While domiciled here, the hideous malady which darkened his manhood began to cast its gloomy pall on his mind.  In the year 1759 he removed from the Middle Temple to better quarters in the Inner Temple.  For a time the change seemed beneficial, but in 1763 what had hitherto been mere morbid melancholy became something very near the dreaded insanity.  “I was struck, " he says, “not long after my settlement in the Temple, with such dejection of spirits as none but they who have felt the same can have the least conception of.  Day and night I was upon the rack, lying down in horror and rising up in despair.”  His residence at the Temple extended in all through eleven years.  The year above mentioned, the last of that term, found the poet in straitened circumstances.  The twin offices of reading-clerk and clerk of committees in the House of Lords became vacant at this juncture, and both were at the disposal of a cousin of Cowper’s.  They were duly conferred on the poet.  But the duties of these positions necessitated frequent attendance before the Peers, and to one who suffered from a morbid nervousness this prospect was most distasteful.  Hence, almost immediately after having accepted them, Cowper resigned these posts and took instead that of clerk of the journals.  Now another difficulty intervened.  It was necessary, in order to qualify for this place, that he should undergo an examination at the bar of the House of Peers; and thus “the evil from which he seemed to have escaped again met him.”

“A thunderbolt,” he writes, “would have been as welcome to me as this intelligence.  To require my attendance at the bar of the House, that I might there publicly entitle myself to the office, was in effect to exclude me from it.  In the mean time, the interest of my friend, the honor of his choice, my own reputation and circumstances, all urged me forward, all urged me to undertake what I saw to be impracticable.”  The mental agony he suffered was wellnigh unbearable.  He even contemplated with some calmness the coming of mental derangement, that thereby he might have good reason for throwing up the appointment.  He made many attempts to destroy himself.  “He purchased laudanum, but threw it away.  He went down to the Custom-House Quay to throw himself into the river.  He tried to stab himself.”  Finally, the most desperate attempt of all to extinguish the lamp of life took place in his Temple chambers.  Thrice he essayed to hang himself by his garter,—­first on his high canopy bedstead, and then on the door.

The public way which, starting at Fleet Street, runs between the Temple Church and Goldsmith Buildings, is a curious thoroughfare,—­street it cannot be called.  It inclines somewhat toward the river, with a very narrow foot-walk, scarcely wide enough for two to pass abreast.  On one side is the hoary sanctuary, and on the other a row of gloomy, flat-fronted houses, whose dirty windows blink drowsily on the flagged way beneath.