intermission. A small etching in my possession (probably by Mr. James Storer) shows Orchard Side as it appeared in the poet's time. Under it, in neat lettering, are the words, "View in Olney, Bucks, September, 1819." It represents the house with cornice and imitation embattlements which hide the roof, and two doors instead of three.

To its castellated appearance Cowper himself refers in a letter to Unwin (July 3, 1786), written just after his removal to Weston. At first sight of the oddlooking place Unwin was shocked. In his eyes it had the appearance of a prison, and he did not like the thought of his mother living in it. Says Cowper: "Your view of it was not only just, but prophetic. It had not only the aspect of a place built for the purposes of incarceration, but has actually served that purpose through a long, long period, and we have been the prisoners. But a gaol-delivery is at hand; the bolts and bars are to be loosed, and we shall escape."

The part of the house occupied by Cowper and Mrs. Unwin-for they never occupied the whole-was the western half, which is the farther of the two from Silver End. It should be borne in mind in reading this description that Cowper's House faces north. "You have not forgotten, perhaps," he writes to the Rev. W. Unwin (August 25, 1781), "that the building we inhabit consists of two mansions. And because you have only seen the inside of that part of it which is in our occupation, I therefore inform you that the other end of it is by far the most superb as well as the most commodious."

The yard at the back of the house, which reminds

us of the incident of the viper, celebrated in the poem called "The Colubriad," was followed by a long narrow garden threaded by a gravel path thirty yards long, at the end of which stood the small erection called "The Summer House," which for the greatness of its renown rivals even Cowper's world-famous parlour. As for the gravel walk, "though it afforded but indifferent scope to the locomotive faculty," it proved in inclement weather a boon. Cowper, indeed, went so far as to say (to Newton, August 5, 1786) that it was "all they had to move on for eight months in the year"—a statement that might have been accurate with regard to Mrs. Unwin, who probably considered that in winter time female feet,

"Too weak to struggle with tenacious clay,
Or ford the rivulets,"

are best at home; but scarcely so as far as Cowper was concerned. Neither badness of roads nor dulness of weather were any obstacle when he wanted an airing; at any rate, according to his own account, in the description of the weather-house :—

"Fearless of humid air and gathering rains,

Forth steps the man—an emblem of myself.”

Indeed, those simple critics who have assumed from a few passages written when Cowper was in an "unked" mood (as the Buckinghamshire people say), that his situation at Olney was one worthy of the utmost commiseration, can only be laughed at.

Between the poet's garden and the vicarage garden was an orchard-Mrs. Aspray's orchard-the same

that gave the name to Cowper's house, and in order that Cowper and his friend Newton might be able to visit each other without going through the street, they had a doorway made through the vicarage garden wall. For the privilege of passing through the orchard they paid a guinea a year, and hence the name by which it is generally known-Guinea Field. It was an incident that occurred in Mrs. Aspray's orchard that gave origin to Cowper's poetical fable of "The Raven."

45. Early Days at Olney.

Cowper was now thirty-six years of age; his friend, the Rev. John Newton, was forty-two. A word or two may be permitted about the other men who have made the neighbourhood of Olney in a manner famous. Scott had not yet arrived here. He was at this time only a lad of twenty, disgraced and scorned, yet with plenty of spirit in him, toiling and rebelling on his father's farm at Braytoft. William Carey, afterwards the eminent missionary, certainly was innocent of Oriental languages. A child of six, he had done little besides play about his father's cottage at Paulerspury. Of another personage belonging to this neighbourhood, however, the literary world had heard a good deal. Two years previously (1765) Dr. Percy had published his celebrated "Reliques of English Poetry," written at the little parsonage of Easton Maudit, five miles east of Olney; but whether Cowper ever met Percy, or even read his book, we do not know. With the surrounding gentry Cowper,