very friends, who called on him for the purpose of attending him to the House of Lords, acquiesced in the cruel necessity of his relinquishing the prospect of a station so severely formidable to a frame of such singular sensibility. The conflict between the wishes of just affectionate ambition, and the terrors of diffidence, so entirely overwhelmed his health and faculties, that after two learned and benevolent divines (Mr. John Cowper, his brother, and the celebrated Mr. Martin Madan, his first cousin (had vainly endeavoured to establish a lasting tranquillity in his mind, by friendly and religious conversation, it was found necessary to remove him to St. Alban's, where he resided a considerable time, under the care of that eminent physician, Dr. Cotton, a scholar, and a poet, who added to many accomplishments, a peculiar sweetness of manners, in very advanced life, when I had the pleasure of a personal acquaintance with him. The misfortune of mental derangement is a topic of such awful delicacy, that I consider it as the duty of a biographer rather to sink, in tender silence, than to proclaim, with circumstantial, and offensive, temerity, the minute particulars of a calamity, to which all human beings are exposed, and perhaps in pro portion as they have received from nature those delightful, but dangerous, gifts, a heart of exquisite tenderness, and a mind of creative energy. This is a sight for pity to peruse, 'Till she resembles, faintly, what she views; Pierc'd with the woes, that she laments in vain. This, of all maladies, that man infest, Claims most compassion, and receives the least. But with a soul, that ever felt the sting "Tis not, as heads that never ache suppose, The screws revers'd (a task, which, if He please, C 2 No wounds like those, a wounded spirit feels; No cure for such, 'till God, who makes them, heals. And thou, sad sufferer, under nameless ill, That yields not to the touch of human skill, A Father's frown, and kiss the chast'ning hand! It is in this awful, and instructive, light, that Cowper himself teaches us to consider the calamity of which I am now speaking; and of which he, like his illustrious brother of Parnassus, the younger Tasso, was occasionally a most affecting example. Heaven appears to have given a striking lesson to mankind, to guard both virtue, and genius, against pride of heart, and pride of intellect, by thus suspending the affections, and the talents, of two most tender and sublime poets, who, in the purity of their lives, and in the splendour of their intellectual powers, will be ever deservedly reckoned among the pre-eminent of the earth. the From December 1763, to the following July, pure mind of Cowper appears to have laboured under the severest sufferings of morbid depression; but the medical skill of Dr. Cotton, and the cheerful, benignant, manners of that accomplished physician, gradually succeeded, with the blessing of Heaven, in removing the undescribable load of religious despondency, which had clouded the admirable faculties of this innocent, and upright man. His ideas of religion were changed from the gloom of terror and despair, to the lustre of comfort and delight. This juster and happier view of Evangelical truth is said to have arisen in his mind while he was reading the third chapter of Saint Paul's Epistle to the Romans. Devout contemplation became more and more dear to his reviving spirit: resolving to relinquish all thoughts of a laborious profession, and all intercourse with the busy world, he acquiesced in a plan of settling at Huntingdon, by the advice of his brother, who, as a minister of the Gospel, and a fellow of Bennet college, in Cambridge, resided in that university; a situation so near to the place chosen for Cowper's retirement, that it afforded to these affectionate brothers opportunities of easy and frequent intercourse. I regret that all the Letters which passed between them have perished, and the more so as they sometimes corresponded in verse. John Cowper was also a poet. He had engaged to execute a translation of Voltaire's Henriade, and in the course of the work requested, and obtained, the assistance of William, who translated, as he informed me himself, two entire cantos of the poem. This fraternal pro duction is said to have appeared in a magazine of the I have discovered a rival, and probably year 1759. an inferior translation, so published, but the joint work of the poetical brothers has hitherto eluded all my researches. In June 1765, the reviving invalide removed to a private lodging in the town of Huntingdon, but providence soon introduced him into a family, which afforded him one of the most singular, and valuable friends, that ever watched an afflicted mortal in seasons of overwhelming adversity; that friend, to whom the poet exclaims in the commencement of the Task, And witness, dear companion of my walks, But genuine, and art partner of them all, |