Declines a joint literary undertaking.. Willing to write, with others, a poem entitled The Four Ages 236 Dr. Johnson's great attention to the poet. Happy results of the Doctor's ingenuity... 66 Dowager Lady Spencer's visit to the poet... THE LIFE OF WILLIAM COWPER. CHAPTER I. His parentage-Loss of his mother-Poetic description of her character -First school-Cruelty he experienced there-First serious impressions-Is placed under the care of an eminent oculist-Entrance upon Westminster School-Character while there-Removal thence-Entrance upon an attorney's office-Want of employment there—Unfitness for his profession-Early melancholy impressions. WILLIAM COWPER was born at Great Berkhamstead, in Hertfordshire, November 15, 1731. His father, Dr. John Cowper, chaplain to King George the Second, was the second son of Spencer Cowper, who was Chief Justice of Cheshire, and afterwards a Judge in the Court of Common Pleas, and whose brother William, first Earl Cowper, was, at the same time, Lord High Chancellor of England. His mother was Anne, daughter of Roger Donne, Esq., of Ludham Hall, Norfolk, who had a common ancestry with the celebrated Dr. Donne, Dean of St. Paul's. In reference to this lady, it has been justly observed, by one of the poet's best biographers, "That the highest blood in the realm flowed in the veins of the modest and unassuming Cowper; his mother having descended through the families of Hippesley of Throughley, in Sussex, and Pellet, of Bolney, in the same county, from the several noble houses of West, Knollys, Carey, Bullen, Howard, and Mowbray, and so, by four different lines, from Henry the Third, King of England." Though, as the same writer properly remarks, "distinctions of this nature can shed no additional lustre on the memory of Cowper, yet genius, however exalted, disdains not, while it boasts not, the splendor of ancestry; and royalty itself may be pleased, and perhaps benefited, by discovering its kindred to such piety, such purity, and such talents as his.” Very little is known of the habits and disposition of Cowper's mother. From the following epitaph, however, in scribed on a monument, erected by her husband in the chancel of St. Peter's church, Great Berkhamstead, and composed by her niece, who afterwards became Lady Walsingham, she appears to have been a lady of the most amiable temper and agreeable manners :— Here lies, in early years bereft of life, The best of mothers, and the kindest wife, These lines, though weak, are as herself sincere. After giving birth to several children, this lady died in child-bed, in her thirty-seventh year; leaving only two sons, John the younger, and William the elder, who is the subject of this memoir. Cowper was only six years old when he lost his mother; and how deeply he was affected by her early death, may be inferred from the following exquisitely tender lines, composed more than fifty years afterwards, on the receipt of her portrait from a relation in Norfolk: "My mother! when I learned that thou wast dead, |