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the happy circle of his London days, she was now once more to take her place in his life, never again to resign it. It is still the second place, not the first. No rival ever came between Cowper and Mrs. Unwin; but from this time onwards, till the final removal to Norfolk, Lady Hesketh was never many months without seeing him, or many weeks without writing to him. Whether she had seen his first volume or not is uncertain; if so, she had perhaps concluded that he was still in a state in which correspondence could only consist of sermons on the one side and vain attempts on the other to go back to lighter matters once enjoyed in common. But when she had read "Gilpin," she knew that the cousin of her youth was alive again. She wrote at once, and he replied that very day: "This is just as it should be: we are all grown young again." In a second letter she placed her purse at his disposal, and he at once said that, though he had refused those of others, he would not refuse hers. With her came back a renewal of friendly intercourse with others of his relations, and "Unwins and Unwinisms," as he called the acquaintances he had made in the twenty years since 1765, were to be his exclusive society no more. anonymous friend, through Lady Hesketh (it was probably Theodora Cowper), sent him frequent presents, and promised an annuity of fifty pounds; his uncle offered to come and see him, and Lady Hesketh came. She was settled in Olney Vicarage by June, 1786, and before she had been there many days had arranged for Cowper and Mrs. Unwin to give up their rather cheerless house in Olney, and take one offered them by the Throckmortons at Weston. The new house was an improvement in every way; a better house, a better garden, pleasanter company, and, above all, Weston park and gardens at their own gate, instead of separated from them by a mile or two of winter mud. Of course, the Throckmorton friendship rapidly grew under the new circumstances: and by the help of Lady Hesketh's carriage and the fame of the author of the "Task," they made some pleasant acquaintances in the country round. Lady Hesketh and Mrs. Unwin got on admirably from the first, though not quite, it must be admitted, to the last; for there came a day when Mrs. Unwin's health failed, and with it sometimes Lady Hesketh's patience, so that we find her writing of the poor old lady rather bitterly as "the Enchantress." * But that was not yet; and for the present, with his new friends, his new house, and the new book he had undertaken, Cowper was busier and happier than he had ever been since the catastrophe of 1763. The work he was engaged in was the translation of Homer, which grew out of an early dislike for the artificiality of Pope. He began it a week after he finished the last poem of his second volume, and set himself the task of forty lines a day. According to Hayley,† the original * See Letters of Lady Hesketh concerning William Cowper, 1901. ↑ Life, i. 411, 1803 edition.

suggestion here also came from Lady Austen, who, when Cowper read Pope to her and grumbled at him, asked why he should not himself make the simpler version he clamoured for. If so, her inspiration was hardly so happy in this case as when she set him to work on the "Task." But, no doubt, the mechanical labour of translating was exactly the thing to keep nightmares at bay. The translation, and the business of revising and correcting it, was his main occupation till its appearance in the summer of 1791: and, indeed, he can hardly be said to have ever again laid Homer aside; for the first edition was hardly out when he began a revision for the second, and he worked at a final revision even during the sad Norfolk period at the end. The blessing of translations is to the translator; and it is impossible for Cowper's readers not to regret these long years, his best, lost for the purposes of original work. But he himself says (January 8, 1787) that it was only after waiting a year, in a condition in which writing was a necessity to him, and finding no subject for original verse, that he turned to the task of translating Homer. And Homer at least gave the poet in him some chance. Milton, who followed next, only asked translation in the case of his Latin and Italian poems; for the rest, Cowper's task was that of an editor. Johnson had planned a Milton to rival Boydell's Shakespeare: plates by Fuseli and notes by Cowper. But Cowper got no good of it except the friendship of Hayley, the poet, who afterwards wrote his life. His important literary work was, in fact, done by 1785, when the "Task was published. Nothing written after that, except a very few occasional pieces, has any bearing on his poetical position to-day. It was with Cowper, as with most poets; his work was done when he began to enjoy the honour of it.

The fifteen years he had still to live when the "Task" appeared were divided into two halves, the happiest and the saddest periods of his life. During the first (with the exception of the first six months of 1787, during which he was insane) he might seem to have got together most of the ingredients whose mixture makes the sweetest cup of happiness middle-aged bachelors can hope to taste. His health and fortune were as good as anybody has a right to expect; and he took them, after the fashion of the wise and happy, as part of the established order of things. The daily domesticities, that are only second in importance to good health and good temper in their effect on happiness, were made delightful to him by the never-broken harmony of his union with Mrs. Unwin. He had a host of friends, new and old, appearing and reappearing from all directions, and loading him not only with their love, which is best, but with their admiration, which, though only second-best, will never be a small part of happiness to any one, and most certainly not to a poet. Then, besides health and wealth, friends to his mind, and, I might almost say, wife to his heart, he had a house and garden which were exactly what he wanted, and where he wanted.

And, best of all, perhaps, he was constantly busy, and his business was of that kind, the most agreeable of all, which brings to him who does it not only credit from outside but pleasure within. What can a man want more? we may ask; and answer, perhaps, Nothing, except some children to carry him on into the future. But it was not the lack of children that spoilt the thought of the future for Cowper. His awful delusion was always in the background to blacken that picture for him. Still, it seems it was not often anywhere except in the background: and probably few discovered it who were not standing very close. For weeks or months no sign of it appeared except his obstinate refusal to enter a church or even to join in the devotional exercises of his own household. Such a conviction to such a man could not but be a large drawback to the completest round of happiness; but all the evidence points to long periods of latency, leaving free play to his great natural gift of enjoyment; and in spite of an attack of insanity in 1787, this was his common condition from 1785 to 1792 or 1793; as a whole, few happier men were to be found.

There are very few eighteenth-century interiors with which we are more intimately acquainted than that of Weston Lodge during these smiling years of industry, prosperity, and peace. The best picture of it, or rather the best hundred pictures of it, are, of course, to be found in his own letters, some of the most charming letters dating from this time. But for those who love to know the little daily ways of great men, it may be worth adding a few details from unpublished sources. About what he ate I do not know that there is much to say, except that he was fond of fish; and nearly all the letters to Hill, and many to the Newtons, contain messages of thanks for fish often suppressed in the printed text. Of what he drank we know more. Like Gibbon, and unlike Johnson, he was a believer in wine. "If such be the consequences of waterdrinking," he writes to Hill of his friend Chester's visit to Harrogate in 1788, "let us abstain from all such perilous beverages, and drink wine." Another of the hitherto unpublished letters to Hill gives us the detail that he found it most convenient to import his wine by the hogshead from Lynn rather than by the hamper from London. What the wine was I do not know, except that it was sometimes the Madeira beloved by Gibbon, and that on one occasion, of which I have seen a detailed description, the two bottles on the table at the afternoon dessert were of port and of calcavella. A young cousin of Cowper's, one John Johnson, grandson of his uncle Roger Donne, came over to see him from Cambridge about this time-to be exact, in January, 1790,-soon became a frequent and very welcome guest at the Lodge, and played a large part in the rest of Cowper's life. Among the Cowper papers of all sorts he left behind him, there are two manuscripts of his own, which are descriptions in verse of his first day at the Lodge, and of the first time he saw Teedon, the

foolish schoolmaster of Olney, a visitor there. It is the second of these which gives us this little detail of the wines. Teedon finds them at dessert on a Saturday afternoon.

"O'er choicest fruits and wine in social chat
Thyself, thy Mary, and thy kinsman sat.”

And Cowper soon asks him

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"Good Mr. Teedon, which shall pass, Port wine or calcavella to thy glass?"

Teedon takes port, and asks, as most of us will to-day, what calcavella is; on which Cowper derives the name "with fear" from qualchevalle." The fear was wiser than the derivation, it seems; for the wine is really a white Portuguese wine, and takes its name from the town Carcavelhos. But Teedon knew no Italian, and cheerfully added a glass of "qualchevalle" to his port. So much for Cowper in the poetical role of a wine-bibber, to which it is regrettable to admit that he added the prosaic character of a drinker of gin. In the printed letters there is, now and then, an indication of a taste for the best Holland gin; and the unprinted indications of it are more numerous; one may be quoted: it is the omitted opening of the letter to Johnson of April 11, 1793 :

"MY DEAREST Johnny,

"In the first place, as a most important article, which I would not willingly forget, I wish you to send us another keg of Geneva, that excellent liquor of which we both take a tablespoonful every day after dinner. This laudable practice, together with the gift of a bottle to the Courtenays, has pretty much reduced our quantity, so that we are in danger of being left ginless unless soon supplied."

There are also demands for white brandy. So that it is plain that neither Cowper nor Mrs. Unwin made room for total abstinence in their creed. Truth must add that both took snuff. John Johnson was not a great poet, but he is a witness to whose evidence there is no reply: and the first of these sketches tells us of the walk he took with Cowper, and paints for us the poet sitting in the Weston alcove, setting his watch by Olney church clock with the assistance of a "traveller glass," enjoying the scenery, and also enjoying the contents of a

"Silver storehouse filled

With Caledonian grain that thrilled and thrilled

Thy nerve olfactory:"

and when they get home they find Mrs. Unwin sitting in her chair, and, on the table by her side, "a box of silver with a pungent store."

The fact is, of course, that Cowper, in matters of this sort, retained the habits of the world in which he was brought up. Indeed, neither the poet nor the evangelical in him ever extinguished the gentleman. When he writes for a hat it is to be a "smart, well-cocked, fashionable affair." Hill's sisters are requested, on January 12, 1771, "now the streets are clean and frozen," to buy him some very specially described handkerchiefs and muslin ruffles; and he allowed himself to be painted by Abbott in the costume of an archery club. Not to linger too long over these trifles, it may be added that Johnson's account of the start for his daily walk suggests a carefully prepared business, quite as far removed from the sloven as from the fop. The youth had been carried off by Mrs. Unwin soon after his arrival, so as to leave the poet to his Homer; but after a while the moment comes, and—

"Thy walking shoes thy valet bore

And what were buskins termed in days of yore:

and the hat, and the gloves, and the wig, are set out by the same functionary, as well as—

"Thy brown surtout, with velvet collar matched,

And, though a poet's garment, nowhere patched;"

and so they go off with his dog, Beau, leading the way.

One other item, and one only, from this source. A poet's workshop must always have some interest for those who read his works. This is what Johnson saw in Cowper's study. First, Mrs. Unwin in a chair, the poet's linnets in a cage, and two cats on the floor. Then, on the walls were two landscapes by Vernet, and two by Rubens, and some engravings illustrating Homer, between which was one of Homer himself. All the pictures are minutely described. Some of them are also to be found in a detailed description of the parlour at Olney, which occurs in an unpublished letter of a Mr. Kilvington, written to John Johnson in 1810, on behalf of Mrs. Powley, daughter of Mrs. Unwin. But the Olney account mentions prints of Bunyan and Thurlow and a Crucifixion, none of which occurs in this description of Weston. A poet's books are, however, more than his pictures; and we are rather surprised to find from Johnson's account that he who once described his library as

"No mighty store,

My own works neatly bound and nothing more,"

has in fact a good small collection of books. The works of Horace stand side by side with his own in the chiffonier: and we are told that not only Latium," but Greece, France, and Caledonia contributed their poets, and even "the new world attuned her infant