THE LIFE OF WILLIAM COWPER. CHAPTER I. His parentage-Loss of his mother-Poetic description of her character-First school-Cruelty he experienced there-First serious impressions-Is placed under the care of an eminent oculist-Entrance upon Westminster School-Character while there Removal thence-Entrance upon an attorney's officeWant of employment there-Unfitness for his professionEarly melancholy impressions. WILLIAM COWPER was born at Great Berkhamstead, in Hertfordshire, November 15, 1731. His father, Dr. John Cowper, chaplain to King George the Second, was the second son of Spencer Cowper, who was Chief Justice of Cheshire, and afterwards a Judge in the Court of Common Pleas, and whose brother William, first Earl Cowper, was, at the same time, Lord High Chancellor of England. His mother was Anne, daughter of Roger Donne, Esq. of Ludham Hall, Norfolk, who had a common ancestry with the celebrated Dr. Donne, Dean of St. Paul's. In reference to this lady, it has been justly observed, by one of the poet's best biographers, "That the highest blood in the realm flowed in the veins of the modest and unassuming Cowper; his mother having descended through the families of Hippesley of Throughley, in Sussex, and Pellet, of Bolney, in the same county, from the several noble houses of West, Knollys, Carey, Bullen, Howard, and Mowbray, and so, by four different lines, from Henry the Third, King of England." Though, as the same writer properly remarks, "distinctions of this nature can shed no additional lustre on the memory of Cowper, yet genius, however exalted, dis dains not, while it boasts not, the splendour of ancestry; and royalty itself may be pleased, and perhaps benefited, by discovering its kindred to such piety, such purity, and such talents as his." Very little is known of the habits and disposition of Cowper's mother. From the following epitaph, however, inscribed on a monument, erected by her husband in the chancel of St. Peter's church, Great Berkhamstead, and composed by her niece, who afterwards became Lady Walsingham, she appears to have been a lady of the most amiable temper and agreeable manners :— Here lies, in early years bereft of life, The best of mothers, and the kindest wife, Pray'd Heaven to bless him with her latest breath. These lines, though weak, are as herself sincere. After giving birth to several children, this lady died in child-bed, in her thirty-seventh year; leaving only two sons, John the younger, and William the elder, who is the subject of this memoir. Cowper was only six years old when he lost his mother; and how deeply he was affected by her early death, may be inferred from the following exquisitely tender lines, composed more than fifty years afterwards, on the receipt of her portrait from a relation in Norfolk :— "My mother! when I learned that thou wast dead, And, turning from my nursery-window, drew But though I less deplored thee, ne'er forgot. I pricked them into paper with a pin, (And thou wast happier than myself the while, And day by day some current's thwarting force Deprived thus early of his excellent and most affectionate parent, he was sent, at this tender age, to a large school at Market-street, Hertfordshire, under the care of Dr. Pitman. Here he had hardships of different kinds to conflict with, which he felt more sensibly, in consequence of the tender manner in which he had been treated at home. His chief sorrow, however, arose from the cruel treatment he met with from a boy in the same school, about fifteen years of age, who on all occasions persecuted him with the most unrelenting barbarity; and who never seemed pleased except when he was tormenting him. This savage treatment impressed such a dread upon Cowper's tender mind of this boy, that he was afraid to lift up his eyes upon him higher than his knees; and he knew him better by his shoe-buckles than by any other part of his dress. It was at this school, and on one of these painful occasions, that the mind of Cowper, which was afterwards to become imbued with religious feelings of the highest order, received its first serious impressions-a circumstance which cannot fail to be interesting to every Christian reader, and the more so as detailed in his own words. "One day, as I was sitting alone on a bench in the school, melancholy, and almost ready to weep at the recollection of what I had already suffered, and expecting at the same time my tormentor every moment, these words of the Psalmist came into my mind I will not be afraid of what man can do unto me.' I applied this to my own case, with a degree of trust and confidence in God, that would have been no disgrace to a much more experienced Christian. Instantly I perceived in myself a briskness and a cheerfulness of spirit which I had never before experienced, and took several paces up and down the room with joyful alacrity. Happy had it been for me, if this early effort towards a dependance on the blessed God, had been frequently repeated. But, alas! it was the first and the last, between infancy and manhood." From this school he was removed in his eighth year; and |