Cowper | Page 5

best school. Out of school hours he studied
independently, as clever boys under the unexacting rule of the old
public schools often did, and read through the whole of the Iliad and
Odyssey with a friend. He also probably picked up at Westminster
much of the little knowledge of the world which he ever possessed.
Among his schoolfellows was Warren Hastings, in whose guilt as
proconsul he afterwards, for the sake of Auld Lang Syne, refused to
believe, and Impey, whose character has had the ill-fortune to be
required as the shade in Macaulay's fancy picture of Hastings.
On leaving Westminster, Cowper, at eighteen, went to live with Mr.
Chapman, an attorney, to whom he was articled, being destined for the

Law. He chose that profession, he says, not of his own accord, but to
gratify an indulgent father, who may have been led into the error by a
recollection of the legal honours of the family, as well as by the "silver
pence" which his promising son had won by his Latin verses at
Westminster School. The youth duly slept at the attorney's house in Ely
Place. His days were spent in "giggling and making giggle" with his
cousins, Theodora and Harriet, the daughters of Ashley Cowper, in the
neighbouring Southampton Row. Ashley Cowper was a very little man
in a white hat lined with yellow, and his nephew used to say that he
would one day he picked by mistake for a mushroom. His fellow-clerk
in the office, and his accomplice in giggling and making giggle, was
one strangely mated with him; the strong, aspiring, and unscrupulous
Thurlow, who though fond of pleasure was at the same time preparing
himself to push his way to wealth and power. Cowper felt that Thurlow
would reach the summit of ambition, while he would himself remain
below, and made his friend promise when he was Chancellor to give
him something. When Thurlow was Chancellor, he gave Cowper his
advice on translating Homer.
At the end of his three years with the attorney, Cowper took chambers
in the Middle, from which he afterwards removed to the Inner Temple.
The Temple is now a pile of law offices. In those days it was still a
Society. One of Cowper's set says of it: "The Temple is the barrier that
divides the City and suburbs; and the gentlemen who reside there seem
influenced by the situation of the place they inhabit. Templars are in
general a kind of citizen courtiers. They aim at the air and the mien of
the drawing-room, but the holy-day smoothness of a 'prentice,
heightened with some additional touches of the rake or coxcomb,
betrays itself in everything they do. The Temple, however, is stocked
with its peculiar beaux, wits, poets, critics, and every character in the
gay world; and it is a thousand pities that so pretty a society should be
disgraced with a few dull fellows, who can submit to puzzle themselves
with cases and reports, and have not taste enough to follow the genteel
method of studying the law." Cowper at all events studied law by the
genteel method; he read it almost as little in the Temple as he had in the
attorney's office, though in due course of time he was formally called to
the Bar, and even managed in some way to acquire a reputation, which
when he had entirely given up the profession brought him a curious

offer of a readership at Lyons Inn. His time was given to literature, and
he became a member of a little circle of men of letters and journalists
which had its social centre in the Nonsense Club, consisting of seven
Westminster men who dined together every Thursday. In the set were
Bonnell Thornton and Colman, twin wits, fellow-writers of the
periodical essays which were the rage in that day, joint proprietors of
the _St. James's Chronicle_, contributors both of them to the
_Connoisseur_, and translators, Colman of Terence, Bonnell Thornton
of Plautus, Colman being a dramatist besides. In the set was Lloyd,
another wit and essayist and a poet, with a character not of the best. On
the edge of the set, but apparently not in it, was Churchill, who was
then running a course which to many seemed meteoric, and of whose
verse, sometimes strong but always turbid, Cowper conceived and
retained an extravagant admiration. Churchill was a link to Wilkes;
Hogarth too was an ally of Colman, and helped him in his exhibition of
Signs. The set was strictly confined to Westminsters. Gray and Mason,
being Etonians, were objects of its literary hostility and butts of its
satire. It is needless to say much about these literary companions of
Cowper's youth: his intercourse with them was totally broken off, and
before he himself became a poet