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tion in the practice of the law. To this gentleman he was engaged by articles, for three years. The oppor tunities, 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 threc years with Mr. Chapnian, 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 lavoured his friend Mr. Hayley, that literature. and

particularly of a poetical kind, was his principal pur suit in the Temple. In the cultivation of studies so agreeable to his taste, he could not fail to associate occasionally with such of his Westminster school-fellows as were resident in London, and whom he knew to be eminent literary characters. The elder Colman, Bonnel Thornton, and Lloyd, were especially of this description. With these, therefore, he seems to have contracted the greatest intimacy, assisting the two former in their periodical publication, The Connoisseur ; and the latter, as Mr. Hayley conjectures, in the works which his slender finances obliged him to engage in. The Duncombes also, father and son, two amiable scholars of Stocks, in Hertfordshire, and intimate friends of his surviving parent, were among the writers of the time, to whose poetical productions Cowper contributed. In short, the twelve years which he spent in the Temple, were, if not entirely devoted to classical pursuits, yet so much engrossed by them as to add little or nothing to the slender stock of legal knowledge which he had previously acquired in the house of the solicitor.

The prospect of a professional income of his own acquiring, under circumstances like these, being out of the question, and his patrimonial resources being nearly exhausted, it occurred to him, towards the end of the above-mentioned period, that not only was his long cherished wish of settling in matrimonial life, thus painfully precluded, but he was even in danger of personal want. It is not unlikely that his friends were aware of the probability of such an event, from the uniform inattention he had shown to his legal studies, for in the thirty-first year of his age they procured him a nomination to the offices of reading-clerk and clerk of the private Committees in the House of Lords But he was by no means qualified for discharging the duties annexed to either of these employments; nature Laving assigned him such an extreme tenderness of

spirit, as, to use his own powerful expression, made a publick exhibition of himself, under any circumstances, "mortal poison" to him. No sooner, therefore, had he adverted to the consequence of his accepting so conspicuous an appointinent, the splendour of which he confesses to have dazzled him into a momentary consent, than, it forcibly striking him at the same time, that such a favourable opportunity for his marrying might never occur again, his mind became the seat of the most conflicting sensations. These continued and increased, for the space of a week, to such a painful degree, that secing no possible way of recovering any measure of his former tranquillity, except by resigning the situation which the kindness of his friends had procured him, he most earnestly entreated that they would allow him to do so. To this, though with great reluctance, they at length consented, he having offered to exchange it for a much less lucrative indeed, but as he flattered himself, a less irksome office, which was also vacant at that time, namely, the clerkship of the journals in the House of Lords.

The return of something like composure to the mind of Cowper was the consequence of this arrangement between him and his friends. It was a calm however but of short duration; for he had scarcely been possess ed of it three days, when an unhappy and unforeseer incident not only robbed him of this semblance of com fort, but involved him in more than his former distress. A dispute in parliament, in reference to the last mentioned appointment, laid him under the formidable necessity of a personal appearance at the bar of the house of Lords, that his fitness for the under taking might be publickly acknowledged. The trembling apprehension with which the timid and exquisitely sensible mind of this amiable man could not fail to look forward to an event of this sort, rendered every intermediate attempt to prepare himself for the examination completely abortive and the conscious

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ness that it did so, accumulated his terrours. These had risen, in short, to a confusion of mind so incompatible with the integrity of reason, when the eve of the dreaded ceremony actually arrived, that his intellectual powers sunk under it. He was no longer himself.

In this distressing situation it was found necessary, in the month of December, 1763, to remove him to St. Alban's; from whence, through the skilful and humane treatment of Dr. Cotton, under whose care he was placed, his friends hoped that he would soon return in the full enjoyment of his former faculties. In the most material part of their wish it pleased God to indulge them, his recovery being happily effected in some what less than eight months. Instead, however, of revisiting the scenes in which his painful calamity had first occurred, he remained with his amiable physician nearly a twelve month after he had pronounced his cure and that from motives altogether of a devotional kind.

On this part of the poet's history it may be proper to observe that although, if viewed as an originating cause, the subject of religion had not the remotest cennexion with his mental calamity; yet no sooner had the disorder assumed the shape of hypochondriasis, which it did in a very early stage of its progress, than those sacred truths which prove an unfailing source of the most salutary contemplation to the undisturbed mind, were, through the influence of that distorting medium, converted into a vehicle of intellectual pci

Bon.

A most erroneous and unhappy idea has occupied the minds of some persons, that those views of christianity which Cowper adopted, and of which, when enjoying the intervals of reason, he was so bright an crnament, had actually contributed to excite the malady with which he was afflicted. It is capable of the clearest demonstration, that nothing was further from the truth.

On the contrary, all those alleviations of sorrow, those delightful anticipations of heavenly rest, those healing consolations to a wounded spirit, of which he was permitted to taste, at the periods when uninterrupted reason resumed its sway, were unequivocally to be ascribed to the operation of those very principles and views of religion, which, in the instance before us, have been charged with producing so opposite an effect. The primary aberrations of his mental faculties were wholly to be attributed to other causes. But the time was at hand, when, by the happy interposition of a gracious Providence, he was to be the favoured subject of a double emancipation. The captivity of his reason was about to terminate; and a bondage, though hitherto unmentioned, yet of a much longer standing, was on the point of being exchanged for the delightful of all freedom.

“A liberty unsung

By poets, and by senators unprais'd;

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E'en "liberty of heart,* deriv'd from heav'n :
Bought with His blood who gave it to mankind,
And seal'd with the same token!"t

To the invaluable blessing of such a change he was as yet a stranger. He had been for some time convinced, and that on scriptural grounds, how much he stood in need of it, from a perception of the fetters with which, so long as he was capable of enjoying them, the pleasures of the world and of sense had bound his heart; but till the moment of his affliction, he had remained spiritually a prisoner. The hour was now come when his prison-doors were to be unfolded; when "he that openeth and no man shutteth,” was to give him a blessed experience of what

"Is liberty: a flight into his arms

Ere yet mortality's fine threads give way,

* Rom. viii. 21

The Task, Book V.

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