Rectory. The letters which, after being arranged and bound by John Johnson for Mr. Hill, were made by him an heirloom to go with his property at Wargrave, came with that property to an ancestor of Mr. Jekyll who has lately presented them to Canon Johnson, the owner of the Abbot portrait and other objects of interest connected with Cowper. I have printed the verses exactly as Cowper wrote them, following, on this occasion, even his spelling and his curious choice of capital letters. His punctuation, however, is so evidently arbitrary that I have not thought it necessary to adhere to it.

Joseph Hill, with whom Cowper had the most unbroken, and, perhaps, the most affectionate of all his friendships, was his adviser and sometimes, as may be seen in the letters printed for the first time in this edition, more than his adviser, in all his pecuniary affairs from the time that he left the St. Albans Asylum till his death. Cf. the Epistle to Joseph Hill, Esq., p. 363. P. 11, 1. 23. For my Father consenteth To make me the Flower of the Age. I do not know what this can refer to. Cowper took chambers in the Middle Temple in 1752, was called to the Bar in 1754, lost his father in 1756 and moved to the Inner Temple in 1759. What it was, then, to which his father had consented in 1755, it is probably impossible now to say. "G. Berk.," the address from which he writes, is, of course, his father's Rectory of Great Berkhampstead.

P. 12. Of Himself:-This most characteristic piece has been placed immediately before the Delia poems, as its last words almost make it one of them.

P. 12, 1. 36. I have ventured to substitute "e'en" for "e'er" on my own conjecture, which I see had also occurred to Bruce, who suggests it in a note. All other editions follow Croft's "e'er."

P. 13, 1. 1. To Delia :-For the story of the poet's love of Delia (Theodora Cowper), see Introduction to this edition, p. xii.

P. 13, 1. 20. Catfield, spelt Cutfield by Croft, is a village in Norfolk of which Roger Donne, Cowper's mother's brother, was Rector. Donne's daughter Catharine was the mother of John Johnson, in whose house the poet died.

P. 13, 1. 33. Bruce suggested "yes!" in place of "yet" and is followed by Benham. Southey and Bell rightly follow Croft. "Yet" refers to Delia's refusal, the sense being "yet, though she now refuses my request, if I can persuade her and gain one single hair, she will admit, when age comes upon her, that that one hair, and that alone, has preserved its youth."

P. 14, 1. 35. "gains" is Bruce's conjecture for Croft's "joins." Bruce is followed by Benham.

P. 15, 1. 9. Benham substitutes "love" for "loved," but the change, however plausible, seems unnecessary.

P. 18. On her Endeavouring, etc. :-The last two stanzas of this piece have a special interest as showing how early Cowper's attitude towards the indulgence of human emotion makes its appearance. It is one of entire naturalness, frankness, and simplicity, equally far removed from the disdainful repression of the feelings which had been the ideal of the Stoics, and from the "luxury of tears" which was so soon to become a fashion all over Europe.

P. 19, 1. 13. Where or what New Burns is I do not know. The name seems unknown to the Gazetteers and is probably that of a house.

P. 20, 1. 21, and p. 21, 1. 15. R.S.S. I do not know what these letters mean.

P. 21, 1. 32. All editors follow Croft, who prints "There borne aloft :" but I cannot help thinking Cowper wrote "then" and have ventured to substitute it.

P. 24. Hayley (i. 12) says that these lines were originally part of a letter to one of Cowper's "female relations," no doubt Lady Hesketh, and that the letter having been destroyed, the verses owe their preservation to her memory. They refer to the death of his friend Sir William Russell, who was drowned in 1757, and, of course, to his separation from Theodora Cowper.

P. 24, 1. 36. Hayley prints "distant," a sufficient proof that he is no more to be implicitly trusted than Croft. Southey follows him, but the correction "destined" is certainly right. Bruce, who is less complete in his record of various readings for these Early Poems than for the Task and the later poems, prints "destined" without comment.

P. 25. On reading the "Prayer for Indifference":-Most of the editors have followed Southey in heading these lines "Addressed to Miss Macartney," the author of the "Prayer": but it seems more natural to regard them as a protest against the "Prayer," addressed not to its author but to the "fair maid" of the fifth stanza who, unlike the writer of the "Prayer," knows the joys of sympathy. John Johnson, who first printed it in his edition of the poems, 1815, gives the title "Addressed to Miss

on reading the 'Prayer for Indifference' (1762)"; and speaks of it in his Preface as the "interesting poem addressed by Cowper to an unknown lady on reading the Prayer for Indifference."" I have had before me a correspondence between him and Charles Cowper, another cousin of the poet, as to the person addressed. One would have guessed Theodora Cowper, and so it appears Hayley and Johnson had conjectured ; but Charles Cowper says in one of his letters: "to Mrs. Theodora Cowper it was certainly not addressed, for she had never heard of the Poem, till my sister showed it her from Mr. Madan's copy." Charles Cowper argues that the verses are addressed to the authoress of the "Prayer," and that their point is an appeal from her poem to her heart; and some confirmation for this view may be found in the phrase "amid your silent hours" in the fifth stanza. There is no doubt from the correspondence

that Johnson printed it as he found it in his MS., which was, as he tells us in the Preface, a copy transcribed from her father's commonplace book by the daughter of Cowper's "highly-valued and affectionate relative" Martin Madan. The fact, then, that the MS. gives Cowper's verses as "Addressed to Miss --," when taken in connection with the fact that the poem to which he replies is headed in the Annual Register for 1762 "A Prayer for Indifference. By Mrs. G-," would seem conclusive against the theory that Cowper was addressing its authoress. But this Charles Cowper endeavours to meet by arguing that Cowper either saw the poem before it was printed and while its authoress was Miss Macartney, or that his verses, though addressed as verses to Mrs. Greville, were sent as a letter or present to a young lady to whom he was writing, and so came to be inscribed by mistake to her. But both these are pure assumptions, so far as I know.

Perhaps, however, the conclusion of the whole matter is best given in a remark he makes in the course of his argument: "however the thing in question seems scarcely worth half the thoughts wasted upon it."

Johnson, who has been generally followed, placed inverted commas before the stanza which begins "Oh! if my Sovereign author" and after the end of the next stanza, and, again, before the stanza beginning "Still may my melting bosom" and after the end of the next: but it seems best to omit them. If any stanza is part of the prayer, it must surely be that which includes the line "Oh grant kind Heaven to me"; and, on the whole, the probability seems to be that Cowper did not distinguish clearly between the prayer and the rest of the poem.

P. 27, 1. 30. Croft, "which fly." and has been followed by all editors.

Southey corrected to "thick fly,"

P. 29, 1. 15. Lines written under the Influence of Delirium :-These terrible Sapphics were written in the interval between his attempt at suicide in the Temple, and his removal to St. Albans. (Southey i. 141.) Southey says lines 15 and 19 ("if vanquished" and "fed with judgment") are "evidently corrupt." But there seems no sufficient reason for thinking so. "Vanquished" refers to the struggle with spiritual enemies in which he conceived himself to be involved, and "fed with judgment" is no very obscure metaphor: It may possibly allude to the fact that during these attacks he loathed food, as he says in the fourth stanza of the poem which follows; his life, he seems to say, was death, and his food judgment.

The verses were first printed in 1822, in the Autobiographical Memoir, in which Cowper relates his illness and recovery.

P. 30. This song appears now for the first time in a Collected Edition of Cowper. It has, however, been previously printed, in an article by Mrs. D'Arcy Collyer in the Universal Review for June, 1890, and in Mr. Thomas Wright's Unpublished and Uncollected Poems of William Cowper. Mr. Wright heads it, correctly in all probability, but, so far as I know, without authority, "written at St. Albans in 1764 after the poet's recovery." I

have printed it from the original MS. in Cowper's hand, kindly lent to me by the owner, my friend Mr. E. P. Ash. It will be observed by those who compare the text here given with Mr. Wright's that the alternative refrain occurs after every stanza, and is not omitted twice as it is in his book. I have also thought right to follow the poet in a small detail, though it is probably due only to carelessness. He writes "the grace that I have found" in the last line of the first stanza, but in the fifth and the eleventh, the only other cases in which he writes the refrain in full, he has substituted "which" for "that."

P. 32. Die ultimo, 1774 :-Mr. Thomas Wright, who prints these lines in his Unpublished and Uncollected Poems of William Cowper, says that the original was written on the same sheet of paper as the English Sapphics "Hatred and Vengeance." If this be so it would tend to connect them with the poet's attack of insanity, during which the English lines were written. But in the 1835 edition of what is called the Autobiography of Cowper, where the Alcaics were first printed, the date ❝ die ultimo, 1774,” is added, and they are expressly said to be printed from a MS. And the Welborne copy, from which I have printed them, which is in John Johnson's handwriting, gives at the foot the same date: and, at the top, Johnson has written: "The following verses were found in the handwriting of Cowper by Sam Roberts in an old paper book where he used to keep his accounts. They were sent to me by Mr. Courtenay, March 8, 1810." On the whole this must be held conclusive. Sam Roberts (the poet's servant) remained in Weston after Cowper's departure, and Mr. Courtenay was Cowper's friend, who lived at Weston Hall.

The point has some interest: because, if the earlier date were correct, the reference in the second stanza would necessarily be to Theodora Cowper, while the date 1774 allows the possibility of an allusion to the abandoned marriage with Mrs. Unwin. On the whole, I think the poet is going back in memory to his first love, the only love he ever spoke of with passion, and the only one whose loss is naturally connected, as he here connects it, with the loss of his early home and friends. At the end of 1774 he was still under the shadow of the depression which began in January, 1773, and only began to lift in May, 1774. No letters exist between November, 1772, and May, 1776. Probably when the gloomy spirit was on him, during these years, he could remember no hope of happiness since the catastrophe of 1763 and could believe in no love but Theodora's. I am unable to give any authority for "vescor" in the sense in which Cowper plainly uses it, i.e., “I live.”

P. 33. For the Olney Hymns, see Introduction, p. xxxiii. Cowper's Hymns are in the original edition distinguished from Newton's by having a C affixed to them.

The original title page of the book, perhaps the most extreme instance on record of the eighteenth-century passion for Virgilian quotations in and out of season, is as follows:

2x

66 Olney Hymns, in three Books.

Book I. On Select Texts of Scripture.

III. On the Progress and Changes of the Spiritual Life.
Cantabitis, Arcades, inquit,

Montibus haec vestris; soli cantare periti

Arcades. O mihi tum quam molliter ossa quiescant,

Vestra meos olim si fistula dicat amores !

Virgil, Ecl. x. 31. And they sang as it were a new song before the throne; and no man could learn that song but the redeemed from the earth.

2 Cor. vi. 10.

Rev. xiv. 3.

As sorrowful-yet always rejoicing. London. Printed and Sold by W. Oliver, No. 12 Bartholomew Close. Sold also by J. Buckland, No. 57 Paternoster Row; and J. Johnson, No. 72 St. Paul's Churchyard. MDCCLXXIX.”

P. 50. Hymn XXVI. This beautiful hymn was written on the occasion of the first prayer-meeting held at a house in Olney called the Great House. In the letter of November 30, 1793 to John Johnson printed for the first time in the appendix to the Introduction, Cowper says that writing on a "Sabbath" morning makes him go back to the time when "on Sabbath mornings in winter Irose before day, and by the light of a lanthorn trudged with Mrs. Unwin, often through snow and rain, to a prayer meeting at the Great House, as they call it, near the church at Olney. There I always found assembled forty or fifty poor folks, who preferred a glimpse of the light of God's countenance and favour to the comforts of a warm bed," etc.

P. 51, 1. 12. " And bring all heaven before our eyes." From Milton's Il Penseroso, line 166. Milton influenced Cowper more than any other poet, but it is curious to find a line borrowed from him occurring in this very un-Miltonic Hymn.

P. 54, 1. 8. In the MS. of this Hymn in the Ash Collection, this line is written "Should soon be made his own." The original edition of Olney Hymns gives "would," and it has seemed safer to follow this for the reasons given in the note on Hymn LIII.

P. 56. Hymn XXXV. Greatheed (Memoirs of Cowper, 32) says that Cowper "conceived some presentiment" of the attack of 1773 "as it drew near, and during a solitary walk in the fields composed that Hymn of the Olney collection beginning 'God moves in a mysterious way.'”

See also Rev. J. Bull's article in The Sunday at Home for 1866, p. 392, one of a series which give much interesting information about Cowper and Newton.

P. 64. Hymn XLVII. According to Mr. Wright (Life of Cowper, 120), this hymn was written when Cowper was leaving the St. Albans