“On Monday morning last, Sam brought me word that there was a man in the kitchen who desired to speak with me.  I ordered him in.  A plain, decent, elderly figure made its appearance, and being desired to sit spoke as follows:  ’Sir, I am clerk of the parish of All Saints in Northampton, brother of Mr. Cox the upholsterer.  It is customary for the person in my office to annex to a bill of mortality, which he publishes at Christmas, a copy of verses.  You will do me a great favour, sir, if you will furnish me with one.’  To this I replied:  ’Mr. Cox, you have several men of genius in your town, why have you not applied to some of them?  There is a namesake of yours in particular, Cox, the Statuary, who, everybody knows, is a first-rate maker of verses.  He surely is the man of all the world for your purpose.’  ’Alas, sir, I have heretofore borrowed help from him, but he is a gentleman of so much reading that the people of our town cannot understand him.’

“I confess to you, my dear, I felt all the force of the compliment implied in this speech, and was almost ready to answer, Perhaps, my good friend, they may find me unintelligible too for the same reason.  But on asking him whether he had walked over to Weston on purpose to implore the assistance of my muse, and on his replying in the affirmative, I felt my mortified vanity a little consoled, and pitying the poor man’s distress, which appeared to be considerable, promised to supply him.  The waggon has accordingly gone this day to Northampton loaded in part with my effusions in the mortuary style.  A fig for poets who write epitaphs upon individuals!  I have written one that serves two hundred persons.”

Seven successive years did Cowper, in his excellent good nature, supply John Cox, the clerk of All Saints in Northampton, with his mortuary verses[42], and when Cox died, he bestowed a like kindness on his successor, Samuel Wright.

[Footnote 42:  Southey’s Works of Cowper, ii. p. 283.]

These stanzas are published in the complete editions of Cowper’s poems, and need not be quoted here.  They begin with a quotation from some Latin author—­Horace, or Virgil, or Cicero—­these quotations being obligingly translated for the benefit of the worthy townsfolk.  The first of these stanzas begins with the well-known lines: 

     “While thirteen moons saw smoothly run
       The Nen’s barge-laden wave,
     All these, life’s rambling journey done,
       Have found their home, the grave.”

Another verse which has attained fame runs thus: 

     “Like crowded forest trees we stand,
       And some are mark’d to fall;
     The axe will smite at God’s command,
       And soon will smite us all.”

And thus does Cowper, in his temporary role, point the moral: 

     “And O! that humble as my lot,
       And scorned as is my strain,
     These truths, though known, too much forgot,
       I may not teach in vain.