The reader is informed by the close of the last Letter that I was at this time the guest of Cowper. Our meeting, so singularly produced, was a source of reciprocal delight. We looked cheerfully for

ward to the unclouded enjoyment of many social and literary hours.

My host, though now in his sixty-first year, appeared as happily exempt from all the infirmities of advanced life, as friendship could wish him to be; and his more elderly companion, not materially oppressed by age, discovered a benevolent alertness of character that seemed to promise a continuance of their domestic comfort. Their reception of me was kindness itself:-I was enchanted to find that the manners and conversation of Cowper resembled his poetry, charming by unaffected elegance, and the graces of a benevolent spirit. I looked with affectionate veneration and pleasure on the lady, who having devoted her life and fortune to the service of this tender and sublime genius, in watching over him with maternal vigilance through many years of the darkest calamity, appeared to be now enjoying a reward justly due to the noblest exertions of friendship, in contemplating the health, and the renown of the poet, whom she had the happiness to perserve.

It seemed hardly possible to survey human nature in a more touching, and a more satisfactory

point of view. Their tender attention to each other,

their simple devout gratitude for the mercies which they had experienced together, and their constant, but unaffected, propensity to impress on the mind and heart of a new friend, the deep sense, which they incessantly felt, of their mutual obligations to each other, afforded me very singular gratification; which my reader will conceive the more forcibly, when he has perused the following exquisite Sonnet, addressed by Cowper to Mrs. Unwin.

SONNET.

Mary! I want a lyre with other strings;

Such aid from Heaven, as some have feign'd they drew!

An eloquence scarce given to mortals, new,
And undebas'd by praise of meaner things!
That ere through age or woe I shed my wings
I may record thy worth, with honour due,
In verse as musical as thou art true,-

Vcrse that immortalizes whom it sings !

But thou hast little need: There is a book,
By seraphs writ, with beams of heavenly light
On which the eyes of God not rarely look;
A chronicle of actions, just and bright!

There all thy deeds, my faithful Mary shine,
And since thou own'st that praise, I spare thee mine.

The delight that I derived from a perfect view of the virtues, the talents, and the present domestic enjoyments of Cowper, was suddenly overcast by the darkest and most painful anxiety.

After passing our mornings in social study, we usually walked out together at noon. In returning from one of our rambles, around the pleasant village of Weston, we were met by Mr. Greatheed, an accomplished minister of the gospel, who resides at Newport-Pagnel, and whom Cowper described to me in terms of cordial esteem.

He came forth to meet us as we drew near the house, and it was soon visible from his countenance and manner, that he had ill news to impart. After the most tender preparation that humanity could de

vise, he acquainted Cowper that Mrs. Unwin was under the immediate pressure of a paralytic attack.

My agitated friend rushed to the sight of the sufferer:-he returned to me in a state that alarmed me in the highest degree for his faculties:-his first speech to me was wild in the extreme:-my answer would appear little less so; but it was addressed to the predominant fancy of my unhappy friend, and with the blessing of Heaven it produced an instantaneous calm in his troubled mind.

From that moment he rested on my friendship, with such mild and cheerful confidence, that his affectionate spirit regarded me as sent providentially to support him in a season of the severest affliction.

A very fortunate incident enabled me to chear him by a little shew of medical assistance, in a form that was highly beneficial to his compassionate mind, whatever its real influence might be on the palsied limbs of our interesting patient.

Having formerly provided myself with an electrical apparatus, for the purpose of applying it medicinally to counteract a continual tendency to inflammation in the eyes, I had used it occasionally, for several years, in trying to relieve various maladies in my rustic neighbours; often indeed with no success

but now and then with the happiest effect. I wished to try this powerful, though uncertain remedy on the present occasion; and enquired most eagerly if the village of Weston could produce an electrical machine: It was hardly to be expected, but it so happened, that a worthy inhabitant of Weston, a man whom Cowper regarded for uncommon gentleness of manners, and for an ingenious mind, possessed exactly such an apparatus as we wanted, which he had partly constructed himself.

This good man, Mr. Socket, was absent from the village, but his wife, for whose relief the apparatus had been originally formed, most readily lent it to her suffering neighbour. With this seasonable aid, seconded by medicines probably more efficacious, from a physician (of consummate skill and benevolence, united to the most fascinating manners) whom I was then so happy as to reckon in the list of my live ing friends, Mrs. Unwin was gradually restored.

But the progress of her recovery, and its influence on the tender spirits of Cowper, will sufficiently appear in the following Letters. I shall have a mournful pleasure in adding to these a few Verses, in which the gratitude of Cowper has celebrated, most tenderly, the kindness of the late Dr, Austen, the physician