, November 26, 1731. He was descended from an ancient and honorable family. His great-grandfather was Sir William Cowper, Bart.; his grandfather was a judge in the court of common pleas; his great-uncle was the Lord Chancellor under Anne and George I; his father, the Reverend John Cowper, was rector of Berkhampstead and later chaplain to George II. His mother was Anne Donne, of the same race as the poet John Donne and, according to the claim of the family, a descendant from Henry III. She died when he was but six years old. This bereavement left upon the sensitive child a feeling of irreparable loss which continued throughout his whole life.

After his mother's death, Cowper was entered in a large boarding-school. There he suffered intensely. With the brutality of boyhood, his more robust companions took various opportunities to tease and maltreat him. He speaks in later years of having been "singled out from all the other boys by a lad of about fifteen years of age as a proper object upon whom he might let loose the cruelty of his temper." His experiences inspired his plea for home education instead of boarding-school education in the poem Tirocinium, written and published near the close of his life.

From this boarding-school, after a period of two years when he was under constant treatment for eye trouble, he was sent (1741) to Westminster. His life there was more endurable: he speaks of his skill at cricket and football and occasionally of his enjoyment of life. His education was, of course, along the classical lines regularly pursued in the schools of the time. He seems to have made no noteworthy record in his studies.

When he left Westminster in 1749 he was articled to an attorney, Mr. Chapman, to study law. After three years with Mr. Chapman, Cowper took chambers for himself in the Temple, where he desultorily read law. He finally was formally called to the Bar, but his interest never was in the profession. He spent much of his time in trying his hand at literature, associating with a little group of journalists and littérateurs who composed the Nonsense Club - Bonnell, Thornton, Colman, Lloyd, and others and contributing a few papers to the Connoiseur and the St. James Chronicle. He did very little in poetry, just a few verses to the conventional "Delia” and an epistle to his friend Lloyd.

His prospects at law were abruptly terminated by an event wholly unforeseen and peculiarly terrible. When he was thirty-two years old, he was nominated to the office of Clerk of the Journals in the House of Lords. The position was one which he was fully able to fill and which would have yielded him a competency for life. For a while he devoted himself with all his powers to special study in preparation for his duties, but as the time drew near for him to make his public appearance, he fell into the deepest melancholy. He foresaw possible criticism and opposition, he felt implied hostility in every paragraph of the daily journals, even in the glances of passers-by, he could not eat or sleep, his imaginary troubles so wrought upon his mind that at the last he became insane and attempted suicide. The nomination was, of course, withdrawn as soon as his condition was known and he was placed in the private asylum of a Dr. Cotton at St. Alban's in December of 1763. There he remained, kindly cared for, for many months. His recovery from his madness was accompanied by a sudden religious fervor. He writes of having taken up the Bible one morning and perused the third chapter of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans: "Immediately I received strength to believe, and the full beams of the Sun of Righteousness shone upon me. I saw the sufficiency of the atonement He had made, my pardon in His blood, and the fulness and completeness of His justification. In a moment I believed and received the Gospel."

His condition when he left the asylum was pitiful. Continuance in the law was impossible, his friends were lost, a large part of his personal funds were exhausted. His family contributed a sum sufficient to yield him a small income, and after a time, settled him in the village of Huntington.

Here began his famous friendship with Mrs. Unwin, a friendship pure and firm through all the intervening years until her death. Cowper was brought into contact with the Unwins through their mutual religious feeling. The Unwins - the Reverend William Unwin, his wife Mary, and their son and daughter - were, like Cowper, converts to the Methodist movement that was the religious sensation of the period. In his new enthusiasm, increased perhaps by his belief that he had been saved from his madness by the direct interposition of the Almighty, Cowper desired nothing more than the opportunity to live in perpetual converse with religious people upon religious subjects. Attracted to the Unwins by their similar enthusiasm, he soon became a boarder in their house. He was from the first strongly attracted toward Mrs. Unwin. "That woman is a blessing to me," he wrote, "and I never see her without being the better for her company." He describes upon another occasion his usual day: "We breakfast commonly between eight and nine; till eleven we read either the Scripture, or the sermons of some faithful preacher of those holy mysteries; at eleven we attend divine service, which is per formed 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 tea-time. . . . 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, accordingly, we are all happy, and dwell together in unity as brethren."

Less than two years after Cowper went to reside at the Unwins the Reverend William Unwin was killed by a fall from his horse. The friendship between Cowper and Mrs. Unwin, however, kept them together. They lived as companions for life. No scandal is possible with regard to their association: Cowper himself says that they were as mother and son, and Mrs. Unwin's son, a very religious man, had no misgivings with regard to the connection.

Inspired by a desire to be near the Reverend John Newton, a leader of the religious revival, Cowper and Mrs. Unwin moved to the squalid little village of Olney in Buckinghamshire. There under Newton's leadership they continued their religious devotions. Cowper wrote a number of hymns for a church hymnal and was encouraged to visit among the poor. His mode of life for the past years began again to affect his brain: he became morbid, worried about his salvation, finally believed that he was one of the doomed, and tried once more to commit suicide. For sixteen months he was out of his mind, tended all the while with the most loving care by Mrs. Unwin and Newton.

When he recovered, he sought for some congenial mental occupation to prevent a return of his disease. He was now, 1781, a man of fifty, without occupation or profession, and with a mental trouble that might at any time recur. To Mrs. Unwin he owed the suggestion that he turn to poetry. She realized that he would thus occupy his mind, but she could hardly have hoped that he would gain success and fame. It was she, too, who suggested the subjects about which he should write, but her suggestion, The Progress of Error, was, unhappily, tinctured with her deep religious feelings. Cowper adopted her suggestion, but the result was a failure. The volume containing this poem and Truth, Table Talk, Expostulation, Hope, Charity, Conversation, and Restiveness appeared in 1782. The criticisms were unfavorable and in this case posterity agrees with the contemporary judgment. Outside of a few purple patches, the poems are unitspired and forced.

The subject for his great work, The Task, was suggested by a new friend he made at the time his first volume of poems was being prepared for the press. Lady Austen, a bright, vivacious widow, came into the village one day to shop, met Mrs. Unwin and Cowper, seemed to feel a great attraction for them, and in a short time settled in a near-by house. The three became in separable companions: "Lady Austen and we pass our days alternately at each other's Chateau." On one occasion she told him the story of John Gilpin, much to his amusement, and the next morning he informed her "that convulsions of laughter brought on by his recollection of

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her story had kept him waking during the greatest part of the night, and that he had turned it into a ballad." Of greater importance, however, was her suggestion that he try a great poem in blank verse. When asked for a subject, she suggested the sofa on which she lay. From the suggestion grew The Task (published 1784), its title reminding the reader that

the Fair commands the song.

This poem constitutes Cowper's chief claim to a place among the leading English poets. It is indeed the poem of a sect, being a concrete expression of the Methodism of the time, but it is more than that. The sympathy he shows for the quiet secluded country life, the truth and sincere joy with which he depicts the homely pleasures of the modest home, the close and accurate observations of nature: - it is in these characteristics that Cowper struck an original note in his long poem, "a poem," says the devoted Hayley, "of such infinite variety, that it seems to nclude every subject, and every style, without any dissonance or disorder: and to have flowed without effort, from inspired philanthropy, eager to impress upon the hearts of all readers, vhatever may lead them, most happily, to the full enjoyment of human life, and to the final attainment of heaven."

The next few years were among the happiest of his life. Although a coolness came between him and Lady Austen, her place was more than filled by his cousin, Lady Hesketh, who came to live with him at this time. He worked busily at his poetry, publishing in 1785 a volume containing a number of his better known lyrics, as The Loss of the Royal George, The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk, The Poplar Field, The Needless Alarm, To Mary, and beginning his longest work, the translation of Homer. The Homer was published in 1791 in two quarto volumes and the first edition was sold out in less than six months. Realizing that health of mind and body lay in continued occupation, he planned a sumptuous edition of Milton, with notes, translations of the Latin and Italian poems, illustrations, etc., but this task was never finished. He engaged himself more enthusiastically upon a revision of his translation of Homer.

With advancing years — he was now over sixty- he began again to fall into the settled melancholy that had in previous instances led to madness, and during these years his faithful companion was in no condition to aid him. Even while his strength was ebbing, Mrs. Unwin was stricken with paralysis and her mind failed. Without her Cowper sank into a pitiful state of dejection, bordering on insanity. She died in December, 1796, but Cowper was in such a mental condition that he scarcely realized she had gone. He lingered on for three wretched years, wholly dependent on the care and kindness of friends and distant relatives. He passed away peacefully April 25, 1800, at the age of sixty-eight. His grave is in St. Edmund's Chapel in Dereham Church.

ROBERT BURNS

ALTHOUGH individual genius is always unique in its manifestations, most authors show marked traces of the literary influences that have surrounded them. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Pope, and the rest reflected in their poetry the literary traditions of the age and society in which they lived. Even the immortal Shakespeare, who rose so far above his predecessors and contemporaries, is truly a child of the Elizabethan period, and a study of the development of his technical skill in the drama shows along what regular and natural lines it proceeded. Occasionally, however, a native genius, untrammeled by the fetters of contemporary literary custom or thought, flashes across the horizon. Such a genius was Robert Burns. He was, as the learned Ramsay called him, "in truth, a sort of comet in literature."

Robert Burns was born January 25, 1759, near the village of Ayr, Scotland. He was the first of the seven children of William Burns (Burness or Burnes) and Agnes Brown. William Burns, a poor farmer, was a man of strictest probity and deep piety. His poet-son has left an ineffaceable portrait of him in The Cotter's Saturday Night. Agnes Burns was an Ayrshire woman, deeply religious as was her husband, and fond of the old Scottish songs and ballads. Burns's

lifelong reverence of the memory of his father and his provision for the care of his mother are notable traits in his character.

Burns's youth was bitterly hard. His father struggled unsuccessfully with farms at Mount Oliphant and Lochlea, and the boys, though not fully grown, were called upon for men's work. "The unceasing moil of a galley-slave," Burns called it in later years. The education of the children was not neglected, however, even in the face of poverty and constant labor. At five years of age, Robert attended the village school and a few years later his father combined with his neighbors to hire a tutor for the children. This tutor, John Murdoch, a man of exceptional intelligence, took especial pains in training his charges in grammar and rhetoric, the use and meaning of words, so that, on the authority of his younger brother, Gilbert Burns, Robert "soon became remarkable for the fluency and correctness of his expression, and read the few books that came in his way with much pleasure and improvement." We know from Burns's own ac count some of these few books: The Spectator, certain plays of Shakespeare, works of Pope, Locke's huge Essay, Boyle's Lectures, Taylor's Doctrine of Original Sin, the works of Allan Ramsay, the writings of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Hume, and Robertson, and, most precious of all (his vade mecum, Burns calls it later), a collection of songs. In his education the influence of his father must be noted. Burns testifies to the value of this when he writes, "he conversed on all subjects with us familiarly," and "was at great pains, as we accompanied him in the labors of the farm, to lead the conversation to such subjects as might tend to increase our knowledge or confirm our virtuous habits."

Burns's father, worn out by his futile efforts at farming, died in 1784, leaving little but debts. Robert and Gilbert had a few months previously taken a farm a few miles away at Mossgiel and there they took their mother and their younger brothers and sisters after William Burns's death. Even before his father's death, Burns had fallen into evil company in the neighboring villages of Kirkoswold and Irvine. He had tasted the joys of dissipation and he had learned to look upon illegitimate love with a careless mind. When the farm at Mossgiel failed to alleviate his poverty, he seems to have yielded to the temptations that abounded in the neighborhood. His genius as a poet and wit was already known among his companions and made him welcome in any convivial crowd. His readiness of address made him attractive to the young women of his own social circles. Together with the unfolding of his genius as a poet during the four years at Mossgiel is to be recorded the sad story of the beginnings of his moral downfall.

Burns had begun to write his lyrics as early as his fifteenth year. Inspired then by sudden love for a partner in a harvest dance, he wrote his first poem, Handsome Nell, “in a wild enthusiasm of passion." "To this hour I never recollect it," said he in later years, "but my heart melts, my blood sallies at the remembrance." It was characteristic of Burns's inspiration that he wrote his best verses under circumstances similar to the above. A chance amour, entered upon with the abandoned enthusiasm of his ardent nature, might result in an unrivaled burst of song. "I never had the least thought or inclination of turning poet till I once got heartily in love, and then rhyme and song were, in a manner, the spontaneous language of my heart." An unhappy feature of his life was that his excesses of affection like his excesses in drink proved the ruin, not only of himself, but of others dear to him.

There is no necessity for chronicling in detail the successive amours of this master-lover. In November, 1784, a daughter was born to him of Elizabeth Paton and was taken into his house by his mother and tenderly nurtured. His fatherhood brought upon him the censure of his church and evoked from him a short series of satirical poems in reply- The Twa Herds, Holy Willie's Prayer, The Ordination, The Holy Fair. After a courtship extending through 1785, early in 1786 Burns and Jean Armour, the daughter of a mason in a near-by village, were secretly and irregularly married. Shortly afterwards the girl's angry father forced her to give up Burns and to destroy the evidences of her marriage. In September of the same year Jean became the mother of twin children. Even in the midst of these troubles, Burns was carrying on his amour with Mary Campbell, a simple, faithful Argyllshire lass who, according to one biographer aroused in Burns the truest love he ever knew.

During the troubled months between the fall of 1784 and the spring of 1786 Burns wrote many of his best-known poems, including The Twa Dogs, The Holy Fair, Address to the Deil, The Cotter's Saturday Night, To a Mouse, Man was Made to Mourn, To a Mountain Daisy, To a Louse, Song: Composed in August.

The publication of his poems was undertaken in 1786 to provide Burns with funds to go to Jamaica to escape the depressing poverty at home and the legal revenge threatened by Jean Armour's father. The little volume, published by John Wilson of Kilmarnock, won immediate fame. Burns received about twenty pounds as his share of the profits of the sale, and bought steerage passage for the West Indies. Just before his ship sailed, however, he changed his plans. "I had taken the last farewell of my friends; my chest was on the way to Greenock; I had composed the last song I should ever measure in Caledonia, The gloomy night is gathering fast,’ when a letter from Dr. Blackwood to a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by opening up new prospects to my poetic ambition."

At the end of 1786 Burns went to Edinburgh to try his fortunes. His winter there was a triumph for him as a poet and the ruination of him as a man. The plowman poet was fêted and honored by the rich, the learned, and the great; he became the lion of the social circles and held his own in wit and conversation with the best in the city. But along beside his visits at the houses of the great were night gatherings in the clubs and brotherhoods of Edinburgh's taverns. In the taverns he found the people more congenial to him. There was no restraint to the raillery, the jests, and the drinking. Burns became the boon companion to the young bloods of the time, an acknowledged leader in their carousals, and indulged his wit and satire, it was said, at the expense of his more noble and dignified hosts. He was given a taste of revelries and excesses that far surpassed the dissipations of his Ayrshire valleys.

His finances improved wonderfully with an Edinburgh edition of his poems including only a few poems not in his Kilmarnock book, as The Address to the Unco' Guid, A Winter Night, and "The gloomy night is gathering fast." It is estimated that he received in all about five hundred pounds at this time, enough, anyway, to lend his brothers one hundred and eighty pounds and to take a trip himself among the Scottish Highlands. His return to the incessant toil of his Mossgiel farm accentuated the difference between the Edinburgh life and the condition to which he was born. He became dissatisfied and moody, restlessly unhappy under the conditions and restricted gayeties at Mossgiel. In this spirit he returned to Edinburgh for the winter of 1787-88. If he looked for the repetition of his former reception, as he probably did, he was bitterly disappointed. His day of glory was over. Gentlemen no longer counted his company; society no longer dined and entertained him; the learned no longer inclined to engage him in sallies of wit and discussion. Burns was practically ignored. The effect upon him was lamentable. He became embittered against the rich and the great and relieved his feelings by excesses in the taverns where he still was welcome. He may have thought of preferment in office when he returned to Edinburgh, but his hopes were quickly undeceived and his anger increased. The favor and smiles of these people of influence had, after all, meant nothing. In the spring of 1788 he bought with his remaining funds a farm at Ellisland, near Dumfries, and married Jean Armour, apparently resolved to return to his native occupation and give up the life of the city.

His farm at Ellisland was, as the factor who rented it told him, a poet's choice and not a farmer's, so that, for the support of his growing family, he applied for and obtained a position as exciseman for his district, yielding him a salary of fifty pounds a year. His duties took him over a district roughly fifty miles square and compelled him to ride fully two hundred miles a week. He felt keenly the stigma attached to his office, but seems to have performed his task creditably. The journeys necessary for his excise business, however, kept him away from his farm for long periods and hastened the utter failure of his hopes in that direction.

Meanwhile, the springs of song did not fail within him. When he was in Edinburgh he met James Johnson, who was collecting a Musical Museum of the songs of Scotland. Burns had enthusiastically coöperated with Johnson in his work, aiding by his knowledge of Scottish tradition, by his criticism (Burns was practically the editor of the collection from 1788 until his

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