tenant; witness all my uncle's and your mother's geese and gridirons. There is something so extremely impertinent in entering upon a man's premises, and using them without_paying for 'em, that I could easily resent it if I would. But I rather choose to entertain myself with thinking how you will scour the man about, and worry him to death, if once you begin with him. Poor toad! I leave him entirely to your mercy !" The toad, however, was not under the harrow four months afterwards, when Cowper says of him, "I think the Welshman must morris ;—what think you? If he withdraws to his native mountains we shall never catch him; so the best way is to let him run in debt no longer 15. After another month's interval, he says, "I rejoice with you in the victory you have obtained over the Welshman's pocket. The reluctance with which he pays and promises to pay, gives me but little concern, further than as it seems to threaten you with the trouble of many fruitless applications hereafter, in the receipt of my lordship's rents 16. دو 18 His "The storm of sixty-three," Cowper said, "made a wreck of the friendships he had contracted in the course of many years, Hill's excepted, which had survived the tempest. In an earlier letter, he says, "I have great reason to be thankful; I have lost none of my acquaintances, but those whom I determined not to keep. I am sorry the class is so numerous " In another a somewhat different cause is assigned; "My friends must excuse me, if I write to none but those who lay it fairly in my way to do so. The inference I am apt to draw from their silence is, that they wish me to be silent too." own peculiar circle had been broken up soon after he was withdrawn from it. The first account which he heard of it was of a kind to startle him. "The tragedies of Lloyd and Bensley," said he to Hill, "are both very deep. If they are not of use to the surviving part of the society, it will be their own fault 19" To Lady Hesketh he unbosomed his feelings upon this subject. "Two of my friends, have been cut off during my illness, in the midst of such a life as it is frightful to reflect upon; and here am I, in better health and spirits than I can almost remember to have enjoyed before, after having spent months in the apprehension of instant death. How 16 Dec. 3. 17 Sept. 25, 1770. 18 Aug. 1, 1763. 15 Nov. 8. I mysterious are the ways of Providence! Why did I receive grace and mercy? Why was I preserved, afflicted for my good, received, as I trust, into favour, and blessed with the greatest happiness I can ever know, or hope for, in this life, while these were overtaken by the great arrest, unawakened, unrepenting, and every way unprepared for it? His infinite wisdom, to whose infinite mercy I owe it all, can solve these questions, and none beside him. وو Thornton's name, I believe, never occurs in his letters. "My friend Colman," he says, "has had good fortune. I wish him better fortune still, which is, that he may make a right use of it 20" Towards Colman, indeed, he had always a friendly feeling, and for Thurlow also; and when for a while he thought and spoke of them both with bitterness, it was more from a sense of disappointed friendship than of wounded pride. Cowper's was, indeed, a heart in which latent affections held their place, and were easily called into action. Eight-and-twenty years after the great crisis of his life, he says, "I often think of Carr, and shall always think of him with affection. Should I never see him more, I shall never, I trust, be capable of forgetting his indefatigable attention to me during the last year that I spent in London. Two years after, I invited him to Huntingdon, where I lived at that time, but he pleaded some engagement, and I have neither seen nor heard of him, except from yourself, from that hour to the present. I know, by experience, with what reluctance we move when we have been long fixed; but could he prevail on himself to move hither, he would make me very happy, and when you write to him next, you may tell him so." 21 9 He was in hopes also of receiving a visit at Huntingdon from Hill, to whom he says, "Both Lady Hesketh and my brother had apprized me of your intention to give me a call: and herein I find they were both mistaken. But they both informed me, likewise, that you were already set out for Warwickshire; in consequence of which latter intelligence, I have lived in continual expectation of seeing you, any time this fortnight. Now, how these two ingenious personages (for such they are both) should mistake an expedition to French Flanders for a journey to Warwickshire, is more than I, with all my ingenuity, can imagine. I am glad, however, that I have 20 July 3, 1765. 21 To Mr. Rowley, Oct. 22, 1791. still a chance of seeing you, and shall treasure it up amongst my agreeable expectations. In the mean time, you are welcome to the British shore, as the song has it, and I thank you for your epitome of your travels. You don't tell me how you escaped the vigilance of the custom-house officers, though I dare say you were knuckle-deep in contrabands, and had your boots stuffed with all and all manner of unlawful wares and merchandises." This visit however soon took place, and Hill was the only one of his old friends whom Cowper saw for many years after his retirement. For some three months Huntingdon continued to please him more and more. "The longer I live here," said he, “the better I like the place, and the people who belong to it." It must have been for the sake of the people that he liked the place; though in that respect indeed Cowper was easily satisfied; his feeling of local attachment could strike root in any soil. The old historian and archdeacon of this town, Henry, who derived his name from it, praised Huntingdon for the conveniency of the fens just by, and its great advantages for hunting and fishing; "it surpassed," he said, "all the neighbouring towns in the pleasantness of its situation, and in its handsomeness and beauty." But since his time, thirteen out of fifteen churches had been demolished, or had fallen to ruins; a priory of regular canons, a house of Augustinian friars, and two hospitals for lepers and poor people, had been destroyed; and of its large castle, placed on a commanding site above the Ouse, and supposed to have been originally a Roman work, no vestiges remained above ground. From the Castle hill," says Camden, "there is a wide prospect, where one may see an extensive meadow, encompassed with the Ouse, called Portsholm, the sun never saw a more glorious one. The race ground was in this meadow. The vicinity of the fens was once thought an advantage; the plenty of pasture, the great profit of fishing, and the inexhaustible supply of turf for fuel being supposed to make amends for an atmosphere which was frequently laden with noisome fogs, and was never, at the best, salubrious. 66 The fish and the fowl of the fens were unmolested by Cowper. He was no angler, though, for a protestant, one of the most icthyophagous of men; and he was no sportsman; his gentle heart, at no time of his life, needed Wordsworth's admonition, Never to blend our pleasure or our pride Camden The country had little to tempt him abroad. "We have neither woods," he says, nor commons, nor pleasant prospects; all flat and insipid; in the summer adorned only with blue willows, and in the winter covered with a flood 22 says that the Ouse decks the country with flowers; but Cowper, though fond of gardening, and though he used every year to purchase myrtles in Covent Garden for his chambers in the Temple, was no botanist. The Ouse was to him, as has been seen, the most agreeable circumstance in those parts; and the only spot in the neighbourhood which he describes as beautiful was a village called Hertford, about a mile and half from the town. "The church there," says he, "is very prettily situated upon a rising ground, so close to the river, that it washes the wall of the churchyard. I found an epitaph there the other morning, the two first lines of which, being better than any thing else I saw there, I made shift to remember. by a widow on her husband. "Thou wast too good to live on earth with me, And I not good enough to die with thee 23." It is The town, however, suited him. In his days it consisted of one street, nearly a mile in length, with several lanes branching off at right angles; it contained something more than three hundred houses, and less than two thousand inhabitants. It was one of the neatest towns in England, he said; and as it is a considerable thoroughfare, and small vessels come up the river from Lynn, there was stir enough to make it lively. Brewing was then the chief business, though not so extensively carried on as in the time of Cromwell's mother, who, from the profits of her brewery there, brought up her family in a manner not unbeseeming their gentle birth, and portioned her daughters well. Long after her house had been so greatly altered, within and without, that it was said to be new built, the chamber in which Oliver was born was preserved in its original state. The site has since been occupied by 66 a re 22 To Lady Hesketh, Jan. 30, 1767. 23 Ibid., July 5, 1765. spectable brick mansion," called Cromwell House Academy, and now only the situation of that chamber is pointed out. "You may recollect," says Cowper, to his benefactor and kinsman, the major, "that I had but very uncomfortable expectations of the accommodations I should meet with at Huntingdon. How much better is it, to take our lot where it shall please Providence to cast it, without anxiety! Had I chosen for myself, it is impossible I could have fixed upon a place so agreeable to me in all respects. I so much dreaded the thought of having a new acquaintance to make, with no other recommendation than that of being a perfect stranger, that I heartily wished no creature here might take the least notice of me. Instead of which, in about two months after my arrival, I became known to all the visitable people here, and do verily think it the most agreeable neighbourhood I ever saw. "Here are three families, who have received me with the utmost civility; and two, in particular, have treated me with as much cordiality, as if their pedigree and mine had grown upon the same sheep-skin. Besides these, there are three or four single men, who suit my temper to a hair." These were probably the "odd scrambling fellows like himself," whom he thus describes to Lady Hesketh 25. "Another acquaintance, I have lately made, is with a Mr. Nicholson, a North-country divine, very poor, but very good and very happy. He reads prayers here twice a day, all the year round; and travels on foot, to serve two churches, every Sunday through the year; his journey out and home again being sixteen miles. I supped with him last night. He gave me bread and cheese, and a black jug of ale of his own brewing, and doubtless brewed by his own hands. Another of my acquaintance is Mr. a thin, tall, old man, and as good as he is thin. He drinks nothing but water, and eats no flesh; partly (I believe) from a religious scruple, (for he is very religious,) and partly in the spirit of a valetudinarian. He is to be met with every morning of his life, at about six o'clock, at a fountain of very fine water, about a mile from the town, which is reckoned extremely like the Bristol spring. Being both early risers, and the only early walkers in the place, we soon became acquainted. His great piety can be equalled by nothing but his great regularity, for he is the most perfect time-piece in the world. I 24 Oct. 18, 1765. 25 Sept. 14, 1765. |