From the boarding school, the boy, his eyes being liable to inflammation, was sent to live with an oculist, in whose house he spent two years, enjoying at all events a respite from the sufferings and the evils of the boarding school.  He was then sent to Westminster School, at that time in its glory.  That Westminster in those days must have been a scene not merely of hardship, but of cruel suffering and degradation to the younger and weaker boys, has been proved by the researches of the Public Schools Commission.  There was an established system and a regular vocabulary of bullying.  Yet Cowper seems not to have been so unhappy there as at the private school; he speaks of himself as having excelled at cricket and football; and excellence in cricket and football at a public school generally carries with it, besides health and enjoyment, not merely immunity from bullying, but high social consideration.  With all Cowper’s delicacy and sensitiveness, he must have had a certain fund of physical strength, or he could hardly have borne the literary labour of his later years, especially as he was subject to the medical treatment of a worse than empirical era.  At one time he says, while he was at Westminster, his spirits were so buoyant that he fancied he should never die, till a skull thrown out before him by a gravedigger as he was passing through St. Margaret’s churchyard in the night recalled him to a sense of his mortality.

The instruction at a public school in those days was exclusively classical.  Cowper was under Vincent Bourne, his portrait of whom is in some respects a picture not only of its immediate subject, but of the schoolmaster of the last century.  “I love the memory of Vinny Bourne.  I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way, except Ovid, and not at all inferior to him.  I love him too with a love of partiality, because he was usher of the fifth form at Westminster when I passed through it.  He was so good-natured and so indolent that I lost more than I got by him, for he made me as idle as himself.  He was such a sloven, as if he had trusted to his genius as a cloak for everything that could disgust you in his person; and indeed in his writings he has almost made amends for all. . . . .  I remember seeing the Duke of Richmond set fire to his greasy locks and box his ears to put it out again.”  Cowper learned, if not to write Latin verses as well as Vinny Bourne himself, to write them very well, as his Latin versions of some of his own short poems bear witness.  Not only so, but he evidently became a good classical scholar, as classical scholarship was in those days, and acquired the literary form of which the classics are the best school.  Out of school hours he studied independently, as clever boys under the unexacting rule of the old public schools often did, and read through the whole of the Iliad and Odyssey with a friend.  He also probably picked up at Westminster much of the little knowledge of the world which he ever possessed.  Among his schoolfellows was Warren Hastings, in whose guilt as proconsul he afterwards, for the sake of Auld Lang Syne, refused to believe, and Impey, whose character has had the ill-fortune to be required as the shade in Macaulay’s fancy picture of Hastings.