some degree of alleviation from the reading of the religious poems of George Herbert. In 1759 he was appointed a Commissioner of Bankrupts. Still, however, he remained a negligent lawyer,-indifferent, or more than indifferent, to his profession. This temper of mind was encouraged by the fact of his having a small patrimony, upon which he partly relied for a subsistence.

Cowper continued living in the Temple for eleven years, up to 1763, by which time his private resources were nearly exhausted. According to his own subsequent account, his life in this quarter was an "uninterrupted course of sinful indulgence" it appears that he joined in the ordinary drinking habits of the day, and probably enough in other youthful dissipations, but this latter point is not distinctly set forth. Within this period he courted his cousin Theodora Cowper, sister of Lady Hesketh; but without any practical result save disappointment to himself, a marriage between the young people being objected to on prudential grounds. He also dallied with literature, contributing a few papers to a journal named The Connoisseur.

Early in 1763 occurred the event which determined, in a way wholly different from what it appeared to promise, the entire future career of Cowper. The appointment, which he now received from his cousin, to the honourable and lucrative post of First Clerk (or Reading Clerk, and Clerk of the Committees) to the House of Lords, would have seemed to be a possible turning-point in his fortunes, by way of a definite and commodious settlement in life it proved to be a turning-point of a very different kind-the occasion of madness, religion, poetry, and literary fame. Cowper was a young man of extreme and painful nervousness-nervousness which reached the morbid stage, and was but too capable of passing beyond that into the insane stage. His new duties required him to be often in personal attendance before the House of Lords. Any such sort of publicity was, as he has phrased it, "mortal poison" to himself hence he voluntarily solicited almost immediately, and obtained, a transfer from the First Clerkship to a

somewhat inferior position, that of Clerk of the Journals, to which the same objection did not apply. But here lay another pitfall for his timorous and wavering steps. The political combinations of the time made it convenient for the lords to suspect that Cowper's cousin, in appointing him to this lower situation, and transferring the then occupant of it to the higher, must have entered into some corrupt bargain. The consequence was that Cowper was summoned to submit himself to an examination at the bar of their Lordships' house before commencing his functions, so as to prove his competence. For this purpose he studied the work of the Journals for about half a year, with little success, and less assistance from his destined subordinates. In October 1763 the terrible moment was impending. He could not make up his mind to resign, for that would be construed into a confession damaging to his relative's honour: so he would actually have to appear at the bar of the house, be examined, be badgered, probably break down and fail. What refuge but insanity? Cowper longed for insanity, but it would not come : he at least supposed that it would not and did not come,-but we, judging the facts by the light of after events, and indeed on their own showing, need scarcely hesitate to say that so monstrous a longing, founded on so trumpery a cause, was itself the longing of a lunatic. Failing insanity, what refuge but suicide? Laudanum first, and next drowning, commended themselves to the judicial intellect of the future poet of Stanzas Subjoined to the Bills of Mortality: but even this was denied him—the hand of Providence immediately, and in fact miraculously, held him back. A penknife was but a pis aller: that proved equally ineffectual when matched against the present deity. "One way remains," as Shelley has said of a graver theologic complexity. Cowper, who could not succeed in self-poisoning, drowning, or stabbing, did succeed in hanging himself. A garter was the sufficient means; but still the end failed, he fell down after losing his consciousness. He now informed his kinsman of these attempts, and received the obvious reply that he could not,

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under the circumstances, take up the appointment which had been conferred upon him. On the very day fixed for his examination-dies illa-he resigned.

The poet (as he has left it on record) did not remember having felt any serious religious impressions earlier than this his thirty-second year-save one or two that proved altogether transitory. His time was now come. He felt a terrible conviction of sin, and despair of salvation: he thought that he had, long before at Southampton, committed "the unpardonable sin," by not ascribing to direct divine illumination a very sudden and strong sensation of happiness which he had then experienced. At last, early in December 1763, he became clearly and undeniably mad, immediately after feeling as if a mighty blow had struck his brain; mad to the eyes of those about him, and mad to his own afterknowledge. We need not, however, date Cowper's insanity so late as December, nor be very confident that it was over for the time (for it undoubtedly returned afterwards) by the middle of July 1764, which is the date specified by himself. The man who could make up his mind to drink laudanum out of a basin, solely in order to escape an examination before the House of Lords preliminary to occupying a snug berth, may be pronounced mad at that moment, as safely as at the time, shortly ensuing, when he supposed he had committed the unpardonable sin by not assuming himself to be God-inspired when he was happy, or at that other time when he had a sensation of a blow on his brain. And the man who could in after years, and believing himself entirely rational, write of his attempt with the laudanum, “With the most confirmed resolution I reached forth my hand towards the basin, when the fingers of both hands were so closely contracted as if bound with a cord, and became entirely useless, it had the air of a divine interposition "was still in a state of mind that one would hardly call sane. In fact, it appears to me more than questionable whether Cowper was strictly sound-minded in any stage of his exceptional religious experiences. If he was insane when he believed himself to be secure of damnation, intermediately

between the attempted suicide and the acknowledged raving madness, I do not see why we should suppose that he was perfectly sane when the religious exaltation took another turn, and he regarded himself as converted, and a monument of the invisible miracle of grace. In his autobiographical narrative he treats himself as sane at all these dates, although insane for some months betwixt his first conviction of damnation, and his conviction of salvation; and in the same narrative he relates, as real facts of divine interposition against his suicidal attempts, various details which were seemingly no more than his own hallucinations of the time, or deranged reminiscences in after years. There are clearly the strongest grounds, from the evidence of dates and otherwise, for saying that the conviction of damnation was a form of religious mania; and I know of no very good reason why the conviction of salvation should have been an inspiration of unclouded intellect. The most clearly perceptible difference between the two cases is that the conviction of damnation naturally made Cowper extremely unhappy, and culminated in ravings; while the conviction of salvation made him happy, and culminated in placidity and in hymn-writing. Whether the latter conviction was any more rational than the former is quite a separate question.

At the present moment we have to deal with Cowper confessedly and violently mad. He was placed under the care of Dr. Cotton at St. Alban's; and remained there under careful tending many months, constantly oppressed at first with the sense of everlasting reprobation. One day in July 1764 he opened a Bible at the third chapter of the Epistle to the Romans-"Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past." Cowper read the words, was relieved from his load of anguish, and was from that day a converted man. Still, it was not considered expedient to discharge him as yet from the asylum-and this fact again is a

weighty suggestion that his religious felicity was as much a form of mania as his religious despair: he remained under Dr. Cotton's superintendence for nearly a year ensuing. In June 1765 he did at last quit the asylum. He resigned, chiefly in order to avoid resuming a London life, his position as Commissioner of Bankrupts, which brought him only the small income of about £60 per annum : his means thus became extremely straitened. He took up his residence at Huntingdon, with a view to being near a younger brother then at Cambridge.

At Huntingdon he formed the friendship which constituted the tranquil happiness of the great majority of his remaining life he became acquainted with the Rev. Mr. Unwin and his family. These kindly and sympathizing neighbours, observing his depressed spirits and scanty means, readily entered into an arrangement whereby Cowper became a boarder and inmate in their house : he entered the hospitable doors on the 11th of November 1765, and seldom had any other home thenceforward than with the Unwin family. Mr. Unwin himself was soon lost from the circle, dying in 1767. Cowper and Mrs. Unwin-the "Mary" of his poems -then removed to Olney in Buckinghamshire, being attracted thither by their special esteem for the curate, Mr. Newton, the well-known evangelical clergyman. Here Cowper zealously identified himself with the religious interests of the society around him; his charities of mind and heart expanded; and he became, as far as the interruptions of his constitutional malady allowed, a happy man. Newton obtained nis co-operation on the volume of Hymns he was then preparing, so well known as The Olney Hymns, published in 1776. A fair proportion of the whole number are by Cowper, who thus, at the more than mature age of forty-four or forty-five, first took an appreciable position in the field of literature and of poetry. This daylight of his manhood was not without its clouds. Attacks of mania recurred between 1773 and 1776, consequent partly upon the death of his brother; and they put a stop to the writing of his hymns before he had gone to any great length with

Mr.