yesterday, and yesterday began the Odyssey. It will be some time before I shall perceive myself travelling in another road; the objects around me are at present so much the same; Olympus, and a council of gods, meet me at my first entrance. To tell you the truth, I am weary of heroes and deities, and, with reverence be it spoken, shall be glad, for variety's sake, to exchange their company for that of a Cyclops."

Not only was Cowper rather weary of heroes and deities of the Iliad, but he began by and by to weary of the whole work of translation, for he says a few weeks later: "Let me once get well out of these two long stories, and if I ever meddle with such matters more, call me, as Fluellen says, 'a fool and an ass and a prating coxcomb.'" However, he kept on, and on January 29, 1789, was able to say to Bagot: "I am now in the eleventh book of the Odyssey, conversing with the dead. Invoke the muse in my behalf, that I may roll the stone of Sisyphus with some success. To do it as Homer has done it is, I suppose, in our verse and language, impossible; but I will hope not to labour altogether to as little purpose as Sisyphus himself did."

148. Mrs. King's "Douceurs."

In his letter to Lady Hesketh of April 14, 1788, Cowper had enclosed a poem which he styled "Benefactions: a poem in Shenstone's manner," and to which he subsequently gave the name of "Gratitude." In these lines he enumerates the many gifts he had received from his cousin the cap and ribbon that adorned his

LOVE BIC VI She had also presented f V & TEST hasne signering, which the poet's Send W- Chester, & tersi articles of Croa denezi wa fis kind in England, - and must mersud a thy griners."

In me flowing September a comber of presents came from Ms. King, including a housewife for Mrs. Caving the very thing she had just begun to want,” a topic case, some cakes, and some apples, in respect to which last Cowper says: The cakes and apples we wet remembering who sent them, and when I say ta also, that when we have neither apples nor cakes to eat, we will still remember you" And then he goes on, “You have been at Bedford Bedford is but twelve miles from Weston. When you are at home we are but eighteen miles asunder. Is it possible that such a paltry interval can separate us always? I will never believe it. Our house is going to be filled by a cousin of mine and her train, who will, I hope, spend the winter with us. I cannot, therefore, repeat my invitation at present, but expect me to be very troublesome on that theme next summer. I could almost scold you for not making Weston in your way home from Bedford.”

In January an “honest old "honest old neighbour" of Mrs. King's is the medium by which more presents arriveto wit, "two pair of bottle-stands, her own manufacture, a knitting-bag, and a piece of plum-cake." "The time," says Cowper, "seems approaching when

that good lady and we are to be better acquainted; and all these douceurs announce it." To Mrs. King he said: "You have sent me the very things I wanted, and which I should have continued to want, had not you sent them. As often as the wine is set on the table, I have said to myself, This is all very well; but I have no bottle-stands;' and myself as often replied, 'No matter; you can make shift without them.' Thus I and myself have conferred together many a day; and you, as if you had been privy to the conference, have kindly supplied the deficiency, and put an end to the debate for ever." In April more good things came, and among them Cowper's brother's poems, "whose handwriting," he says, "struck me the moment I saw it. They gave me some feelings of a melancholy kind, but not painful. I will return them to you by the next opportunity."

149. A High-Buck Holiday.-January, 1789.

In the opening month of 1789 an accident happened to Mrs. Unwin, which proved the beginning of her decline. It is thus alluded to by the poet: "I have more items than one by which to remember the late frost it has cost me the bitterest uneasiness. Mrs. Unwin got a fall on the gravel-walk covered with ice, which has confined her to an upper chamber ever since. She neither broke nor dislocated any bones: but received such a contusion below the hip, as crippled her completely. She now begins to recover, after having been helpless as a child for a whole fortnight,

but so slowly at present that her amendment is even now almost imperceptible." In reference to this calamity Cowper writes, in an unpublished letter of January 19 (1789): "I have been so many years accustomed either to feel trouble or to expect it, that habit has endued me with that sort of fortitude which I remember my old schoolmaster, Dr. Nicholl, used to call the passive valour of an ass.

On the 4th of February Mrs. Unwin was certainly on the road to recovery, "but the room over the study," which they occupied in order to save journeys up and down stairs, still continued the place of their habitation. By help of a staff too, on one side, "and a human prop on the other," she could move from chamber to chamber. But the great day was the 10th of February, "what we call here a High-Buck Holiday. On that day Mrs. Unwin descended, for the first time since her fall, into the study "-and thenceforward for some months she went on mending; but as the year waned Mrs. Unwin's health gave the poet fresh uneasiness. "She has almost constant headaches; almost a constant pain in her side, which nobody understands; and her lameness, within the last half year, is very little amended."

The ill-returns which he received from his kindness in educating and bringing up Dick Coleman did not deter Cowper from repeating the experiment, and in 1781 we find him possessed of a second protégée,

a little girl named Hannah Willson, who was the daughter of Dick Coleman's wife by a former husband. Hannah had been received into Cowper's household solely from charitable motives, the idea being to train her for a useful servant. In his second protégée Cowper was no more fortunate than in his first, for Hannah Willson, though in a different way, proved as unworthy of the poet's kindness as Dick Coleman.

Cowper's first reference to her is on July 22, 1781, when he describes to Newton a picnic in the spinney (see § 81). Those who made up the party, it may be remembered, were Cowper, Mrs. Unwin, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Lady Austen, and they were accompanied by Lady Austen's lackey and Hannah. Says Cowper, writing on the aforementioned date to Newton, "We were seven in number, including Hannah, who, though highly delighted with her jaunt, was not at all more pleased than her elders. She is as much delighted to-day with the acquisition of a sister born last night, but whether the rest of that noble family will have equal cause to rejoice in the event, is uncertain. Should she be followed by a troop, unless they practise Dean Swift's recommended method for the maintenance of the poor, it is not easy to say where they will find victuals, certainly not at Olney."

On Christmas Eve, 1784, Cowper writes: "We are agreeably disappointed in Hannah: we feared that through a natural deficiency of understanding we should always find her an encumbrance; but she has suddenly brightened up, and being put into such little offices as she is capable of, executes them with an expertness and alacrity at which we wonder. She has