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THE

ECLECTIC REVIEW,

FOR MARCH, 1824.

Art. I. Private Correspondence of William Cowper, Esq. with several of his most intimate Friends. Now first published from the Originals in the Possession of his Kinsman, John Johnson, LL.D. Rector of Yaxham with Welborne in Norfolk. In two Volumes. 8vo. pp. xxiv, 728. (2 Portraits) Price 11. 8s. London. 1824.

W E suppose that there is now but one opinion as to the utter unfitness of Cowper's Biographer for the office which he assumed. It proved It proved a lucrative one to himself, and the poor Poet had, in his friend William Hayley, a rich legatee. But, within the circle of his private friends, an individual could scarcely have been selected, less qualified to do justice to the memory of Cowper, whom, in his best days, he never knew, whose character he could not appreciate, and with whose inmost feelings he could have no sympathy. If we have a reader who retains a doubt on this point, the present publication will, we think, remove it. The letters contained in these volumes were equally submitted,' we are told, to the selecting hand of Mr. Hayley;' and without going the length of condemning him for not inserting the whole, (for many might unquestionably have been suppressed without any serious loss to the public,) it is impossible to account for his rejecting a large proportion of them, on any supposition creditable either to his head or to his heart. The reason of their being excluded, is, however, obvious: they would have shewn the want of fidelity in the Biographer. Their insertion would not have comported with that studied concealment of the morbid peculiarities of Cowper's mind, which a sickly delicacy or an unmanly fear of giving offence led him to adopt, and to which must be ascribed the prevalence of the most unfounded and prejudicial notions respecting the true source of Cowper's singular and afflictive malady. The present Editor adverts to this conduct on the part of Mr. Hayley, in the mildest terms.

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There are,' he says, ' many letters addressed to Mr. Newton, with two or three to Mr. Bull, on the subject of religion, which, though not of general application, but confined to its aspect on the mind of the writer, were decidedly worthy of Mr. Hayley's insertion ; and the more so, indeed, on that very account, his concern, as biographer, being rather with the individual than with the community. But these, out of tenderness to the feelings of the reader, I am persuaded, and for the gloominess they attach to the Writer's mind, he has utterly excluded. In doing this, however, amiable and considerate as his caution must appear, the gloominess which he has taken from the mind of Cowper, has the effect of involving his character in obscurity. People read the Letters with the Task in their recollection, (and vice versa,) and are perplexed. They look for the Cowper of each in the other, and find him not. The correspondency is destroyed. Hence the character of Cowper is undetermined; mystery hangs over it; and the opinions formed of him are as various as the minds of the inquirers.

This is perfectly just; only that, with regard to the Biographer's tenderness to the feelings of his readers, we are tempted to employ the expressive monosyllable by which Mr. Burchell intimates his provoking incredulity in the Vicar of Wakefield. Mr. Hayley, no doubt, wished to present his distinguished friend under what he judged the most advantageous aspect,-as the poet Cowper, such as Romney has portrayed him, with only that slight shade of melancholy thrown into the expression, that might give the effect of an interesting pensiveness, and only those faint traces of indisposition which might touch the reader's sympathy, without drawing upon his pity. That tasteful night-cap wonderfully aided the desired impression; and therefore, Cowper was to be exhibited only in that costume, although the picture by Abbot, from which the portrait in the present work is engraved, is much more characteristic, and is esteemed by far the best likeness; it is, moreover, excellently painted; but, alas ! it exhibits the Author of the Task, habited like an ordinary gentleman of the day, and wearing, in place of the cap, a wig! Now if even Dr. Johnson's wig could not gain admittance into St. Paul's cathedral, it being deemed indispensable to Romanize the venerable inhabitant of Bolt Court before a tolerable statue could be made of the uncouth original, we need not marvel that Cowper's wig was deemed by his sentimental Biographer, quite incompatible with the effect which he sought to produce by his ideal portrait of the recluse of Weston. We could have forgiven, however, the suppression of the wig;-though worthy Mr. Wilson of Olney had a good right to be hurt at the ill compliment tacitly paid to his professional

skill; yet, out of tenderness to the feelings of the reader, we could have tolerated the concealment of this humiliating infirmity in the Poet, had the sacrifice of truth and nature to effect been carried no further than the outward man. But the same motive led Mr. Hayley to alter the whole story of Cowper's life, and to give a false view of his character. He could not endure the thought, that the Author of the Task, his friend, should be known to have been insane. He seems to have feared that it would tarnish the lustre of the Poet's name, were the secret divulged, that the mind of one who could so rule the harp of poetry as to command the feelings of others, was itself, according to his own affecting image, a harp unstrung. But this consideration, if allowed to have any other influence than that of leading him to touch the subject with all the delicacy of friendship, should have deterred him altogether from writing and publishing the Memoirs. There was no necessity imposed upon him. Had the life of Cowper been deemed a tale unfit for the public ear, it might have been left untold. But this, the Biographer's vanity would have endured no better than the disclosure of the whole truth; and he therefore adopted the middle course,-which, when speaking the truth and saying nothing are the alternatives to be escaped from, is seldom either an honest or a wise one,-that of adapting both the selection of letters and the statement of circumstances to the imperfect view which he has given of Cowper's mental history.

It was inevitable that this ill-judged attempt at concealment should eventually produce an effect the very opposite to what was intended. Cowper's malady was not a secret: he had himself alluded to it in the poem on Retirement, in language which few readers could misinterpret; and it was impossible to avoid all reference to it in the Memoirs. But the mystery which was suffered to hang over the subject, only served the more to excite curiosity, and to draw attention to the subject. In reference to all cases of this afflictive nature, there is an invariable propensity which prompts persons busily to inquire the supposed cause; and there is a prejudice which disposes them to believe that there must always be a moral cause for this species of bodily ailment; and of all assignable causes of this description, love or religion is the first that suggests itself. Now as it was not generally known, that Cowper had ever exhibited these morbid symptoms before he was somewhat too old to become the victim of disappointed love, it was a natural conclusion, that his gloomy religion was the cause of all his suffering. The methodism and mysticism' with which his poems are tinctured, seemed to

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favour this supposition ; and a writer in the Encyclopedia Britannica thought that he had found out the whole secret, when he jumped to the conclusion, that the theory of Christian jus* tification' which Cowper had adopted, was the source of all his alarming and distressful apprehensions; his natural disposition fitting him to receive all the horrors without the conso• lations of his faith.' There is nothing in Hayley's Memoirs, to say the least, to forbid this inference. Could we believe the Biographer to have been ignorant of his friend's early history and constitutional infirmity, we should imagine that this was his own opinion. Either he was not aware of all the facts that bore upon the case, or, knowing them, he withheld the information that would have obviated a most pernicious misapprehension. Either he mistook in supposing that religion was the exciting cause of Cowper's distemper, overlooking all the circumstances of the case which prove beyond contradiction the contrary, or he was not unwilling that Cowper's religious tenets should form as it were the apology for his mental aberration.

Now it is this false delicacy and disingenuousness on the part of the Biographer, that has rendered it necessary to expatiate on a topic which otherwise might have been thrown into the back-ground. Cowper's friends must thank Mr. Hayley, that it has ever been found necessary to lay bare his character to its very anatomy, in order to expose the erroneousness of the diagnosis which ascribed its morbid symptoms to his theological opinions. Our readers will recollect'that we were among those who warmly deprecated the exposure to the public eye, of that agonizing memoir of his own case, (interesting as it is in a physiological or psychological respect,) which the amiable sufferer left behind him. We objected to it as an unfeeling violation of the secrets of the sepulchre, as a throwing open of the closet of the anatomist to the gape of the vulgar. But what was the plea set up for its publication ? The persuasion that its details would be the most efficient * means of correcting certain false notions unfriendly to spiri• tual religion, which some have thought themselves sanctioned

in entertaining, by the vague and indistinct accounts which • were previously before the world.'* There ought not to have been given occasion for this plea. The memoir, in the hands of a man of philosophical mind and Christian principles, would have been invaluable as data for a just representation of all the

* See Eclectic Review, N. S. Vol. VI. p. 13. Art. Memoirs of Couper.

phenomena of the case it describes, and some extracts might have been given from the manuscript, which would sufficiently have vouched for its correctness; it was unpardonable not to make this use of the document; but, this end being answered, it might then have been consigned to the sacred silence of the grave. We should have honoured the sensibility of the Biographer, if, having once distinctly disclosed the nature and traced the origin of the malady, he had forborne to dwell on the fearful details. The case once understood, there would have been a stop put to the pryings of a prurient curiosity.

The fact is, however, that the offence which Cowper's Biographer was most sedulous to obviate, related as much to his religious character as to his physical ailments. There are persons who would far sooner tolerate a poet's being a madman, than his being a saint. That Cowper laboured under a very peculiar species of hypochondriasis, which left him the entire command of his faculties in reference to every subject but one, and that one subject himself, was so clearly understood, that there could be no pretence, on the score of delicacy, for suppressing the letters in this collection which allude to the false impression on his mind. The gloom which they bespeak, is not of a deeper shade than some of his published poems betray;

in particular those exquisitely affecting stanzas entitled “The “ Castaway.” Nothing can be more touching than Cowper's story even as told by Hayley. Why then withhold these interesting illustrations of his history? We can conceive of no other reason, than because they exhibit what is far more repulsive to many of his admirers than insanity itself,--that practical sense of religion which is deemed a sort of madness. What this pious sufferer imagined that he had for ever lost, and was miserable because he despaired of regaining, was the presence and favour of God,--an object which the madness of ihe sane consists in despising. His concern would not have appeared less irrational to the irreligious, had no delusion existed in his mind to give it the character of despair. In fact, the period of his history at which he enjoyed, together with the 'unclouded sunshine of reason, the peace and joy of religion,—the interval from 1764 to 1773, during which he was most truly himself, is precisely that stage in which he retreats the furthest from the admiration of worldly-minded persons. It was then that his genuine character broke through the mists and shadows which veiled alike his morning and his sunset, and he appeared the cheerful and affectionate, though timid . and retiring man, the devout and elevated being which religion had made him. But it was then, too, that he appeared to many of his relatives the most mad, though, if his own account may

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