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 Westminster-school, where, some time 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 oculist 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 scholastic attainments of the first order, is beyond a doubt.

After spending three months with his father at Berkhamstead, he was placed in the family of a Mr. Chapman, a solicitor in London, with a view to his instruction in the practice of the law. To this gentleman he was engaged by articles for three years. The opportunities, 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 three years with Mr. Chapman, 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 shew, 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 favoured his friend Mr. Hayley, that literature, and particularly of a poetical kind, was his principal pursuit 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 preyiously 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 shewn 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 having assigned him such an extreme tenderness of spirit, as, to use his own powerful expression, made a public 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 appointment, 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, seeing 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.

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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 possessed of it three days, when an unhappy and unforeseen incident not only robbed him of this semblance of comfort, but involved him in more than his former distress. dispute in parliament, in reference to the lastmentioned appointment, laid him under the formidable necessity of a personal appearance at the bar of the House of Lords, that his fitness for the undertaking might be publicly acknowledged. The trembling apprehension with which the timidand 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 abor