IN WEEKLY VOLUMES, price 3d.; or in Cloth, 6d. CASSELL'S NATIONAL LIBRARY. The following are amongst the books already published. Essays on Mankind and Political Arithmetic.. DANIEL DEFOR. SIR WALTER SCOTT. FENELON. ROGER ASCHAM. DANIEL DEFOE. EDMUND SPENSER. SIR WILLIAM PETTY. ROBERT SOUTHEY. RICHARD STEELE. Translated by LADY DUFF Gordon. JEREMY TAYLOR. CHARLES DICKENS. PAUL HENTZNER. JEREMY TAYLOR. BEN JONSON. Aristotle's Poetics and Longinus on the Sublime. The North-West Passage Pepys's Diary (March-November, 1668). VOLTAIRE. ADELBERT CHAMISSO. JOSEPH ADDISON. Letters on Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, Ludgate Hill, London. INTRODUCTION. WILLIAM COWPER was born in November, 1731. His father was the Rev. John Cowper, rector of Great Berkhampstead, and Chaplain to George II. His mother died when he was six years old. After early experience of a rough school and two years' suffering from inflammation of the eyes, Cowper was sent, aged ten, to Westminster School. In 1748 Cowper left Westminster, was entered of the Middle Temple, and articled for three years to law. An uncle had two daughters. One of them, Theodora, touched his young fancy; the other, Harriet, was his friend afterwards as Lady Hesketh. A nervous melancholy, shadow of evil to come, had weighed on Cowper; when he was called to the bar in 1754 Theodora's father refused sanction to his daughter's engagement with Cowper, and he saw her no more. Two years later, his father, who had married again, died, and Cowper's means diminished. He was made a Commissioner of Bankrupts. This brought him £60 a year. In 1763, a cousin, Major Cowper, offered him the offices of Clerk of the Journals of the House of Lords, and of Reading Clerk, and Clerk of Committees, to which Major Cowper had a right of presentation. He flinched from taking more than one; and when the major's right of nomination to that was questioned, and the fitness of the nominee was to be tested, Cowper's nervous excitement passed into lunacy, and he was placed, in December, 1763, in an asylum at St. Alban's. When he recovered, Cowper gave up his small office of Commissioner of Bankrupts, and was chiefly dependent 2762 |