“Vive valeque,
     Yours ever,
       W. C.”

These letters have been chosen as illustrations of Cowper’s epistolary style, and for that purpose they have been given entire.  But they are also the best pictures of his character; and his character is everything.  The events of his life worthy of record might all be comprised in a dozen pages.

CHAPTER VIII.

CLOSE OF LIFE.

Cowper says there could not have been a happier trio on earth than Lady Hesketh, Mrs. Unwin, and himself.  Nevertheless, after his removal to Weston, he again went mad, and once more attempted self-destruction.  His malady was constitutional, and it settled down upon him as his years increased, and his strength failed.  He was now sixty.  The Olney physicians, instead of husbanding his vital power, had wasted it away secundum artem by purging, bleeding, and emetics.  He had overworked himself on his fatal translation of Homer, under the burden of which he moved, as he says himself, like an ass over-laden with sand-bags.  He had been getting up to work at six, and not breakfasting till eleven.  And now the life from which his had for so many years been fed, itself began to fail.  Mrs. Unwin was stricken with paralysis; the stroke was slight, but of its nature there was no doubt.  Her days of bodily life were numbered; of mental life there remained to her a still shorter span.  Her excellent son, William Unwin, had died of a fever soon after the removal of the pair to Weston.  He had been engaged in the work of his profession as a clergyman, and we do not hear of his being often at Olney.  But he was in constant correspondence with Cowper, in whose heart as well as in that of Mrs. Unwin his death must have left a great void, and his support was withdrawn just at the moment when it was about to become most necessary.

Happily just at this juncture a new and a good friend appeared.  Hayley was a mediocre poet, who had for a time obtained distinction above his merits.  Afterwards his star had declined, but having an excellent heart, he had not been in the least soured by the downfall of his reputation.  He was addicted to a pompous rotundity of style, perhaps he was rather absurd; but he was thoroughly good-natured, very anxious to make himself useful, and devoted to Cowper, to whom, as a poet, he looked up with an admiration unalloyed by any other feeling.  Both of them, as it happened, were engaged on Milton, and an attempt had been made to set them by the ears; but Hayley took advantage of it to introduce himself to Cowper with an effusion of the warmest esteem.  He was at Weston when Mrs. Unwin was attacked with paralysis, and displayed his resource by trying to cure her with an electric-machine.  At Eartham, on the coast of Sussex, he had, by an expenditure beyond his means, made for himself a little paradise, where it was his delight to gather a distinguished circle.  To this place he gave the pair a pressing invitation, which was accepted in the vain hope that a change might do Mrs. Unwin good.