His uncle Ashley and his aunt Judith were also dabblers in rhyme. Some improvement having taken place in his eyes, Cowper was now, at the age of ten, placed at Westminster School.

CHAPTER II.

SCHOOL-DAYS.

(1741-49.)

4. Early Days at Westminster.

EVERE as Cowper is, in his Tirocinuim and

elsewhere, on public schools, his career at West

minster would seem to have been on the whole

a not unhappy one; at any rate he speaks quite as much. of the pleasures of his school-days as of his crosses and troubles. In after years he could say :

"We love the playplace of our early days;

The scene is touching, and the heart is stone
That feels not at that sight, and feels at none.
The wall on which we tried our graving skill,

The very name we carved subsisting still;
The bench on which we sat while deep employed,

Though mangled, hacked, and hewed, not yet destroyed;
The little ones unbuttoned, glowing hot,

Playing our games, and on the very spot;
As happy as we once, to kneel and draw
The chalky ring, and knuckle down at taw;
To pitch the ball into the grounded hat,
Or drive it devious with a dextrous pat;
The pleasing spectacle at once excites
Such recollections of our own delights,
That, viewing it, we seem almost to obtain
Our innocent sweet simple years again."

Cowper, as he tells us himself, excelled at cricket and other games. To Unwin, in an undated letter of 1786, he says, "He who cannot look forward with comfort, must find what comfort he can in looking backward. Upon this principle I the other day sent my imagination upon a trip thirty years behind me. She was very obedient, and very swift of foot, presently performed her journey, and at last set me down in the sixth form at Westminster. I fancied myself once more a schoolboy-a period of life in which, if I had never tasted true happiness, I was at least equally unacquainted with its contrary. . . . Accordingly I was a schoolboy in high favour with the master, received a silver groat for my exercise, and had the pleasure of seeing it sent from form to form for the admiration of all who were able to understand it." As Southey says, the poet's aversion to public schools arose from what he saw and what he reflected on in after life, not from any ill-usage which he experienced at Westminster. In his "Memoir " Cowper refers to a singular incident in connection with his father that happened during one of his holidays. Some acquaintance having done away with himself, the mind of Dr. Cowper was greatly exercised upon the subject of self-destruction, and whilst in this mood he put into the hands of his son, who was only eleven years old, a treatise in favour of suicide, requesting him to give his opinions upon it. Dr. Cowper heard his son's reasons and was silent, neither approving nor disapproving- the true motive for his conduct probably being that he wanted, if possible, to think favourably of the state of the departed friend. To set a child such a task cannot be pro

nounced a very judicious action, and could the father have obtained glimpses of subsequent events, probably it would have been the last thing to enter his mind. As every one knows, the desire to commit suicide was always one of the earliest features of those terrible fits of despondency that in after years seized upon the afflicted poet. Four or five times, as we shall subsequently see, he attempted to destroy himself, whilst he would brood over the horrible subject for days, and even weeks.

Among the objects in Berkhamsted parsonage familiar to Cowper's childish eyes, one, his father's family Bible, has been preserved, being now in the possession of the Rev. J. Barham Johnson (son of "Johnny of Norfolk"). It is a thick volume in purple morocco-the Bible with Apocrypha (A.D. 1723) and the Book of Common Prayer (1726) bound up together-and contains the coat of arms of " John Cowper, A.M.," on the first page, and the entries of the births and deaths of Dr. Cowper's family.

In respect to Westminster, what Cowper in after years most regretted was that it afforded so little religious instruction. The duty of the schoolboy swallowed up every other; and he "acquired Latin and Greek at the expense of a knowledge much more important." To use the words of the Rev. Legh Richmond, "Jesus Christ was crucified between classics and mathematics," as in only too many other schools. Cowper, however, relates with gratification one mark of religious discipline which in his time was observed in Westminster-to wit, the pains which Dr. Nicholls took to prepare the lads for confirmation. The old

man acquitted himself of his duty like one who had a deep sense of its importance; and most of the boys were struck by his manner, and affected by his exhortation. Cowper's mind had only a short time previously been brought to serious thoughts by an incident of which he gives the relation. "As I was crossing St. Margaret's churchyard, late one evening, I saw a glimmering light in the midst of it, which excited my curiosity. Just as I arrived at the spot, a grave-digger, who was at work by the light of his lanthorn, threw up a skull which struck me upon the leg. This little accident was an alarm to my conscience; for that event may be numbered among the best religious documents which I received at Westminster." The impression, however, presently went off, and the boy, surveying his activity and strength, began to entertain the notion that he should never die. Soon after he was struck with a lowness of spirits, uncommon at his age, and at the same time he was troubled with the hallucination that he was consumptive, and consequently fated to an early death. The preparation for confirmation beginning not long after, Cowper was again led to serious thoughts, and "for the first time attempted prayer in secret."

At the age of thirteen he was seized with the smallpox, which very providentially did for him what the oculists had been unable to do that is to say, it delivered his eyes from the spots; not, however, from great liableness to inflammation, to which they were in a degree subject all his life.

The usher of the fifth form when he passed through it was Vincent Bourne, whose Latin poems Cowper