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follow my example. You will presently qualify yourself for the task, and may not only amuse yourself at home, but may even exercise your skill in mending the church windows; which, as it would save money to the parish, would conduce, together with your other ministerial accomplishments, to make you extremely popular in the place."

Touching upon the same subject to Mr. Newton ", and comparing his own feelings with those of most other men, Cowper says, "At present, the difference between them and me is greatly to their advantage. I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and viewed without a reference to their Author, what is the Earth, what are the planets, what is the sun itself, but a bauble? Better for a man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be able to say, 'The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!' Their eyes have never been opened, to see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they are closed for ever. They think a fine estate, a large conservatory, a hothouse rich as a West Indian garden, things of consequence; visit them with pleasure, and muse upon them with ten times more. I am pleased with a frame of four lights, doubtful whether the few pines it contains will ever be worth a farthing; amuse myself with a greenhouse which Lord Bute's gardener could take upon his back and walk away with; and when I have paid it the accustomed visit, and watered it and given it air, I say to myself— This is not mine; 'tis a plaything lent me for the present; I must leave it soon.'"

With the love of reading, the love of writing also had returned, and Cowper amused himself with versifying upon various occasions; but this gave place for a while to a passion for drawing. "I deal much in ink," he says, "but not such ink as is employed by poets and writers of essays. Mine is a harmless fluid, and guilty of no deceptions but such as may prevail without the least injury to the person imposed on. I draw mountains, valleys, woods, and streams, and ducks and dabchicks. I admire them myself, and Mrs. Unwin admires them, and her praise and my praise, put together, are fame enough for me.'

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Some employment, in the way of his old profession, his 11 May 3, 1780.

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neighbours occasionally gave him,-in kindness to themselves. "I know less of the law," he says to Mr. Hill12 “than a country attorney, yet sometimes I think I have almost as much business. My former connexion with the profession has got wind; and though I earnestly profess and protest, and proclaim it abroad, that I know nothing of the matter, they cannot be persuaded to believe that a head once indued with a legal periwig can ever be deficient in those natural endowments it is supposed to cover. I have had the good fortune13 to be once or twice in the right, which, added to the cheapness of a gratuitous counsel, had advanced my credit to a degree I never expected to attain in the capacity of a lawyer. Indeed, if two of the wisest in the science of jurisprudence may give opposite opinions on the same point, which does not unfrequently happen, it seems to be a matter of indifference whether a man answers by rule or at a venture. He that stumbles upon the right side of the question, is just as useful to his client as he that arrives at the same end by regular approaches, and is conducted to the mark he aims at by the greatest authorities."

The "Report of an adjudged Case, not to be found in any of the Books," was written about this time. "Happy," said he, when he transcribed it for his friend Hill, "is the man who knows just so much of the law as to make himself a little merry now and then with the solemnity of judicial proceedings. In a darker mood he said to Mr. Newton", "I wonder that a sportive thought should ever knock at the door of my intellects, and still more that it should gain admittance. It is as if harlequin should intrude himself into the gloomy chamber where a corpse is deposited in state. His antic gesticulations would be unseasonable at any rate, but more especially so if they should distort the features of the mournful attendants with laughter. But the mind, long wearied with the sameness of a dull dreary prospect, will gladly fix its eyes on any thing that may make a little variety in its contem12 May 6, 1780. 13 Mr. Newton had some reliance upon his skill, "I have drawn up a clause," he says, "to be inserted in Mrs. -'s will, which my dear friend Mr. Cowper has looked over and approves, and says it will pass very well as to the forms of law; for in what does not immediately concern himself, his judgement is as clear as ever." 14 Jan. 1775. This was at the commencement of his recovery.

14 July 12, 1780.

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plations, though it was but a kitten playing with her tail." Cowper's taste," says Sir Egerton Brydges 15, "lay in a smiling, colloquial, good-natured humour; his melancholy was a black and diseased melancholy, not a grave and rich contemplativeness." It was black because it was morbid; but it assumed a better character in his writings, when a fortunate direction was given it.

Mrs. Unwin was the first who excited him to undertake something of greater pith and moment than he had ever before produced. She urged him to write a poem of considerable length, and as moral satire was equally congenial to his taste and accordant to his views, she suggested as a theme the Progress of Error. Mr. Newton was the only person to whom his intention was communicated while he was engaged upon it; and notwithstanding the tone and purport of his poetry, he seems to have thought that Mr. Newton might disapprove it. "Don't be alarmed," he says to him; "I ride Pegasus with a curb. He will never run away with me again. I have even convinced Mrs. Unwin that I can manage him, and make him stop when I please." In the same letter, he says, “If human nature may be compared to a piece of tapestry, (and why not?) then human nature, as it subsists in me, though it is sadly faded on the right side, retains all its colour on the wrong. I am pleased with commendation, and though not passionately desirous of indiscriminate praise, or what is generally called popularity, yet when a judicious friend claps me on the back, I own I find it an encouragement. At this season of the year, and in this gloomy uncomfortable climate, it is no easy matter for the owner of a mind like mine, to divert

it from sad subjects, and fix it upon such as may administer

to its amusement. Poetry, above all things, is useful to me in this respect. While I am held in pursuit of pretty images, or a pretty way of expressing them, I forget every thing that is irksome, and, like a boy that plays truant, determine to avail myself of the present opportunity to be amused, and to put by the disagreeable recollection that I must, after all, go home and be whipt again."

The Progress of Error met with Mr. Newton's approbation, and it was speedily followed by three other poems of the same 16 Recollections of Foreign Travel, vol. i. p. 242. 16 Dec. 21, 1780.

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kind, Truth, Table Talk, and Expostulation. So eagerly did he enter into this undertaking, and pursue it, that the first of these poems sprung up in the month of December, and the last in the month of March following.

Upon sending Table Talk to Mr. Newton, he said to him, "It is a medley of many things, some that may be useful, and some that, for aught I know, may be very diverting. I am merry that I may decoy people into my company, and grave that they may be the better for it. Now and then I put on the garb of a philosopher, and take the opportunity that disguise procures me, to drop a word in favour of religion. In short, there is some froth, and here and there a bit of sweetmeat, which seems to entitle it justly to the name of a certain dish the ladies call a trifle. I did not choose to be more facetious, lest I should consult the taste of my readers at the expense of my own approbation; nor more serious than I have been, lest I should forfeit theirs. A poet in my circumstances has a difficult part to act: one minute obliged to bridle his humour, if he has any, and the next to clap a spur to the sides of it now ready to weep from a sense of the importance of his subject, and on a sudden constrained to laugh, lest his gravity should be mistaken for dulness. If this be not violent exercise for the mind, I know not what is; and if any man doubt it, let him try. Whether all this management and contrivance be necessary, I do not know, but am inclined to suspect that if my Muse was to go forth clad in Quaker colour, without one bid of riband to enliven her appearance, she might walk from one end of London to the other, as little noticed as if she were one of the sisterhood indeed "7"

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The four poems contained about two thousand five hundred lines; and these he thought, with a few select smaller pieces, about seven or eight perhaps, the best he could find in a bookful which he had by him, would furnish a volume of tolerable bulk, that needed not to be indebted to an unreasonable breadth of margin for the importance of its figure. The letters which Cowper received seem either not to have been preserved by him, or to have been destroyed by others; and with this part of his correspondence many circumstances which would have thrown light upon his history have perished. It is not known whether the intention of publishing his poems originated at

17 Feb. 18, 1781.

Olney, or was suggested by Mr. Newton; but he has told us what the reasons were which actuated him.

"If a board of inquiry were to be established, at which poets were to undergo an examination respecting the motives that induced them to publish, and I were to be summoned to attend, that I might give an account of mine, I think I could truly say, what perhaps few poets could, that though I have no objection to lucrative consequences, if any such should follow, they are not my aim; much less is it my ambition to exhibit myself to the world as a genius. What then, says Mr. President, can possibly be your motive? I answer, with a bow-Amusement. There is nothing but this,-no occupation within the compass of my small sphere, poetry excepted,that can do much towards diverting that train of melancholy X thoughts, which, when I am not thus employed, are for ever pouring themselves in upon me. And if I did not publish what I write, I could not interest myself sufficiently in my own success, to make an amusement of it 18."

The business of finding a publisher was undertaken by Mr. Newton, who found one in his old friend Johnson 19, with whom he had had dealings of his own. The publisher took upon himself the whole risk, but seems to have requested that the book should not appear as an anonymous work. When this was communicated to the poet, he replied, "Since writing is become one of my principal amusements, and I have already produced so many verses on subjects that entitle them to a hope that they may possibly be useful, I should be sorry to suppress them entirely, or to publish them to no purpose, for want of that chief ingredient, the name of the author. If my name, therefore, will serve them in any degree, as a passport into public notice, they are welcome to it; and Mr. Johnson

19 When the Olney Hymns

18 To Mr. Newton, March 18, 1781. were about to be printed, Mr. Newton said in a letter to Mr. Thornton, (Feb. 13, 1779,) "To you I entirely submit the choice of the printer or bookseller. If it was a matter of perfect indifference to you, I have had a thought of my old friend, Joseph Johnson, in St. Paul's Churchyard. He printed my Narrative and volume of Sermons; and though he is not a professor, I believe him a man of honour and integrity."

In a former letter (Feb. 2, 1773) he had said, "I am afraid things are come to that pass, that professors in general find they may more safely depend upon the people of the world, than upon one another. "

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