In 1756 Cowper’s father died.  There does not seem to have been much intercourse between them, nor does the son in after-years speak with any deep feeling of his loss:  possibly his complaint in Tirocinium of the effect of boarding-schools, in estranging children from their parents, may have had some reference to his own case.  His local affections, however, were very strong, and he felt with unusual keenness the final parting from his old home, and the pang of thinking that strangers usurp our dwelling and the familiar places will know us no more.

  Where once we dwelt our name is heard no more,
  Children not thine have trod my nursery floor;
  And where the gardener Robin, day by day,
  Drew me to school along the public way,
  Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapp’d
  In scarlet mantle warm and velvet capp’d. 
  ’Tis now become a history little known,
  That once we call’d the pastoral house our own.

Before the rector’s death, it seems, his pen had hardly realized the cruel frailty of the tenure by which a home in a parsonage is held.  Of the family of Berkhampstead Rectory there was now left besides himself only his brother John Cowper, Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge, whose birth had cost their mother’s life.

When Cowper was thirty-two and still living in the Temple, came the sad and decisive crisis of his life.  He went mad and attempted suicide.  What was the source of his madness?  There is a vague tradition that it arose from licentiousness, which, no doubt is sometimes the cause of insanity.  Hut in Cowper’s case there is no proof of anything of the kind; his confessions, after his conversion, of his own past sinfulness point to nothing worse than general ungodliness and occasional excess in wine; and the tradition derives a colour of probability only from the loose lives of one or two of the wits and Bohemians with whom he had lived.  His virtuous love of Theodora was scarcely compatible with low and gross amours.  Generally, his madness is said to have been religious, and the blame is laid on the same foe to human weal as that of the sacrifice of Iphigenia.  But when he first went mad, his conversion to Evangelicism had not taken place; he had not led a particularly religious life, nor been greatly given to religious practices, though as a clergyman’s son he naturally believed in religion, had at times felt religious emotions, and when he found his heart sinking had tried devotional books and prayers.  The truth is his malady was simple hypochondria, having its source in delicacy of constitution and weakness of digestion, combined with the influence of melancholy surroundings.  It had begun to attack him soon after his settlement in his lonely chambers in the Temple, when his pursuits and associations, as we have seen, were far from Evangelical.  When its crisis arrived, he was living by himself without any society of the kind that suited him (for the excitement