pared. He had noticed the rapid advances the last messenger was making towards his venerable friend Mrs Unwin; and on the day, 17th Dec. 1796, when this excellent servant of God fell asleep in Jesusthe precise moment of her departure could not be marked, he said to a confidential domestic, "Sally, is there life above stairs?" During the dying moments of Mrs Unwin, Dr Johnson tried to occupy his relative's attention, by reading to him in the room below. He had not continued long when he was called out of the room to be informed of Mrs Unwin's death; and returned in a few seconds, without being asked as to the cause of the interruption. Dr Johnson thought it a fit opportunity to communicate the painful intelligence of their friend's exit; which he accordingly did, with a feeling compounded of tenderness and cheerfulness.-The communication did not agitate Cowper so much as was dreaded; yet it was heard by him with sensible emotion. He afterwards accompanied his kinsman to the chamber of the deceased, to view the corpse. The time chosen for this purpose was in the dusk of the evening; when the afflicting spectacle, as being but indistinctly seen, might agitate him the less. He looked at it for a few moments, and suddenly burst away, with a "vehement but unfinished sentence of passionate sorrow." Mrs Unwin's name was never after pronounced by him.

The whole of the following year, 1797, was passed by him in a way similar to that of the preceding-in listening to reading, in walking, and in riding. The year 1798, only varied from the course of its precursor, in the poet's removing alternately to the coast, and home again, at short intervals. The progress of his disease, was now very marked.-Having received, about this time a visit from the Dowager Lady Spencer, and likewise from Sir John Throckmorton, notwithstanding his long and affectionate attachment to both, it was with some considerable difficulty that he could express to them his sense of their kindness and friend

S ship. The end of 1799 left him sensibly more debilitated than he was at its commencement; and in January of the following year, the swelling in his ancles and feet alarmed his friends with fears of dropsy. Very soon their apprehensions were but too accurately verified. By the month of March, the symptoms of that fatal distemper, were quite unequivocal. Mr Rose, whose visits had so often dispelled, for a season, at least, his desponding feelings, passed about two months with him, at this time, without the gratification of perceiving his friend benefited by his kindness. His departure, however, evidently affected the susceptible heart of the amiable invalid. Lady Hesketh felt an anxious desire to visit him once more ; but the infirm state of her health, occasioned principally by her devotion to the promotion of Cowper's comfort, when tending him at Weston, deprived her of this satisfaction. On the 19th of April, his weakness had so much increased, that his friends were apprehensive of his last end being at hand. He lingered on, however, till the 25th, without suffering apparently, much corporal pain; but his mind remaining buried in such hopeless dejection, as to repel the consoling suggestion of his pious relative, "that he was on the eve of release from all pain and from evil of every kind, of admission into that state of unspeakable happiness which his merciful Redeemer had prepared for him."-To this he exclaimed "Oh! spare me, spare me, you know it to be false !" A cordial presented to him by the affectionate hand of one whom he tenderly regarded, Miss Perowne, was rejected with the abrupt question "what can it signify? His breathing had become very rapid;

but he exhibited none of those distortions of countenance often witnessed immediately before death. At five o'clock on Friday morning, a mortal change had taken place in his features; he lay, however, in a state of insensibility till five in the afternoon, when he breathed his last. It must have been about this hour, although his kinsman, and his surgeon, together

with three other attendants who were watching him unremittingly, could not specify the moment of his decease. His features retained the same interesting appearance as before his death, and may very naturally be considered as more expressive of that peace and joy, to which his disembodied spirit had winged its flight, than of that dejection to which it was subject, when lodged in its clay tenement.

His mortal remains were buried in St Edmond's chapel, in the church of East Dereham, on Saturday the 2d May. Over his grave a monument is erected, bearing the following inscription, from the pen of Mr Hayley:

IN MEMORY OF

WILLIAM COWPER, ESQ.
BORN IN HERTFORDSHIRE, 1731.
BURIED IN THIS CHURCH, 1800.

Ye, who with warmth the public triumph feel
Of talents, dignified by sacred zeal,
Here to devotion's bard, devoutly just,

Pay your fond tribute due to Cowper's dust!
England, exulting in his spotless fame,

Ranks with her dearest sons his fav'rite name:
Sense, fancy, wit, suffice not all to raise
So clear a title to affection's praise:
His highest honours to the heart belong;
His virtues formed the magic of his song.

We shall not lengthen the narrative of Cowper's life with an elaborate dissertation on his merits as an author, the impression produced by reading his history will be both more agreeable and more permanent on a mind of sensibility, when left to its own meditations. The blandness of his manners, the ingenuousness of his mind, the delicacy of his taste, the benevolence of his heart, and the ardour of his piety, are every where displayed, in all the productions of his pen, and were exhibited when disease did not interpose in every period of his life. As he had no personal enemies when he lived, save those who hated his religion, so, any unfriendly treatment his mem

ory has experienced, is justly traceable to the same cause. The Reviewer formerly alluded to, has committed a most unpardonable trespass, in this respect, by asserting," that though sufficiently steady and confident in the opinions he had adopted, he was very little inclined, in general, to force them upon the conviction of others, the warmth of his religious zeal made an occasional exception!"- When and where did the author of the Task evince any approach to intolerance? We defy the Reviewer to cite, from any of the writings of Cowper, a single phrase, that can be even tortured into a semblance of proof of this rash assumption. In politics, he was no partizan : measures, and not men, influenced his judgment; and amid all the boasted liberality of certain writers of the present day, who prove the hollowness of their title to the term, by attempting, through ridicule, to compel their opponents to be of their enlarged and charitable views, we shall in vain look for such enlightened and truly liberal sentiments as the following from Cowper's Letters: "There is no true whig who wishes all power in the hands of his own party. The division of it, which the lawyers call tripartite, is exactly what he desires; and hewould have neither king, lords, nor commons unequally trusted, or in the smallest degree predominant. Such a whig am I-and such whigs are the true friends of the constitution."-" The dissenters, I think, Catholics and others, have all a right to the privileges of all other Englishmen, because to deprive them is persecution; and persecution on any account, but especially on a religious one, is an abomination."-Such were his professions. What his practice was, the reader may readily conceive, when he is told, that Cowper counted among his dearest friends, several clergymen of the Episcopal establishment, of which himself was a member, from conscience; that he lived on the most confidential footing with the Rev Mr Greatheed; was not less intimate with the Rev Mr Bull, ministers of the Independents; and associated with,

and highly esteemed a whole family of Roman Catholics, the Throckmortons.

The publication of the Task formed a new era in the history of English poetry:-not that before this there had been nothing produced under the name of descriptive poetry; but, entirely disregarding the affected and puerile effusions in verse, styled Pastorals, the only descriptive poem of any merit that had appeared before this, was " The Seasons" of Thomson-which, though a poem containing some of the finest passages of descriptive poetry in the language, and is remarkable, in many places, for the felicities of its diction, is nevertheless oppressed, as a whole, by the general heaviness of style, and the monotony of versification. Cowper's just taste and warm sensibility admirably qualified him for painting rural subjects. The fields, the woods, the garden, the cottage, and sentient being connected with them, were ail appropriated by him, and received, from his magic pencil, many exquisite delineations. It must be confessed, however, that his range, in this field, is limited to tranquil scenes, to the less majestic but more cultivated landscape. With a command of language, scarcely inferior to Milton, and with a fearlessness in choosing for himself his illustrations, and even the structure of his verse, that resemble the author of Paradise Lost, he never rises to such awful sublimity, nor indulges in so prodigal a display of classical literature. To Cowper's mind external nature never fails to suggest a train of reflections natural and unforced, amiable and poetical. He never detains you long with mere description. You are never tired with reading Cowper, in spite of the occasional prosaicalness of his style, and ruggedness of his versification (which he has in common with his avowed model Churchill,) few poems are so frequently taken up, and so generally read as the Task. In the terseness and vigour of his style, he often reminds you of the last mentioned poet, and also in the edge of his satire; and yet the latter quality often indicated malevolence