of the periodical essays which were the rage in that day, joint proprietors of the St. James’s Chronicle, contributors both of them to the Connoisseur, and translators, Colman of Terence, Bonnell Thornton of Plautus, Colman being a dramatist besides.  In the set was Lloyd, another wit and essayist and a poet, with a character not of the best.  On the edge of the set, but apparently not in it, was Churchill, who was then running a course which to many seemed meteoric, and of whose verse, sometimes strong but always turbid, Cowper conceived and retained an extravagant admiration.  Churchill was a link to Wilkes; Hogarth too was an ally of Colman, and helped him in his exhibition of Signs.  The set was strictly confined to Westminsters.  Gray and Mason, being Etonians, were objects of its literary hostility and butts of its satire.  It is needless to say much about these literary companions of Cowper’s youth:  his intercourse with them was totally broken off, and before he himself became a poet its effects had been obliterated by madness, entire change of mind, and the lapse of twenty years.  If a trace remained, it was in his admiration of Churchill’s verses, and in the general results of literary society, and of early practice in composition.  Cowper contributed to the Connoiseur and the St. James’s Chronicle.  His papers in the Connoisseur have been preserved; they are mainly imitations of the lighter papers of the Spectator by a student who affects the man of the world.  He also dallied with poetry, writing verses to “Delia,” and an epistle to Lloyd.  He had translated an elegy of Tibullus when he was fourteen, and at Westminster he had written an imitation of Phillips’s Splendid Shilling, which, Southey says, shows his manner formed.  He helped his Cambridge brother, John Cowper, in a translation of the Henriade.  He kept up his classics, especially his Homer.  In his letters there are proofs of his familiarity with Rousseau.  Two or three ballads which he wrote are lost, but he says they were popular, and we may believe him.  Probably they were patriotic.  “When poor Bob White,” he says, “brought in the news of Boscawen’s success off the coast of Portugal, how did I leap for joy!  When Hawke demolished Conflans, I was still more transported.  But nothing could express my rapture when Wolfe made the conquest of Quebec.”

The “Delia” to whom Cowper wrote verses was his cousin Theodora, with whom he had an unfortunate love affair.  Her father, Ashley Cowper, forbade their marriage, nominally on the ground of consanguinity, really, as Southey thinks, because he saw Cowper’s unfitness for business and inability to maintain a wife.  Cowper felt the disappointment deeply at the time, as well he might do if Theodora resembled her sister, Lady Hesketh.  Theodora remained unmarried, and, as we shall see, did not forget her lover.  His letters she preserved till her death in extreme old age.