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ordinary subjects, his was a case both of body and mind, for which the peacefulness and security of home, and the constant tenderness of a wise and watchful mother, were peculiarly required. The school at which he was placed was at Market Street in Hertfordshire, kept by a Dr. Pitman. The number of boys was considerable; and as in most institutions of this kind then, and in too many of them still, the most momentous part of education,.. that of moral discipline,.. seems to have been totally disregarded there.

Here," says Cowper, "I had hardships of various kinds to conflict with, which I felt more sensibly in proportion to the tenderness with which I had been treated at home. But my chief affliction consisted in being singled out from all the other boys, by a lad of about fifteen years of age, as a proper object upon whom he might let loose the cruelty of his temper. I choose to conceal a particular recital of the many acts of barbarity with which he made it his business continually to persecute me. It will be sufficient to say, that his savage treatment of me impressed such a dread of his figure upon my mind, that I well remember being afraid to lift my eyes upon him higher than his knees; and that I knew him better by his shoe-buckles than by any other part of his dress. May the Lord pardon him, and may we meet in glory!

"One day as I was sitting alone upon a bench in the schoolroom, melancholy, and almost ready to weep at the recollection of what I had already suffered, and expecting at the same time my tormentor every moment, the words of the Psalmist came into my mind, 'I will not fear what flesh can do unto me!' I applied them to my own case, with a degree of trust and confidence in God that would have been no disgrace to a much more experienced Christian. I instantly perceived in myself a briskness of spirits and a cheerfulness I had never before experienced, and took several paces up and down the room with joyful alacrity,.. His gift in whom I trusted. But alas! it was the first and last instance of this kind between infancy and manhood. The cruelty of this boy, which he had long practised in so secret a manner that no creature suspected it, was at length discovered; he was expelled the school', and I was taken from it."

4 In Cowper's account of his own early life, this school is said to have been in Bedfordshire; but Hayley says Hertfordshire, mentioning also the

The tyranny under which Cowper, for two years, suffered there, made, as it well might, a deep and lasting impression upon him; and to this it is that the strong dislike with which, in the latter part of his life, he regarded all schools, must be ascribed. I know not whether wicked propensities are ever cured at school; but this I know, that they generally find full play there; and that a system of preventive discipline which should impose some effectual restraint upon brutal dispositions, at that age when they are subject to control, would be one of the surest means of national reformation. It is needed alike for those who are being trained in our seminaries of sound and orthodox learning for the higher walks of life and the more important stations of society, and for those who are training themselves in the streets and purlieus of every populous place for transportation or the gallows.

When Cowper was removed from Dr. Pitman's, he was in some danger of losing his sight, specks having appeared on both eyes, which it was feared might cover them. He was therefore placed in the house of an eminent oculist, whose wife also had obtained great celebrity in the same branch of medical science. With them he remained two years, according to his own account, "to no good purpose;" yet it appears that the progress of the disease was stopped there, and that the great weakness of his eyes, with which he had previously been afflicted, must have been much relieved, for when he left their house he was placed at Westminster school. He was then ten years old; at fourteen he was seized with the smallpox; he was severely handled by it, and in imminent danger, but this disease, he says, proved the best oculist, it removed

place and the name of the master; and as Cowper was only at one private school, subsequent biographers have properly followed Hayley. The mistake probably originated in the press, Cowper's own Memoirs having apparently been printed from an ill written manuscript. Of this there is a whimsical proof (p. 35), where the Persian Letters of Montesquieu are spoken of, and the compositor, unable to decipher that author's name, has converted it into Mules Quince.

There are, however, two errors in this part of Hayley's account; he supposes that Cowper was probably removed from this school because of a complaint in his eyes, and he transfers the scene of his sufferings under a cruel boy to Westminster. I should not notice these, or any such mistakes, were it not to justify the difference in my own statement, which on both these points is drawn from Cowper's own memoir.

the specks entirely. The eyes however still remained very liable to inflammation, and though this liability was afterwards much diminished, it continued in some degree as long as he lived. He was of opinion that it had been abated by the use of a hot foot-bath every night, the last thing before going to rest. 5.

If after years, when Cowper regarded with a diseased mind his own nature and the course of human life, he referred to his want of devotion during this illness, as showing that at that early age his heart had become proof against the ordinary means a gracious God employs for our chastisement. " Though I was severely handled," he says, "by this disease, and in imminent danger, yet neither in the course of it, nor during my recovery, had I any sentiments of contrition, any thought of God, or eternity. On the contrary, I was scarcely raised from the bed of pain and sickness, before the emotions of sin became more violent than ever, and the devil seemed rather to have gained, than lost, an advantage over me; so readily did I admit his suggestions, and so passive was I under them. By this time I became such an adept in the infernal art of lying, that I was seldom guilty of a fault for which I could not invent an apology capable of deceiving the wisest. These, I know, are called school-boys' tricks; but a total depravity of principle, and the work of the father of lies, are universally at the bottom of them."

A Roman Catholic is never likely to exaggerate either the sum or the character of his offences when he confesses them to his priest, because he knows that the rate of penance will be fixed in proportion; but in Protestant countries, both hypocrites and enthusiasts practise the same kind of exaggerated self condemnation; the former because it is a part easily acted

5 He relied, however, upon "Elliott's medicines," whatever they may have been. In a letter to Mr. Hill (Nov. 1782), he requests a supply of them, and says, "My eyes are in general better than I remember them to have been, since I first opened them upon this sublunary stage, which is now a little more than half a century ago; yet I do not think myself safe either without those remedies, or when, through long keeping, they have in part lost their virtue. I seldom use them without thinking of our trip to Maidenhead, where I first experienced their efficacy.".. "Every time I feel the least uneasiness in either eye, I tremble, lest my Esculapius being departed, my infallible remedy should be lost for ever." (To the same, Dec. 7, 1782.)

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