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determination was unalterable, and he then expressed his feelings in verses, which were sent in a letter to Theodora's sister, Lady Hesketh. The letter has perished, but the verses were preserved in her memory.

Doom'd, as I am, in solitude to waste

The present moments, and regret the past;
Deprived of every joy I valued most,

My friend torn from me, and my mistress lost;
Call not this gloom 1 wear, this anxious mien,
The dull effect of humour, or of spleen!
Still, still, I mourn, with each returning day,
Him 11 snatch'd by fate, in early youth away;
And her.. through tedious years of doubt and pain,
Fix'd in her choice, and faithful.. but in vain.
O prone to pity, generous, and sincere,
Whose eye ne'er yet refused the wretch a tear;
Whose heart the real claim of friendship knows,
Nor thinks a lover's are but fancied woes;
See me, ere yet my distant course half done,
Cast forth a wand'rer on a wild unknown!
See me neglected on the world's rude coast,
Each dear companion of my voyage lost!
Nor ask why clouds of sorrow shade my brow,
And ready tears wait only leave to flow;

Why all that soothes a heart from anguish free,
All that delights the happy, palls with me.

From that time Cowper and the cousin whom he had loved so dearly never met again. Many years afterward, when his intimacy with Lady Hesketh was renewed, he said to her, "I still look back to the memory of your sister, and regret her; but how strange it is, if we were to meet now, we should not know each other!" The effect on Theodora was more durable. Neither time nor absence diminished her attachment to the object of her first and only love; the poems which, while their intercourse continued, he had transcribed for her as they were composed, she carefully preserved during many years; and then, for reasons known only to herself, sent them in a sealed packet to a lady, her particular friend, with directions not to be opened till after her decease. His death perhaps, or the hopeless state into which he had sunk, rendered the sight of these relics too painful; and hoping that they might one day

11 Sir William Russel, the favourite friend of the young poet.

be incorporated 12 (as they now are) with those works which will perpetuate her beloved cousin's name; she put it out of her own power to burn them in any darker mood of mind. Often as there is cause to censure the want of judgement and of feeling with which posthumous writings have been published, there is more reason to regret the rashness and the carelessness with which precious papers have been destroyed.

The depression of spirits which compelled Cowper to give up his professional pursuits, and continued at times to affect him through life, has been supposed to have been partly produced by this disappointment13. But melancholy madness, which in women so often originates in love, or takes its type from it, is seldom found to proceed from that passion, or assume its character in men. Cowper's morbid feelings, when he began to brood over them, were of a totally different kind, and there is not the slightest allusion to this disappointment in his account of his own mental sufferings. He speaks there of his twelve years in the Temple, as having been " spent in an uninterrupted course of sinful indulgence;" and though assuredly in such words, so used by one in his state of mind, more.. much more.. "meets the ear" than "is meant," it may safely be inferred from them that no great part of that time was rendered unhappy by this cause. This, indeed, is placed beyond a doubt by a letter written in Latin 1 to his friend and fellow Templar, Mr. Clotworthy Rowley, then upon the circuit in Ireland. "While you," he says, are following your Rhadamanthus with more pains, as you tell me, than profit, I, who neither take pains nor hope for profit, am leading an idle, and there

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12 They were printed in a small volume, with the following title, "Poems, the Early Productions of William Cowper; now first published from the originals, in the possession of James Croft, with anecdotes of the Poet, collected from letters of Lady Hesketh, written during her residence at Olney. London, 1825."

Mr. Croft says, in his Preface, that "Miss Cowper's death took place on the 22nd of last October (1824), and her friend having died a short time previous to that event, her executors sent the packet to me, with other articles, according to the direction of that lady."

The copyright of this volume has been purchased for the present edition of Cowper's Works.

13 Mr. Croft's preface. 14 Aug. 1758. The original will be found among the supplementary notes.

fore what is to me a most agreeable life: nor do I envy you the country, dirty as it now is, and daily deluged with unseasonable rain. Sometimes, indeed, I go into the adjacent parts of the country, to visit a friend or a lady; but it is a short journey, and such as may easily be performed on foot, or in a hired carriage, for never, unless compelled to do it, do I mount a horse, because I have a tender skin, which with little exercise of that kind suffers sorely. I lately passed three days at Greenwich; a blessed three days, and if they had been three years I should not have envied the gods their immortality. There I found that lovely and beloved little girl, of whom I have often talked to you; she is at that age, sixteen, at which every day brings with it some new beauty to her form. No one can be more modest, nor (which seems wonderful in a woman) more silent; but when she speaks, you might believe that a Muse was speaking. Woe is me that so bright a star looks to another region; having risen in the West Indies, thither it is about to return, and will leave me nothing but sighs and tears."

Without supposing that there was any thing serious in this attachment, we may believe that he would not have thus spoken of it, nor allowed it to enter his fancy, unless he had entirely overcome his former disappointment. On both occasions he found amusement and perhaps, as in later years, relief, by employing himself in light literature.

The power of versifying is sometimes hereditary; but far less frequently than a musical ear, or the painter's accuracy of eye and dexterity of hand, all which depend more evidently upon organic aptitude. Cowper's father, his uncle Ashley, and his brother, all wrote verses. He himself had been "a dabbler in rhyme," he said, ever since he was fourteen years of age, when he began with translating an elegy of Tibullus. The earliest of his compositions that has been preserved is an imitation of the Splendid Shilling, written at Bath, in 1748, on finding the heel of a shoe: he was then in his seventeenth year, and the diction and versification are such that no one would suppose it to have been a juvenile production. During his residence in the Temple, where "according to his colloquial account, he rambled," says Hayley, "from the thorny road of jurisprudence into the primrose paths of literature and poetry, even then his native diffidence confined him to social and sub

ordinate exertions; and though he wrote and printed both verse and prose, it was as the concealed assistant 15 of less diffident authors.

He belonged at that time to the Nonsense Club, consisting of seven Westminster men, who dined together every Thursday. Bonnell Thornton, Colman, Lloyd, and Joseph Hill were members; the latter no otherwise known than as having been Cowper's correspondent and constant friend through life,.. but this is to be well known. He was a man of playful talent as well as solid practical sense. To him it is that Cowper says, looking back over an interval of more than thirty years 16, The noble institution of the Nonsense Club will be forgotten, when we are gone who composed it; but I often think of your most heroic line, written at one of our meetings, and especially think of it when I am translating Homer:

To whom replied the Devil yard-long-tailed.

There was never any thing more truly Grecian than that triple epithet and were it possible to introduce it into either Iliad or Odyssey, I should certainly steal it."

But Hill had other sympathies with Cowper than those which grew out of school-fellowship, and were merely intellectual. He was a friend for all weathers; one with whom the pleasurable excitement of conversation might be enjoyed, but in whose presence also an inclination for silence might be indulged. The heart had little share in the intimacy between Cowper and the other members of the club ;.. Hill's was a cordial friendship. They had the same taste for quiet enjoyment. Hill, though he afterwards applied himself drudgingly and successfully to the law, allowed himself in those years wholesome intervals of recreation in the country, where he used to "read upon sunshiny banks, and contemplate the clouds as he lay upon his back." Long after, when he had become a man of business in his habits, Cowper, writing" to him at his country seat, says, "I greet you at your castle of Buen Retiro, and wish you could enjoy the unmixt pleasures

15 In the Monthly Review for September, 1759, William Cowper, Esq. is mentioned as one of the assistants of the Duncombes in the translation of Horace. But W. C. Esq. is also mentioned, and the initials are more likely to designate him at that time than the name at length. It is remarkable that both should occur in a list of only four names.

16 June 9, 1786.

17 Aug. 10, 1780.

of the country there; but it seems you are obliged to dash the cup with a portion of those bitters you are always swallowing in town. Well.. you are honourably and usefully employed; and ten times more beneficially to society, than if you were piping to a few sheep under a spreading beech, or listening to a tinkling rill. Besides, by the effect of long custom and habitual practice, you are not only enabled to endure your occupation, but even find it agreeable. I remember the time when it would not have suited you so well, to have devoted so large a part of your vacation to the objects of your profession; and

you, I dare say, have not forgot what a seasonable relaxation

you found, when, lying at full stretch upon the ruins of an old wall, by the seaside, you amused yourself with Tasso's Jerusalem, and the Pastor Fido. I recollect that we both pitied Mr. De Grey, when we called at his cottage at Taplow, and found, not the master indeed, but his desk, with his whiteleaved folio upon it, which bespoke him as much a man of business in his retirement as in Westminster Hall. But by these steps he ascended the bench. Now he may read what he pleases, and ride where he will, if the gout will give him leave. And you who have no gout, and probably never will, when hour of dismission comes, will, for that reason, if for no other, be a happier man than he."

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Cowper was at this time fond of moving about; this, however, was rather the restlessness of a highly sensitive nature, than the activity of a healthful one; though he delighted in rural scenery, he never seems to have made any exertion for the sake of enjoying it, and he did not think the most splendid spectacle that the metropolis can afford, and which it afforded but once in the course of his life, worth the little trouble that it would have cost him to behold it. Hill had the same indifference for such things, and they both manifested it at the coronation of George III. When Hill's sisters obtained, by Ashley Cowper's favour, a good situation for seeing that solemnity, neither their brother nor Cowper would accompany them and when they returned, full of delight and admiration, "Well, ladies," exclaimed Hill, and Cowper joined him in the exclamation, "I am glad you were so pleased, though you have sat up all night for it!" At the illumination for the king's recovery, in 1789, these ladies, who were then "the old Mrs. Hills," retained with their youthful spirits the same passion

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