more abominate.

Whatever I Whatever I may write on that occasion, shall, you may depend on it, do him as little honour and as much justice as the lines you sent me. I have paid here and there a compliment to persons who I knew deserved one, and I would not invalidate them all by proving that my Muse is an indiscriminating harlot, and her good word nothing worth." By and by the lines were written, and sent to Mrs. King on March 8th. They run as follows, the title being "On a Late Theft":

"Sweet nymph, who art, it seems, accused

Of stealing George's pen,

Use it thyself, and having used,

E'en give it him again.

The plume of his, that has one scrap

Of thy good sense expressed,

Will be a feather in his cap

Worth more than all his crest."

The poet wished to be known only to Mr. and Mrs. King as the author. The last letter of Cowper's to Mrs. King appears to have been that of October 14, 1792, written shortly after his return from Eartham. For some time this lady had been ailing, but she lingered on till the 6th of February of the following year, on which day she died. Her friend, Professor Martyn, thus recorded the event in his diary, February 6, 1793: "In the evening died my excellent friend, the eminently pious Margaret, above forty years wife to my cousin, the Rev. John King, having supported a long and painful sickness with exemplary patience and resignation, in the fifty-eighth year of her age." She was interred within the chancel of Pertenhall church.

Meantime Cowper's mental sufferings rather increased

than subsided. He writes to Teedon on February 2, 1793:

"I despair of everything, and my despair is perfect, because it is founded on a persuasion that there is no effectual help for me, even in God.

"From four this morning till after seven I lay meditating terrors, such terrors as no language can express, and as no heart I am sure but mine ever knew. My very finger-ends tingled with it, as indeed they often do. I then slept and dreamed a long dream, in which I told Mrs. U. with many tears that my salvation is impossible, for the reason given above. I recapitulated, in the most impassioned accent and manner, the unexampled severity of God's dealings with me in the course of the last twenty years, especially in the year '73, and again in '86, and concluded all with observing that I must infallibly perish, and that the Scriptures which speak of the insufficiency of man to save himself can never be understood unless I perish.

"I then made a sudden transition in my dream to one of the public streets in London, where I was met by a dray; the forehorse of the team came full against me, and in violent anger I damn'd the drayman for it.

"Such are my nocturnal experiences, and my daily ones are little better. I know that I have much fever, but it is a fever for which there is no cure, and is as much the afflictive hand of God upon me as any other circumstance of my distress."

In another letter he records a dream if possible still more painful. He says: "I seemed to be taking a final leave of my dwelling, and every object with which I have been most familiar, on the evening before my

execution. I felt the tenderest regret at the separation, and looked about for something durable to carry with me as a memorial. The iron hasp of the garden door presenting itself, I was on the point of taking that; but recollecting that the heat of the fire in which I was going to be tormented would fuse the metal, and that it would therefore only serve to increase my insupportable misery, I left it. I then awoke in all the horror with which the reality of such circumstances would fill me."

On May 16th he writes to Teedon in the following distressing manner : You," said he, "receive assurances almost as often as you pray of spiritual good things intended for me; and I feel in the meantime everything that denotes a man an outcast and a reprobate. I dream in the night that God has rejected me finally, and that all promises and all answers to prayer made for me are mere delusions. I wake under a strong and clear conviction that these communications are from God, and in the course of the day nothing occurs to invalidate that persuasion. As I have said before, there is a mystery in this matter that I am not able to explain. I believe myself the only instance of a man to whom God will promise everything, and perform nothing."

In his letter of July 2nd he refers to a matter that had troubled him ever since the year 1786. He says:

"I have already told you that I heard a word in the year '86, which has been a stone of stumbling to me ever since. It was this:

"I will promise you anything.'

"This word taken in connection with my experience,

such as it has been ever since, seems so exactly accomplished, that it leaves me no power at all to believe the promises made to you. You will tell me that it was not from God. By what token am I to prove that? My experience verifies it. In the day I am occupied with my studies, which, whatever they are, are certainly not of a spiritual kind. In the night I generally sleep well, but wake always under a terrible impression of the wrath of God, and for the most part with words that fill me with alarm, and with the dread of woes to come. What is there in all this that in the least impeaches the truth of the threatening I have mentioned? I will promise you anything:-that is to say, much as I hate you, and miserable as I design to make you, I will yet bid you be of good cheer and expect the best, at the same time that I will show you no favour. This, you will say, is unworthy of God. Alas! He is the fittest to judge what is worthy of Him, and what is otherwise. I can say but this, that His conduct and dealings are totally changed toward me. Once He promised me much, and was so kind to me at the same time, that I most confidently expected the performance. Now He promises me as much, but holds me always at an immense distance, and so far as I know, never deigns to speak to me. What conclusions can I draw from these promises, but that He who once loved now hates me, and is constantly employed in verifying the notice of '86, that is to say, in working distinctly contrary to His promises?

"This is the labyrinth in which I am always bewildered, and from which I have hardly any hope of deliverance."

186. The Quadruple Alliance.-July 7, 1793.

In June little was done besides some lines suggested by an incident that occurred when Mr. Johnson was going to Cambridge to take his degree. In the following month Hayley endeavoured to get Cowper to collaborate with him, hoping that together they might produce a poem of value-though what the proposed literary partnership at first was we do not know. The answer came in a letter commencing with the following

sonnet :

"TO WILLIAM HAYLEY, Esq.

"WESTON, June 29, 1793

"Dear architect of fine CHATEAUX in air
Worthier to stand for ever if they could,
Than any built of stone, or yet of wood,
For back of royal elephant to bear!

Oh for permission from the skies to share,

Much to my own, though little to thy good,
With thee (not subject to the jealous mood!)
A partnership of literary ware!

But I am bankrupt now; and doom'd henceforth
To drudge, in descant dry, on others' lays;
Bards, I acknowledge, of unequall'd worth!

But what is commentator's happiest praise?

That he has furnish'd lights for other eyes,

Which they who need them use, and then despise.'

"What remains for me to say on this subject, my dear brother bard, I will say in prose. There are other impediments which I could not comprise within the bounds of a sonnet.