I wish you well through your laborious task of transcribing. I hope the good lady's meditations are such as amuse you rather more, while you copy them, than meditations in general would; which, for the most part, have appeared to me the most laboured, insipid, and unnatural of all productions. Adieu my dear friend. Our love attends you both.

Ever yours,

W.C.

TO LADY HESKETH.

Weston, Dec. 21, 1786.

Your welcome letter, my beloved Cousin, which ought by the date to have arrived on Sunday, being by some untoward accident delayed, came not till yesterday. It came, however, and has relieved me from a thousand distressing apprehensions on your

account.

The dew of your intelligence has refreshed my poetical laurels. A little praise now and then is very good for your hard-working poet, who is apt to grow languid, and perhaps careless without it. Praise I find affects us as money does. The more a man gets of it, with the more vigilance he watches over and preserves it. Such at least is its effect on me, and you may assure yourself that I will never lose a mite of it for want of care.

I have already invited the good Padre* in general terms, and he shall positively dine here next week,

*The Chaplain of John Throckmorton, Esq.

'whether he will or not. I do not at all suspect that his kindness to Protestants has any thing insidious în it, any more than I suspect that he transcribes Homer for me with a view for my conversion. He would find me a tough piece of business I can tell him, for, when I had no religion at all, I had yet a terrible dread of the Pope. How much more now!

I should have sent you a longer letter, but was obliged to devote my last evening to the melancholy employment of composing a Latin inscription for the tombstone of poor William, two copies of which I wrote out and inclosed, one to Henry Thornton, and one to Mr. Newton.

W.C.

TO THE REV. WALTER BAGOT.

Weston, Jan. 3, 1787.

My dear Friend-You wish to hear from me at any calm interval of epic frenzy. An interval presents itself, but whether calm or not is perhaps doubtful. Is it possible for a man to be calm who for three weeks past has been perpetually occupied in slaughter; letting out one man's bowels, smiting another through the gullet, transfixing the liver of another, and lodging an arrow in a fourth? Read the thirteenth book of the Iliad, and you will find such amusing incidents as these the subject of it, the sole subject. In order to interest myself in it and to catch the spirit of it, I had need discard all humanity. It is woeful work; and were the best

poet in the world to give us at this day such a list of killed and wounded, he would not escape universal censure,―to the praise of a more enlightened age be it spoken. I have waded through much blood, and through much more I must wade before I shall have finished. I determine in the mean time to account it all very sublime, and for two reasons :— first, because all the learned think so, and secondly, because I am to translate it. But, were I an indifferent by-stander, perhaps I should venture to wish that Homer had applied his wonderful powers to a less disgusting subject: he has in the Odyssey, and I long to get at it.

I have not the good fortune to meet with any of these fine things that you say are printed in my praise. But I learn from certain advertisements in the Morning Herald that I make a conspicuous figure in the entertainments of Freemason's Hall. I learn also that my volumes are out of print, and that a third edition is soon to be published. But, if I am not gratified with the sight of odes composed to my honour and glory, I have at least been tickled with some douceurs of a very flattering nature by the post. A lady unknown addresses the best of men—an unknown gentleman has read my inimitable poems, and invites me to his seat in Hampshireanother incognito gives me hopes of a memorial in his garden, and a Welsh attorney sends me his verses to revise, and obligingly asks

Say, shall my little bark attendant sail,

Pursue the triumph, and partake the gale?"

If you find me a little vain hereafter, my friend,

you must excuse it in consideration of these powerful incentives, especially the latter; for surely the poet who can charm an attorney, especially a Welsh one, must be at least an Orpheus, if not something greater.

Mrs. Unwin is as much delighted as myself with our present situation. But it is a sort of April weather life that we lead in this world. A little sunshine is generally the prelude to a storm. Hardly had we begun to enjoy the change when the death of her son cast a gloom upon every thing. He was a most exemplary man; of your order; learned, polite, and amiable; the father of lovely children, and the husband of a wife (very much like dear Mrs. Bagot) who adored him.

Adieu, my friend!

Your affectionate,

W. C.

The correspondence of Cowper was very limited this year, owing to a severe attack of nervous fever, which continued during a period of eight months, and greatly affected his health and spirits.

TO LADY HESKETH.

The Lodge, Jan. 8, 1787.

I have had a little nervous fever lately, my dear, that has somewhat abridged my sleep, and though I find myself better to-day than I have been since it seized me, yet I feel my head lightish, and not in the best order for writing. You will find me there

fore perhaps not only less alert in my manner than I usually am when my spirits are good, but rather shorter. I will however proceed to scribble till I find that it fatigues me, and then will do as I know you would bid me do were you here, shut up my desk and take a walk.

The good General tells me that in the eight first books which I have sent him he still finds alterations and amendments necessary, of which I myself am equally persuaded; and he asks my leave to lay them before an intimate friend of his, of whom he gives a character that bespeaks him highly deserving such a trust. To this I have no objection, desiring only to make the translation as perfect as I can make it. If God grant me life and health I would spare no labour to secure that point. The General's letter is extremely kind, and both for matter and manner like all the rest of his dealings with his cousin, the poet.

I had a letter also yesterday from Mr. Smith, member for Nottingham. Though we never saw each other, he writes to me in the most friendly terms, and interests himself much in my Homer, and in the success of my subscription. Speaking on this latter subject, he says, that my poems are read by hundreds who know nothing of my proposals, and makes no doubt that they would subscribe if they did. I have myself always thought them imperfectly or rather insufficiently announced.

I could pity the poor woman who has been weak enough to claim my song: such pilferings are sure to be detected. I wrote it, I know not how long,

VOL. III.

R