Cowper | Page 6

its effects had been obliterated by
madness, entire change of mind, and the lapse of twenty years. If a
trace remained, it was in his admiration of Churchill's verses, and in the
general results of literary society, and of early practice in composition.
Cowper contributed to the Connoiseur and the _St. James's Chronicle_.
His papers in the Connoisseur have been preserved; they are mainly
imitations of the lighter papers of the Spectator by a student who
affects the man of the world. He also dallied with poetry, writing verses
to "Delia," and an epistle to Lloyd. He had translated an elegy of
Tibullus when he was fourteen, and at Westminster he had written an
imitation of Phillips's _Splendid Shilling_, which, Southey says, shows
his manner formed. He helped his Cambridge brother, John Cowper, in
a translation of the Henriade. He kept up his classics, especially his
Homer. In his letters there are proofs of his familiarity with Rousseau.
Two or three ballads which he wrote are lost, but he says they were
popular, and we may believe him. Probably they were patriotic. "When
poor Bob White," he says, "brought in the news of Boscawen's success
off the coast of Portugal, how did I leap for joy! When Hawke

demolished Conflans, I was still more transported. But nothing could
express my rapture when Wolfe made the conquest of Quebec."
The "Delia" to whom Cowper wrote verses was his cousin Theodora,
with whom he had an unfortunate love affair. Her father, Ashley
Cowper, forbade their marriage, nominally on the ground of
consanguinity, really, as Southey thinks, because he saw Cowper's
unfitness for business and inability to maintain a wife. Cowper felt the
disappointment deeply at the time, as well he might do if Theodora
resembled her sister, Lady Hesketh. Theodora remained unmarried, and,
as we shall see, did not forget her lover. His letters she preserved till
her death in extreme old age.
In 1756 Cowper's father died. There does not seem to have been much
intercourse between them, nor does the son in after-years speak with
any deep feeling of his loss: possibly his complaint in Tirocinium of the
effect of boarding-schools, in estranging children from their parents,
may have had some reference to his own case. His local affections,
however, were very strong, and he felt with unusual keenness the final
parting from his old home, and the pang of thinking that strangers
usurp our dwelling and the familiar places will know us no more.
Where once we dwelt our name is heard no more, Children not thine
have trod my nursery floor; And where the gardener Robin, day by day,
Drew me to school along the public way, Delighted with my bauble
coach, and wrapp'd In scarlet mantle warm and velvet capp'd. 'Tis now
become a history little known, That once we call'd the pastoral house
our own.
Before the rector's death, it seems, his pen had hardly realized the cruel
frailty of the tenure by which a home in a parsonage is held. Of the
family of Berkhampstead Rectory there was now left besides himself
only his brother John Cowper, Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge,
whose birth had cost their mother's life.
When Cowper was thirty-two and still living in the Temple, came the
sad and decisive crisis of his life. He went mad and attempted suicide.
What was the source of his madness? There is a vague tradition that it
arose from licentiousness, which, no doubt is sometimes the cause of
insanity. Hut in Cowper's case there is no proof of anything of the kind;
his confessions, after his conversion, of his own past sinfulness point to
nothing worse than general ungodliness and occasional excess in wine;

and the tradition derives a colour of probability only from the loose
lives of one or two of the wits and Bohemians with whom he had lived.
His virtuous love of Theodora was scarcely compatible with low and
gross amours. Generally, his madness is said to have been religious,
and the blame is laid on the same foe to human weal as that of the
sacrifice of Iphigenia. But when he first went mad, his conversion to
Evangelicism had not taken place; he had not led a particularly
religious life, nor been greatly given to religious practices, though as a
clergyman's son he naturally believed in religion, had at times felt
religious emotions, and when he found his heart sinking had tried
devotional books and prayers. The truth is his malady was simple
hypochondria, having its source in delicacy of constitution and
weakness of digestion, combined with the influence of melancholy
surroundings. It had begun to attack him soon after his settlement in his
lonely chambers in the Temple, when his pursuits and associations, as
we have seen, were far from Evangelical.