the almost singular felicity of having enjoyed the company of so amiable and so near a relation so long. Your lot and mine, in this respect, have been very different, as indeed in almost every other. Your mother lived to see you rise, at least to see you comfortably established in the world. Mine dying when I was six years old, did not live to see me sink in it. You may remember with pleasure, while you live, a blessing vouchsafed to you so long, and I while I live must regret a comfort of which I was deprived so early. I can truly say, that not a week passes (perhaps I might with equal veracity say a day) in which I do not think of her. Such was the impression her tenderness made upon me, though the opportunity she had for showing it was so short. But the ways of God are equal; and when I reflect on the pangs she would have suffered had she been a witness of all mine, I see more cause to rejoice than to mourn that she was hidden in the grave so soon."

Perhaps the following explanation of the notice of Bishop Bagot ought to form a note to the Poem on Public Schools: it places Cowper's love of justice in a strong light, and it would be unjust to him to pass it over:

"I intended in my last to have given you my reasons for the compliment that I paid Bishop Bagot, lest knowing, that I have no personal connection with him, you should suspect me of having done it at rather too much at a venture. In the first place, then, I wished the world to

know that I have no objection to a bishop, quià bishop. In the second place, the brothers were all five my schoolfellows, and very amiable and valuable boys they were. Thirdly, Lewis, the

bishop, had been rudely and coarsely treated in the Monthly Review, on account of a sermon which appeared to me, when I read their extract from it, to deserve the highest commendations, as exhibiting explicit proof of both his good sense and his unfeigned piety. For these causes, me thereunto moving, I felt myself happy in an opportunity to do public honour to a worthy man, who had been publicly traduced."

There is much playful sarcasm upon the manner in which persons in an elevated station sometimes treat their inferiors in a letter which he wrote to Mr. Unwin in March, 1785: "I was pleased too, to see my opinion of his Lordship's nonchalance upon a subject that you had so much at heart, completely verified. I do not know that the eye of a nobleman was ever dissected. I cannot help supposing, however, that were that organ, as it exists in the head of such a personage, to be accurately examined, it would be found to differ materially in its construction from the eye of a commoner; so very different is the view that men in an elevated and in an humble station have of the same object. What appears great, sublime, beautiful, and important to you and to me, when submitted to my Lord, or his Grace, and submitted too with the utmost

humility, is either too minute to be visible at all, or, if seen, seems trivial and of no account."

In tracing Cowper's career from his letters, a painful duty is continually forced upon his biographer of noticing the occasional presence of that calamity which lay like an incubus upon his spirits. To have introduced all the allusions to the subject which occur in his correspondence would have needlessly wounded the reader's feelings, but the existence of that malady forms part of the Poet's history, and its occurrence, force, and duration, must necessarily be sometimes adverted to. It would be curious, were it possible, to examine the verses which were composed when the cloud was darkest with those which were written when he was free from the obscuration. In May, 1785, he says, in a letter to Mr. Newton,

"I am sensible of the tenderness and affectionate kindness with which you recollect our past intercourse, and express your hopes of my future restoration. I too, within the last eight months, have had my hopes, though they have been of short duration, cut off, like the foam upon the waters. Some previous adjustments, indeed, are necessary, before a lasting expectation of comfort can have place in me. There are those persuasions in my mind which either entirely forbid the entrance of hope, or, if it enter, immediately eject it. They are incompatible with any such inmate, and must be turned out themselves before so desirable a guest can possibly have secure possession. This

you say will be done. It may be, but it is not done yet; nor has a single step in the course of God's dealings with me been taken towards it. If I mend, no creature ever mended so slowly that recovered at last. I am like a slug or snail that has fallen into a deep well: slug as he is, he performs his descent with an alacrity proportioned to his weight: but he does not crawl up again quite so fast. Mine was a rapid plunge; but my return to daylight, if I am indeed returning, is leisurely enough."

A description of the place in which the greater part of the works of a favourite author were composed is interesting:

"I write in a nook that I call my Boudoir. It is a summer-house not much bigger than a sedan-chair, the door of which opens into the garden, that is now crowded with pinks, roses, and honeysuckles, and the window into my neighbour's orchard. It formerly served an apothecary, now dead, as a smoking-room; and under my feet is a trap-door, which once covered a hole in the ground where he kept his bottles. At present, however, it is dedicated to sublimer uses. Having lined it with garden-mats, and furnished it with a table and two chairs, here I write all that I write in summer time, whether to my friends or to the public. It is secure from all noise, and a refuge from all intrusion; for intruders sometimes trouble me in the winter evenings at Olney. But (thanks to my Boudoir!) I can now hide

myself from them. A poet's retreat is sacred. They acknowledge the truth of that proposition, and never presume to violate it."

To the appearance of the second volume of his Poems, Cowper was indebted for a renewal of his friendship with his cousin Lady Hesketh. After her marriage she lived some time abroad, which, with other eircumstances, interrupted their intercourse for many years, but the perusal of "The Task" recalled him to her memory, and she wrote him a very kind letter. In his reply, written in October, 1785, after expressing the delight which her communication had occasioned him, he said,

"I can truly boast of an affection for you, that neither years, nor interrupted intercouse, have at all abated. I need only recollect how much I valued you once, and with how much cause, immediately to feel a revival of the same value; if that can be said to revive, which at the most has only been dormant for want of employment, but I slander it when I say that it has slept. A thousand times have I recollected a thousand scenes, in which our two selves have formed the whole of the drama, with the greatest pleasure; at times, too, when I had no reason to suppose that I should ever hear from you again. I have laughed with you at the Arabian Nights Entertainment, which afforded us, as you well know, a fund of merriment that deserves never to be forgot. I have walked with you to Netley Abbey, and have scrambled with you over hedges