riage, had not, first, his circumstances been so precarious, and had not, in the second place, the father objected to the match, on the ostensible ground that the parties were too nearly related in law. Probably his real reason was, that he knew Cowper's hereditary tendency to insanity. The cousins, however, continued to love, although the father's will forbade any farther intercourse, and the after incidents in Cowper's sad story put their marriage entirely out of the question. He vented his anguish in plaintive verse, addressed to a sister of hers, who, as Lady Hesketh, was destined to play an important part in his history on an after day. Theodora cherished his memory-long and carefully preserved the copies of poems he had given her, and is suspected of having done him effective pecuniary service at a future period of his life. That this disappointment produced Cowper's malady, is not true-for that unquestionably lay in the blood-but that it, along with many other untoward circumstances, increased its virulence, seems certain. Alas!

"The course of true love never did run smooth,"

and even although it had, and the two true and warm hearts had become one, the calm might only have been temporary— "The torrent's smoothness, ere it dash below"

and what a miserable aggravation to his malady would the fact of his marriage have been!

Cowper had, as early as fourteen, been a ❝ dabbler in verse." He began with a translation of an elegy of Tibullus. When seventeen he wrote an imitation of the "Splendid Shilling," on finding the heel of a shoe. At the Temple he spent much of his time in inditing both verse and prose, most of which he gave away to the help of less gifted and needier scribes, who published them with their own names. He became at this time a member of the Nonsense Club, which was composed of seven Westminster men, who dined together every Thursday. It included several of those we have already named, with one or two remarkable additions. But none of them did Cowper love so well as Joseph Hill-afterwards characterised by him as

“An honest man, close-button'd to the chin,

Broad cloth without, and a warm heart within."

Hill was at once a lawyer and a lover of letters, an amusing companion, and a steadfast friend. He wrought hard in his chambers all the week, and on Saturdays might be seen "reading upon sunshiny banks, and contemplating the clouds as he lay on his back." This was the very man after Cowper's own heart; and deep, and clear, and constant, and embalmed at last in energetic verse, was their friendship.

During these years Cowper seems to have been-till his disappointment in love-tolerably happy, often even gay, sometimes, we fear, rather dissipated. From the character of his companions he could hardly have been otherwise. He was the daily and nightly associate of Lloyd and Thornton, sometimes, too, of Churchill; and those excesses, the effects of which Churchill's huge and iron frame as yet threw off from it, "like dew-drops from the lion's mane," must have told terribly on the delicate nervous system of Cowper. He did not, however, try it very often, and he never allowed his mind to be idle. He kept up his acquaintance with Latin and Greek, and read through all the Iliad and Odyssey, carefully and critically, with a friend, having gone over them before, more rapidly and slightly, at Westminster School. He contributed papers to the Connoisseur, and the St James' Magazine, and his papers in both are exceedingly characteristic of his fine sense, keen discrimination, and delicate humour. He translated, in conjunction with his brother, a considerable portion of Voltaire's "Henriade." Altogether, he seemed busy and cheerful, and, perhaps, many thought of him in the spirit of the fine future lines of his best biographer

"How happily the days

Of Thalaba went by!"

But all this was false and hollow. It was the flowery verge of a smouldering volcano. In the first place, his small patrimony was wasting away, and as his guineas were disappearing, he felt that he could no more prevent the process, than he could prevent the melting of a patch of snow in the spring sun. Then he had neglected his professional studies, and was not

qualified for the only offices from which he could expect either emolument or subsistence. With some twinges of remorse, too, were doubtless blending the sighs of a hopeless affection. But the great difficulty was, how to rid himself of the meagre fiend-Want—which was beginning to stare him in the face. At this time, while talking one day on his affairs with a friend, he expressed his hope that the clerk of the House of Lords should die, that, through Major Cowper, his kinsman, who had the place at his disposal, he might obtain it. This, he afterwards in deep contrition said, was "spoken in the spirit of a murderer." Alas! if this be so, who is blameless? What man that lives has not a thousand times, in levity, or in momentary anger, uttered similar expressions—nay, entertained similar desires? And is not, if the law be carried out to its rigour, "every one that hateth his brother a murderer?" Surely, surely Cowper was here applying too sternly a test, which, in condemning him, would condemn all men, and which would, moreover, confound the guilt of the idle WISH with that of the determined purpose, the secret influence, or the overt act.

At all events, his wish was fulfilled. In what De Quincey would call a "spirit of accommodation," such as he tells us produced so many windfalls of good fortune to Wordsworth, the clerk of the journals dropped off, and two other officialsthe reading clerk and the clerk of the committees-resigned, and thus any one out of three situations, all valuable, fell within the reach of Cowper. Major Cowper immediately called on him and offered him two of the most profitable places, reserving the other for Mr Arnold. The kind promptitude of his relative touched the heart of the poet, who was besides dazzled at the splendid prospect opened so providentially up to him. He accepted the offer eagerly, but that moment felt, he says, "a dagger planted in his heart." He went home in deep dejection; and, fancying himself unfit for the duties of the office, he wrote to his friend, and proposed resigning the more lucrative offices in favour of Mr Arnold, and succeeding him as clerk of the journals, a much easier post. This was at once arranged, and he became, for the moment, contented and calm. But an opposition arising to his friend's right of

presentation, and a powerful party in the Lords insisting that the new clerk to the journals should be examined at the bar of the house, Cowper was seized with a fit of incontrollable terror. In vain did he try to qualify himself for the examination by attending daily at the office, and studying the journals. He was seized with a nervous fever, and, when partially recovered, fled to Margate. There air and exercise. restored him; but as soon as he came back to town, his malady returned in tenfold force. We cannot dwell on the melancholy history that follows, which, even in the graceful language of his own narrative, is absolutely appalling. Suffice it to say that he at one time cursed and blasphemed his Maker; at another, like Manfred, "prayed for madness as a blessing," and repeatedly attempted self-murder. Every one remembers how, in one of these frightful attempts, he was saved through the breaking of a garter, by which he had strung himself to his own bed. At last he obtained transient relief by resigning the situation. But his system and soul were thoroughly unhinged. His days continued to be days of darkness; his nights, nights of despair. Satan, he imagined, had become a constant inmate of his soul, and was tormenting him before the time, now in his waking hours by horrible suggestions, and now in sleep by the dark machinery of dreams. He felt oppressed under a constant sense of God's wrath; his sins seemed all arranged before him like the open mouths of lions ready to devour him up. There was a "dreadful sound in his ears," a dull dead pressure on his brain, and a perpetual flashing as of fire before his eyes. He heard the flaming sword of Eden turning audibly over his head, a sound mingled with the distant moaning of the waves of hell. In vain he sought relief from books; every page he opened seemed bordered by the blackness of darkness, and in vain he sought aid from his kind brother John, who, when he came at his call, found him crying out, "O brother, I am damned!" He sent for Martin Madan, his friend, the chaplain of the Lock Hospital, who ministered him some consolation by pointing to the peace-speaking blood of Christ. At last his intellect, which had hitherto remained quite entire, reeled and wavered. He lost consciousness of everything, except a vague sense of

sin, such as oft oppresses men in dreams, and a "certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation." He was now veritably insane, and it was thought expedient to remove him to a private asylum, kept by Dr Cotton, at St Albans.

Cowper has declined to discover the "secrets of his prisonhouse." He tells us only that the differentia of his madness lay in an infinite self-loathing and abhorrence. He thought himself lost, and justly lost, because he was the most execrable monster that ever polluted humanity! The Bible he threw away as a book in which he had no longer any interest or portion. But Dr Cotton was exceedingly kind, as Cowper has so beautifully acknowledged in one of his poems, and gradually he became somewhat calmer. At this juncture, his brother, who was a fellow of Bene't College, Cambridge, visited him. They walked out to the garden. John laboured to convince him that his expectation of sudden judgment was a delusion. He burst into tears, and said, "If it be a delusion, then am I the happiest of human beings." He dated his recovery from that moment. He re-opened his Bible. He saw once more the benignant face of his Saviour,-of Him who so often in the days of his flesh had compassion on the "lunatics and the sore vexed; " the doctrine of Christ as the Propitiation broke on him like the morning; he wept like a child for very gladness; the cloud was fairly burst, and he came out of it, not a "sadder," but certainly a "wiser" and a humbler man, and was now to be seen clothed and in his right mind, sitting at the feet of Jesus. Although perfectly restored, he continued for a whole additional year at St Albans, enjoying friendly and Christian communion with the amiable, talented, and pious man who had been one important agent in his cure.

He had now made up his mind to forsake the world, and, especially, never to enter London a city with which so many dark associations were connected. Wordsworth, in his "Ruth," speaking of the rocks and scenery which, by nursing a romantic and ill-regulated sensibility, had wrought her ruin, adds

"She never charged them with the wrongs

That they had done to her."

For why? because they were the mere passive instruments.