SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF COWPER. WILLIAM COWPER, the subject of the following brief Memoir, was born at Great Berkhamstead, in Hert fordshire, 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 Throughley, in Sussex, and Pellet of Bolney, in the same county from the several noble housos of West, Knollys, Carey, Bullen, Howard, and Mowbray; and so by four different lines from IIenry 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. Chap man, a solicitor, in London, with a view to his instruc |