Sir Robert Austen, Baronet, and sister of Mrs. Jones; thereupon he got Mrs. Unwin to invite the ladies to tea; but upon their arrival, in acceptance of the invitation, the poet, who had since repented of his boldness, could not at first muster sufficient courage to join the little party.

But, having at length forced himself into their company, he found Lady Austen such a vivacious and sympathetic companion that he speedily lost all shyness, with which in her presence he seems never afterwards to have been troubled. In his own words, she was "a lively, agreeable woman, who had seen much of the world, and accounted it a great simpleton, as it is-one who laughed and made laugh, and could keep up a conversation without seeming to labour at it." In the evening he escorted the ladies home, and a few days after, with Mrs. Unwin, returned the visit. The walk from Olney to Clifton is a very beautiful one. The path leads first through level meadows intersected by narrow arms of the river, and about half-way to Clifton, a few yards beyond the main stream, takes us past the pleasant spot where stood the picturesque old water-mill to which Cowper alludes in "The Winter Morning Walk" ("Task," V.). The current is spoken of as stealing silently and unperceived beneath its sheet of ice and snow, but at the mill it bursts asunder its icy shackles, and

"Scornful of a check, it leaps

The mill-dam, dashes on the restless wheel,
And wantons in the pebbly gulf below:
No frost can bind it there; its utmost force
Can but arrest the light and smoky mist
That in its fall the liquid sheet throws wide."

The music of its familiar clack and splashing waters has long ceased; even the mill itself, with all its appurtenances, has disappeared; but the site is still very lovely, especially in summer time, when the shallow streams that surround it are yellow with irises, and bristle with reeds, and rushes, and wax-like umbels of butomus.

Mounting a steep path brings us to the top of Clifton Hill, and the view is not soon forgotten by the memory. The visitor carries away remembrance of the smooth line of the horizon broken by the conspicuous spire of Hanslope church (eight miles distant); the nearer prospect of the Weston uplands (in front of whose woods and spinnies could formerly be seen the old mansion of the Throckmortons); the steep white road leading to Weston, the river winding through the level meadows, and, here and there lost to sight, appearing in the evening sun like a succession of silver lakes, the lines of willows marking the smaller watercourses, the roof-tops of the long town of Olney; the church with its many-lighted steeple and great east window; the mill at Olney; and the straight run of river at the foot of the declivity, lined on the near side by a row of willows, doddered with age, and grown with polypodies

and wild raspberry.1

Clifton itself, which was now to be such a favourite resort of Cowper, consisted of a group of cottages, an antiquated circular dove-house, and three important structures which stood on the brow of the hill that overlooks the river-namely, the Church, the Rectory, and the Hall; but the last, called also the "The Town of Cowper."

I

Manor House-the "Mr. Small's house" of Cowper's letters has now quite disappeared.

Clifton Hall was a large, square, and strongly-built mansion of stone, with a large porch at the front that faced the river. It was of no antiquity, having been built by Alexander Small, Esq., about 1750 (his bust in a large wig by Scheemaker can be seen in the church), but it stood doubtless on or near the site of the ancient castellated mansion of the Borards and Reyneses, at a distance of about eighty yards to the north-west of the church. The fishpond, the orchard, a portion of the avenue, and the wall round the garden still remain.

The Rectory is a building of considerable antiquity, portions of it being about three hundred years old. In a Terrier (November 11, 1639) of Thomas Webb (a rector, who, by the by, is said to have been hanged for sheep-stealing) it is described as "The Parsonage, consisting of five bays, built of stone, and covered with thatch."

The outcome of this meeting of Cowper and Lady Austen was a friendship which, as the former said, gave them and Mrs. Unwin an opportunity to verify Solomon's word that "a threefold cord is not soon broken"; and in the lines addressed to her later in the year he inquires :

"But who can tell how vast the plan,
Which this day's incident began?"-

a passage which had a happy sequel, for but for this meeting of Cowper and Lady Austen the finest of his poems had not been written. It has been said by

Southey, and truly: "The most fortunate incident in his literary life was that which introduced him to this lady."

Many pleasant walks and conversations were enjoyed by the friends that summer, and as the following extract from Cowper's "hop-o'-my-thumb" rhyming letter to Newton testifies (July 12, 1781), their dissipation took the form of picnicing :-" Mrs. Jones proposes, ere July closes, that she and her sister, and her Jones Mister, and we that are here, our course shall steer, to dine in the Spinnie; but for a guinea, if the weather should hold, so hot and so cold, we had better by far stay where we are. For the grass there grows, while nobody mows (which is very wrong), so rank and so long, that, so to speak, 'tis at least a week, if it happen to rain, ere it dries again."

Everything, however, turned out favourably; so Cowper and Mrs. Unwin, Mr. and Mrs. Jones and Lady Austen, "all dined together in the Spinnie—a most delightful retirement, belonging to Mrs. Throckmorton, of Weston. Lady Austen's lackey and a lad that waits on me in the garden drove a wheelbarrow full of eatables and drinkables to the scene of our fête champêtre. A board laid over the top of the wheelbarrow served us for a table; our dining-room was a root-house, lined with moss and ivy. At six o'clock the servants, who had dined under the great elm upon the ground, at a little distance, boiled the kettle, and the said wheelbarrow served us for a tea-table. We then took a walk into the Wilderness, about half a mile off, and were at home again a little after eight, having spent the day together from noon till evening

without one cross occurrence, or the least weariness of each other, a happiness few parties of pleasure can

boast of."

82. "Hope," "Charity," "Conversation," and "Retirement."-June to September, 1781.

The poem entitled "Hope" was written in June, and by the end of the same month Cowper had commenced "a proper sequel" to it, namely, "Charity," written in a fortnight, and finished on July 12th, when he says, in a jingling letter to Newton, "I have writ Charity,' not for popularity, but as well as I could, in hopes to do good." With this production was completed what has been called his series of Christian Poems, and, as he then supposed, his first volume. The poem called "Conversation," which he found himself engaged upon at the end of July, would, he thought, make a very good introduction to a second volume. "My design in it," he says, "is to convince the world that they make but an indifferent use of their tongues, considering the intention of Providence when He endued them with the faculty of speech; to point out the abuses, which is the jocular part of the business, and to prescribe the remedy, which is the grave and sober."

Among the practices satirized in "Conversation," one is smoking, though, drolly enough, as we have seen, two of Cowper's most intimate friends were ardent votaries of the fragrant weed. His fondness for Mr. Bull, however, was so much stronger than his antipathy to tobacco that he was always ready to find an excuse