SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF COWPER. WILLIAM COWPER, the subject of the following brief Memoir, was born at Great Berkhamstead, in Hertfordshire, on the fifteenth of November, 1731. His father, the Rev. John Cowper, D. D. Rector of that place, and one of the chaplains of King George the Second, married Anne, daughter of Roger Donne, Esq. of Lodham-hall, in the county of Norfolk. She died in childbed on the thirteenth of November, 1737; and he of a paralytick seizure on the tenth of July. 1756. Of five sons and two daughters, the issue of this marriage, William and John only survived their parents the rest died in their infancy. Such was his origin ;-but it must be added, that the highest blood of the realm flowed in the veins of the modest and unassuming Cowper. It is perhaps already known that his grandfather, Spencer Cowper, was Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and next brother to William, first Earl Cowper, and Lord High Chancellor of England: but his mother was descended through the families of Hippesley of Througliley, in Sussex, and Pellet of Bolney, in the same county from the several noble houses of West, Knollys, Carey, Bullen, Howard, and Mowbray; and so by four different lines from Henry the Third king of England. Distinctions of this nature can shed no additional lustre on the memory of Cowper; but genius, however exalted, disdains not, while it boasts not, the splendour of ancestry; and royalty itself may be flattered, and perhaps benefited, by discovering its kindred to such piety, such purity, such talents as his. The simplicity of the times that witnessed the childhood of Cowper, assigned him his first instruction at a day-school in his native village. The reader may recollect an allusion to this circumstance in his beautiful Monody on the receipt of his mother's Picture, "the gard'ner Robin, day by day Drew me to school along the publick way, On the death of the beloved parent, who is so tenderly commemorated in that exquisite poem, and who just lived to see him complete his sixth year, he was placed under the care of Dr. Pitman, of Market-street, a few miles distant from the paternal roof. At this respectable academy he remained till he was eight years of age, when the alarming appearance of specks on both his eyes induced his father to send him to the house of a female oculist in London. Her attempts, however, to relieve him, were unsuccessful, and at the expiration of two years he exchanged her residence for that of Westminister-school, where, sometime afterwards a remedy was unexpectedly provided for him in the small-pox, which, as he says in a letter to Mr. Hayley, "proved the better occulist of the two." What degree of proficiency, as to the rudiments of education, he carried with him to this venerable establishment, at the head of which was Dr. Nichols, does not appear, but that he left it in the year 1749, with scholastick attainments of the first order, is beyond a doubt. After spending three months with his father at Berk. hampstead, he was placed in the family of a Mr. Chapman, a solicitor, in London, with a view to his instruc tion in the practice of the law. To this gentleman he was engaged by articles, for three years. The opportunities, however, which a residence in the house of his legal tutor afforded him, for attaining the skill that he was supposed to be in search of, were so far from attaching him to legal studies, that he spent the greater part of his time in the house of a near relation. This he playfully confesses in the following passage of a letter to a daughter of that relative, more than thirty years after the time he describes: "I did actually live three years with Mr. Chapman, a solicitor, that is to say, I slept three years in his house; but I lived, that is to say, I spent my days in Southampton-row, as you very well remember. There was I, and the future Lord Chancellor, constantly employed from morning to night in giggling and making giggle, instead of studying the law. Oh fie, cousin! how could you do so?” The subject of this sprightly remonstrance was the lady Hesketh, who so materially contributed to the comfort of the dejected poet in his declining years, and the chancellor alluded to was lord Thurlow. This trifling anecdote is no otherwise worthy of record, than as it may serve to show, that the profession which his friends had selected for him, had nothing in it congenial with the mind of Cowper. The three years for which he had been consigned to the office of the solicitor being expired, at the age of twenty-one he took possession of a set of chambers in the Inner Temple. By this step he became, or rather ought to have become, a regular student of law; but it soon appeared that the higher pursuits of jurisprudence were as little capable of fixing his attention, as the elementary parts of that science had proved. It is not to be supposed, indeed, that at this maturer age, he continued those habits of idleness and dissipation which have already been noticed; but it is certain, from a colloquial account of his early years, with which he favoured his friend Mr. Hayley, that literature, and |