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ham. My vote will hardly recommend him to an increase of his pension, or to a seat in the cabinet. But if his ambition be upon a level with his understanding;—if he judges of what is truly honorable for himself, with the same superior genius which animates and directs him to eloquence in debate, to wisdom in deci sion, even the pen of Junius shall contribute to reward him. Recorded honors shall gather round his monument, and thicken over him. It is a solid fabric, and will support the laurels that adorn it. I am not conversant in the language of panegyric.— These praises are extorted from me; but they will wear well, for they have been dearly earned.

TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE LORD CAMDEN.

MY LORD:-I turn, with pleasure, from that barren waste in which no salutary plant takes root, no verdure quickens, to a character fertile, as I willingly believe, in every great and good qualification. I call upon you, in the name of the English nation, to stand forth in defence of the laws of your country, and to exert, in the cause of truth and justice, those great abilities with which you were intrusted for the benefit of mankind. Your lordship's character assures me that you will assume that principal part, which belongs to you, in supporting the laws of England, against a wicked judge, who makes it the occupation of his life to misinterpret and pervert them. If you decline this honorable office, I fear it will be said that, for some months past, you have kept too much company with the Duke of Grafton. When the contest turns upon the interpretation of the laws, you cannot, without a formal surrender of all your reputation, yield the post of honor even to Lord Chatham. Considering the situation and abilities of Lord Mansfield, I do not scruple to affirm, with the most solemn appeal to God for my sincerity, that, in my judgment, he is the very worst and most dangerous man in the kingdom. Thus far I have done my duty in endeavoring to bring him to punishment. But mine is an inferior, ministerial office in the temple of justice. -I have bound the victim, and dragged him to the altar.

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The man, who fairly and completely answers iny arguments, shall have my thanks and my applause. My heart is already with him.-I am ready to be converted.-I admire his morality and would gladly subscribe to the articles of his faith. Grateful, as I am, to the Good Being whose bounty has imparted to me this reasoning intellect, whatever it is, I hold myself proportionably indebted to him from whose enlightened understanding another ray of knowledge communicates to mine. But neither should I think the most exalted faculties of the human mind a gift worthy

of the divinity; nor any assistance, in the improvement of them, a subject of gratitude to my fellow-creature, if I were not satisfied, that really to inform the understanding corrects and enlarges the heart. JUNIUS.

WILLIAM COWPER. 1731-1800.

WILLIAM COWPER, "the most popular poet of his generation, and the best of English letter-writers," as the poet Southey terms him, was born in Berkhampstead, in Bedfordshire, Nov. 15, 1731. His father, the Rev. John Cowper, was the rector of that place. From infancy he had a delicate and extremely susceptible constitution,-a misfortune that was aggravated by the loss of an affectionate mother, who died when he was only six years old. The intense love with which he cherished her memory during the rest of his life, may be known from that most affecting poem which he wrote on contemplating her picture. At the age of ten he was sent to Westminster School, where he stayed till he was eighteen; and though he pursued his studies diligently while there, he could never look back upon those years without horror, as he remembered the despotic tyranny exercised over him by the older boys:—a shameful practice, still, in a degree, maintained in the English schools.

After leaving school, he spent three years in an attorney's office, and then entered the Middle Temple, in which he continued eleven years, devoting his time, however, to poetry and general literature more than to law. In 1763 the offices of clerk of the journals, reading clerk, and clerk of the committees of the House of Lords, which were all at the disposal of a cousin of Cowper's, became vacant about the same time. The two last were conferred on Cowper, but the idea of appearing and reading before the House of Lords so overwhelmed him, that he resigned the offices almost as soon as they were accepted. But as his patrimony was nearly spent, his friends procured for him the office of clerk of the journals, thinking that his personal appearance at the House would not be required. But he was unexpectedly summoned to an examination at the bar of the House, before he could be allowed to take the office. The thoughts of this so preyed upon his mind, as to shatter his reason, and he actually made attempts upon his own life. He was therefore removed to the house of Dr. Cotton, at St. Albans, with whom he continued about eighteen months.

On his recovery he was so fortunate as to find friends who were able to soothe his melancholy, direct his genius, and make his time pass happily away. In June, 1765, his brother took him to Huntingdon to board. Here he was introduced to the family of the Rev. Mr. Unwin, who was the clergyman of the place. It consisted of the father, Mrs. Unwin, and a son and daughter just arrived at majority. Cowper says of them, in one of his letters, "they are the most agreeable people imaginable; quite sociable, and as free from the ceremonious civility of country gentlefolks as any I ever met with. They treat me more like a near relation than a stranger, and their house is always open to me." Much to his joy, they agreed to receive him into their house as a boarder. He had been there, however, but two years, when Mr. Unwin, senior, died, and Cowper accompanied Mrs. Unwin and

her daughter to a new residence, which they chose at Olney, in Buckinghamshire. Here he formed an intimate friendship with the Rev. Mr. Newton of that place, with whom he long maintained a Christian intercourse, delightful and profitable to both parties.

In 1773 Cowper was visited by a second attack of mental derangement, which showed itself in paroxysms of extreme religious despondency. It lasted for about four years, during which period Mrs. Unwin watched over him with a tenderness and devotion truly maternal. As he began to recover, he betook himself to various amusements, such as taming hares and making bird-cages, which pastimes he diversified with light reading. Hitherto his poetic faculties had lain nearly dormant; but in the winter of 1780–81 he prepared the first volume of his poems for the press, consisting of «TableTalk," "Hope," "The Progress of Error," « Charity," &c., which was published in 1782, but it did not attract much attention till the appearance of "The Task."

In the same year that he published his first volume, an elegant and accomplished visitant came to Olney, with whom Cowper formed an acquaintance that was, for some time, a most delightful one to him. This was Lady Austen, the widow of Sir Robert Austen. She had wit, gayety, agreeable manners, and elegant taste. While she enlivened Cowper's unequal spirits by her con· versation, she was also the task-mistress of his Muse. He began his great original poem, "The Task," at her suggestion,1 and was exhorted by her to undertake the translation of Homer. So much cheerfulness seems to have beamed upon his sequestered life from the influence of her society, that he gave her the endearing appellation of Sister Anne. But his devoted old friend, Mrs. Unwin, looked with no little jealousy upon the ascendency of a female, so much more fascinating than herself, over Cowper's mind; and, appealing to his gratitude for her past services, she gave him his choice of either renouncing Lady Austen's acquaintance or her own. Cowper decided upon adhering to the friend who had watched over him in his deepest afflictions; and sent Lady Austen a valedictory letter, couched in terms of regret and regard, but which necessarily put an end to their acquaintance. Whether in making this decision he sacrificed a passion or only a friendship for Lady Austen, it is now impossible to tell; but it has been said that the remembrance of a deep and devoted attachment of his youth was never effaced by any succeeding impressions of the same nature; and that his fondness for Lady Austen was as platonic as for Mary Unwin. The sacrifice, however, cost him much pain; and is, perhaps, as much to be admired as regretted.3

1 One day Lady Austen requested him to try his powers on blank verse: "But," said he, “I have no subject." "Oh you can write on any thing," she replied; "take this sofa." Hence the beginning of the Task,

I sing the Sofa.

*

The theme, though humble, yet august and proud

Th' occasion-for the fair commands the song.

2 "Lady Austen's conversation had as happy an effect upon the melancholy spirit of Cowper as the harp of David upon Saul. Whenever the cloud seemed to be coming over him, her sprightly powers were exerted to dispel it. One afternoon, (Oct., 1782,) when he appeared more than usually depressed, she told him the story of John Gilpin, which had been told to her in her childhood, and which, in her relation, tickled his fancy as much as it has that of thousands and tens of thousands since, in his. The next morning he said to her that he had been kept awake during the greater part of the night by thinking of the story and laughing at it, and that he had turned it into a ballad. The ballad was sent to Mr. Unwin, who said, in reply, that it had made him laugh tears."—Southey, 8 See Campbell's Specimens, vol. vii. p. 346.

In 1784 appeared his « Task," a poem which, as Hazlitt well remarks, contains "a number of pictures of domestic comfort and social refinement which can hardly be forgotten but with the language itself." The same year he began his “ Tirocinium," a poem on the subject of education, the object of which was to censure the want of discipline, and the inattention to morals, which prevailed in public schools. In the same year also he commenced his translation of Homer, which was finished in 1791, and which is, on the whole, the best translation of Homer that we possess: that is, it gives us the best idea of the style and manner and sentiments of the great Grecian bard: for having adopted blank verse, he had to make no sacrifices of meaning or language to rhyme.

In the mean time, the loss of Lady Austen was, in a degree, made up by his cousin Lady Hesketh, who, two years after the publication of "The Task,” paid him a visit at Olney, and settling at Weston Hall, in the immediate neighborhood, provided a comfortable abode for him and Mrs. Unwin there, to which they removed in 1786; and here he executed his translation of Homer.

In 1792, the poet Hayley, afterwards his biographer, made him a visit at Weston, having corresponded with him previously. Of him, Cowper, in one of his letters, thus writes: "Everybody here has fallen in love with him, and wherever he goes everybody must. We have formed a friendship that, I trust, will last for life, and render us an edifying example to all future poets." While Hayley was with him, Mrs. Unwin had a severe paralytic stroke, which rendered her helpless for the rest of her life. To this most excellent woman, to whom we are indebted, perhaps, as the instrument of preserving Cowper's reason, and it may be his life, he addressed one of the most touching, and perhaps the most widely known of all his poems-« To Mary." Mr. Hayley says he believes it to be the last original piece he produced at Weston, and that he doubts whether any language on earth can exhibit a specimen of verse more exquisitely tender.

In 1794 his unhappy malady returned upon him with increased violence, and Lady Hesketh, with most commendable zeal and disinterestedness, devoted herself to the care of the two invalids. Mr. Hayley found him, on a third visit, plunged into a sort of melancholy torpor, so that when it was announced to him that his majesty had bestowed on him a pension of £300 a year, he seemed to take no notice of it. The next year it was thought best for both Cowper and Mrs. Unwin, that their location should be changed, and accordingly they were removed to the house of his kinsman, Mr. Johnson, at North Tuddenham, in Norfolk. The removal, however, had no good effect upon either, and the next year Mrs. Unwin died. Cowper would not believe she was dead, when the event was broken to him, and desired to see her. Mr. Johnson accompanied him to the room where lay her remains. He looked upon her for a few moments, then started away with a vehement, unfinished exclamation of anguish, and never afterwards uttered her name.

In the year 1799, some power of exertion returned to him; he completed the revisal of his Homer, and wrote the last original piece that he ever composed-The Cast-Away." It is founded on an incident mentioned in one of Anson's Voyages, and when we consider the circumstances under which it was written, and the parallelism constantly preying upon the diseased mind of the author, it is one of the most affecting pieces that ever was com· posed. His own end was now drawing near, and on the 5th of April, 1800, he breathed his last.

Cowper is eminently the David of English poetry, pouring forth, like the great Hebrew bard, his own deep and warm feelings in behalf of moral and religious truth. "His language,” says Campbell, "has such a masculine, idiomatic strength, and his manner, whether he rises into grace or falls into negligence, has so much plain and familiar freedom, that we read no poetry with a deeper conviction of its sentiments having come from the author's heart; and of the enthusiasm, in whatever he describes, having been unfeigned and unexaggerated. He impresses us with the idea of a being, whose fine spirit had been long enough in the mixed society of the world to be polished by its intercourse, and yet withdrawn so soon as to retain an unworldly degree of purity and simplicity." And a writer in the Retrospective Review remarks, that "the delightful freedom of his manner, so acceptable to those who had long been accustomed to a poetical school, of which the radical fault was constraint; his noble and tender morality; his fervent piety; his glowing and well-expressed patriotism; his descriptions, unparalleled in vividness and accuracy since Thomson; his playful humor and his powerful satire; the skilful construction of his verse, at least in the Task,' and the refreshing variety of that fascinating poem,-all together conspired to render him highly popular, both among the multitude of common readers, and among those who, possessed of poetical powers themselves, were capable of intimately appreciating those of a real poet."

We might thus fill many pages with encomiastic remarks upon the poetry of Cowper, but the reader would rather taste of the original for himself.1

THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IN ALL THINGS.

Happy the man, who sees a God employ'd
In all the good and ill that checker life!
Resolving all events, with their effects
And manifold results, into the will
And arbitration wise of the Supreme.
Did not his eye rule all things, and intend

The least of our concerns; (since from the least
The greatest oft originate;) could chance
Find place in his dominion, or dispose
One lawless particle to thwart his plan;
Then God might be surprised, and unforeseen
Contingence might alarm him, and disturb
The smooth and equal course of his affairs.
This truth, Philosophy, though eagle-eyed
In nature's tendencies, oft overlooks;
And, having found his instrument, forgets,
Or disregards, or, more presumptuous still,
Denies the power that wields it. God proclaims
His hot displeasure against foolish men,
That live an atheist life; involves the heaven
In tempests; quits his grasp upon the winds,
And gives them all their fury; bids a plague

1 Read-Hayley's Life, a most interesting piece of biography-Grimshaw's Life, prefixed to his edition in 8 vols., and Southey's Life, prefixed to his edition in 15 vols. The latter is the best edition of the poet. Read, also, articles in the Edinburgh Review, ii. 64, and iv. 273, and in the Quarterly xvi. 116, and xxx. 185. Also, an article in Jeffrey's Miscellanies. An admirable dissertation on the progress of English poetry, from Chaucer to Cowper, will be found in vol. ii. chap. 12, of Southey's edi tion of the poet.

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