Cowper | Page 4

charges himself, it may be in the exaggerated style of a
self-accusing saint, with having become at school an adept in the art of

lying. Southey says this must be a mistake, since at English public
schools boys do not learn to lie. But the mistake is on Southey's part;
bullying, such as this child endured, while it makes the strong boys
tyrants, makes the weak boys cowards, and teaches them to defend
themselves by deceit, the fist of the weak. The recollection of this
boarding school mainly it was that at a later day inspired the plea for a
home education in Tirocinium.
Then why resign into a stranger's hand A task as much within your own
command, That God and nature, and your interest too, Seem with one
voice to delegate to you? Why hire a lodging in a house unknown For
one whose tenderest thoughts all hover round your own? This second
weaning, needless as it is, How does it lacerate both your heart and his
The indented stick that loses day by day Notch after notch, till all are
smooth'd away, Bears witness long ere his dismission come, With what
intense desire he wants his home. But though the joys he hopes beneath
your roof Bid fair enough to answer in the proof, Harmless, and safe,
and natural as they are, A disappointment waits him even there:
Arrived, he feels an unexpected change, He blushes, hangs his head, is
shy and strange. No longer takes, as once, with fearless ease, His
favourite stand between his father's knees, But seeks the corner of some
distant seat, And eyes the door, and watches a retreat, And, least
familiar where he should be most, Feels all his happiest privileges lost.
Alas, poor boy!--the natural effect Of love by absence chill'd into
respect.
From the boarding school, the boy, his eyes being liable to
inflammation, was sent to live with an oculist, in whose house he spent
two years, enjoying at all events a respite from the sufferings and the
evils of the boarding school. He was then sent to Westminster School,
at that time in its glory. That Westminster in those days must have been
a scene not merely of hardship, but of cruel suffering and degradation
to the younger and weaker boys, has been proved by the researches of
the Public Schools Commission. There was an established system and a
regular vocabulary of bullying. Yet Cowper seems not to have been so
unhappy there as at the private school; he speaks of himself as having
excelled at cricket and football; and excellence in cricket and football at
a public school generally carries with it, besides health and enjoyment,
not merely immunity from bullying, but high social consideration. With

all Cowper's delicacy and sensitiveness, he must have had a certain
fund of physical strength, or he could hardly have borne the literary
labour of his later years, especially as he was subject to the medical
treatment of a worse than empirical era. At one time he says, while he
was at Westminster, his spirits were so buoyant that he fancied he
should never die, till a skull thrown out before him by a gravedigger as
he was passing through St. Margaret's churchyard in the night recalled
him to a sense of his mortality.
The instruction at a public school in those days was exclusively
classical. Cowper was under Vincent Bourne, his portrait of whom is in
some respects a picture not only of its immediate subject, but of the
schoolmaster of the last century. "I love the memory of Vinny Bourne.
I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or
any of the writers in his way, except Ovid, and not at all inferior to him.
I love him too with a love of partiality, because he was usher of the
fifth form at Westminster when I passed through it. He was so
good-natured and so indolent that I lost more than I got by him, for he
made me as idle as himself. He was such a sloven, as if he had trusted
to his genius as a cloak for everything that could disgust you in his
person; and indeed in his writings he has almost made amends for
all. . . . . I remember seeing the Duke of Richmond set fire to his greasy
locks and box his ears to put it out again." Cowper learned, if not to
write Latin verses as well as Vinny Bourne himself, to write them very
well, as his Latin versions of some of his own short poems bear witness.
Not only so, but he evidently became a good classical scholar, as
classical scholarship was in those days, and acquired the literary form
of which the classics are the