volume and not begun my second) to pay my devoirs to her ladyship every morning at eleven.  Customs very soon became laws.  I began The Task, for she was the lady who gave me the Sofa for a subject.  Being once engaged in the work, I began to feel the inconvenience of my morning attendance.  We had seldom breakfasted ourselves till ten; and the intervening hour was all the time I could find in the whole day for writing, and occasionally it would happen that the half of that hour was all that I could secure for the purpose.  But there was no remedy.  Long usage had made that which was at first optional a point of good manners, and consequently of necessity, and I was forced to neglect The Task to attend upon the Muse who had inspired the subject.  But she had ill-health, and before I had quite finished the work was obliged to repair to Bristol.”  Evidently this was not the whole account of the matter, or there would have been no need for a formal letter of farewell.  We are very sorry to find the revered Mr. Alexander Knox saying, in his correspondence with Bishop Jebb, that he had a severer idea of Lady Austen than he should wish to put into writing for publication, and that he almost suspected she was a very artful woman.  On the other hand, the unsentimental Mr. Scott is reported to have said, “Who can be surprised that two women should be continually in the society of one man and quarrel, sooner or later, with each other?” Considering what Mrs. Unwin had been to Cowper, and what he had been to her, a little jealousy on her part would not have been highly criminal.  But, as Southey observes, we shall soon see two women continually in the society of this very man without quarrelling with each other.  That Lady Austen’s behaviour to Mrs. Unwin was in the highest degree affectionate, Cowper has himself assured us.  Whatever the cause may have been, this bird of paradise, having alighted for a moment in Olney, took wing and was seen no more.

Her place, as a companion, was supplied, and more than supplied, by Lady Hesketh, like her a woman of the world, and almost as bright and vivacious, but with more sense and stability of character, and who, moreover, could be treated as a sister without any danger of, misunderstanding.  The renewal of the intercourse between Cowper and the merry and affectionate play-fellow of his early days, had been one of the best fruits borne to him by The Task, or perhaps we should rather say by John Gilpin, for on reading that ballad she first became aware that her cousin had emerged from the dark seclusion of his truly Christian happiness, and might again be capable of intercourse with her sunny nature.  Full of real happiness for Cowper were her visits to Olney; the announcement of her coming threw him into a trepidation of delight.  And how was this new rival received by Mrs. Unwin.  “There is something,” says Lady Hesketh in a letter which has been already