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his childhood, was the prime misfortune of Cowper, and what contributed perhaps in the highest degree to the dark colouring of his subsequent life.-The influence of a good mother on the first years of her children, whether nature has given them peculiar strength, or peculiar delicacy of frame, is equally inestimable: It is the prerogative and the felicity of such a mother to temper the arrogance of the strong, and to dissipate the timidity of the tender. The infancy of Cowper was delicate in no common degree, and his constitution discovered at a very early season that morbid tendency to diffidence, to melancholy, and despair, which darkened as he advanced in years into periodical fits of the most deplorable depression.

It may afford an ample field for useful reflection to observe, in speaking of a child, that he was destined to excite in his progress through life the highest degrees of admiration and of pity—of admiration for mental excellence, and of pity for mental disorder.

We understand human nature too imperfectly to ascertain in what measure the original structure of his frame, and the casual incidents of his life, contributed to the happy perfection of his genius, or to the calamitous eclipses of his effulgent mind. Yet such were the talents, the virtues, and the misfortunes of this wonderful person, that it is hardly possible for Biography, extensive as her province is, to speak of a more interesting individual, or to select a subject on which it may be more difficult to satisfy a variety of readers.

readers. In feeling all the weight of this difficulty, I may still be confident that I shall not utterly disappoint his sincerest admirers, if the success of my endeavours to make him more known, and more beloved, is proportioned, in any degree, to the zeal with which I cultivated his friendship, and to the gratification that I feel in recalling to my own recollection the delightful extent and diversity of his literary powers, with the equally delightful sweetness of his social character.

But the powerful influence of such récollection has drawn me imperceptibly from the proper course of my narrative.-I return to the childhood of Cowper. In first quiting the house of his parents, he was sent to a reputable school at Market-Street, in Hertfordshire, under the care of Dr. Pitman, and it is probable that he was removed from it in consequence of an ocular complaint. From a circumstance which he relates of himself at that period, in a letter written to me in 1792, he seems to have been in danger of resembling Milton in the misfortune of blindness, as he resembled him, more happily, in the fervency of a devout and poetical spirit.

“I have been all my life, says Cowper, subject to inflamma❝tions of the eye, and in my boyish days had specks on both that "threatened to cover them. My father alarmed for the conse

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quences, sent me to a female Oculist of great renown at that time, in whose house I abode two years, but to no good pur

pose..

"pose. From her I went to Westminster school, where at the age " of fourteen the small-pox seized me, and proved the better ocu"list of the two, for it delivered me from them all.-Not how"ever from great liableness to inflammation, to which I am in a

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degree still subject, tho' much less than formerly, since I have "been constant in the use of a hot foot-bath every night, the last "thing before going to rest."

It appears a strange process in education, to send a tender child from a long residence in the house of a female oculist, immediately into all the hardships that a little delicate boy must have to encounter at a public school. But the mother of Cowper was dead, and fathers, though good men, are, in general, utterly unfit to manage their young and tender orphans. The little Cowper was sent to his first school in the year of his mother's death, and how illsuited the scene was to his peculiar character, must be evident to all who have heard him describe his sensations in that season of life, which is often, very erroneously, extolled as the happiest period of human existence. He has been frequently heard to lament the persecution that he sustained in his childish years, from the cruelty of his school-fellows, in the two scenes of his education. His own forcible expression, represented him at Westminster as not daring to raise his eye above the shoe-buckle of the elder-boys, who were too apt to tyrannise over his gentle spirit. The acuteness of his feelings in his childhood, rendered those important years (which might have produced, under tender cultivation, a series of lively enjoyments)

miserable

miserable years of increasing timidity and depression, which, in the most cheerful hours of his advanced life, he could hardly describe to an intimate friend, without shuddering at the recollection of his early wretchedness. Yet to this perhaps the world is indebted for the pathetic and moral eloquence of those forcible admonitions to parents, which give interest and beauty to his admirable Poem on Public Schools. Poets may be said to realize, in some measure, the poetical idea of the Nightingale's singing with a thorn at her breast, as their most esquisite songs have often originated in the acuteness of their personal sufferings. Of this obvious truth, the Poem I have just mentioned, is a very memorable example, and if any readers have thought the Poet too severe in his strictures on that system of education, to which we owe some of the most accomplished characters that ever gave celebrity to a civilized nation, such readers will be candidly reconciled to that moral severity of reproof, in recollecting, that it flowed from severe personal experience, united to the purest spirit of philanthropy and patriotism.

Cowper's exhortation to fathers, to educate their own sons, is a model of persuasive eloquence, and not inferior to similar exhortations in the eloquent Rousseau, or in the accomplished translator of Tansillo's poem, the Nurse, by which these enchanting writers have induced, and will continue to induce, so many mothers in polished life to suckle their own children. Yet similar as these exhortations may be esteemed, in their benevolent design, and in their

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graceful

graceful expression, there are two powerful reasons, which must, in all probability, prevent their being attended with similar success. In the first place, woman has, in general, much stronger propensity than man to the perfect discharge of parental duties; and secondly, the avocations of men are so imperious, in their different lines of life, that few fathers could command sufficient leisure (if nature furnished them with talents and inclination) to fulfill the arduous office of preceptor to their own children; yet, arduous and irksome as the office is generally thought, there is perhaps no species of mental labour so perfectly sweet in its success: and the Poet justly exclaims:

O'tis a sight to be with joy perus'd,

A sight surpass'd by none that we can shew!

A Father blest with an ingenuous Son;
Father, and Friend, and Tutor, all in one.

Had the constitutional shyness and timidity of Cowper been gradually dispelled by the rare advantage that he describes in these verses, his early years would certainly have been happier; but men, who are partial to public schools, will probably doubt, if any system of private tuition could have proved more favourable to the future display of his genius, than such an education, as he received at Westminster. There, indeed, the peculiar delicacy of his nature

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