sumed the office which Mrs. Powley had tenderly performed for her venerable Parent, and regularly read a chapter in the Bible every morning to Mrs. Unwin before she rose. It was the invariable custom of Cowper to visit his poor old Friend the moment he had finished his breakfast, and to remain in her apartment while the chapter was read.

In June the pressure of his melancholy appeared to be in some little degree alleviated, for on Mr. Johnson's receiving the edition of Pope's Homer, published by Mr. Wakefield, Cowper eagerly seized the book, and began to read the Notes to himself with visible interest. They awakened his attention to his own version of Homer. In August he deliberately engaged in a revisal of the whole, and for some time produced almost sixty new lines a day.

This mental occupation animated all his intimate friends with a most lively hope of his speedy and perfect recovery. But Autumn repressed the hope that Summer had excited.

In September the family removed from Dunham-Lodge to try again the influence of the sea-sidę, in their favorite village of Mundsley.

Cowper walked frequently by the sea; but no apparent benefit arose, no mild relief from the incessant pressure of his melancholy. He had relinquished his Homer again, and could not yet be induced to resume it.

Towards

Towards the end of October this interesting family of disabled Invalides and their affectionate attendants, retired from the coast to the

house of Mr. Johnson in Dereham.

A house now chosen for their Winter residence, as Dunham-Lodge appeared to them too dreary.

The long and exemplary life of Mrs. Unwin was drawing towards a close :-The powers of nature were gradually exhausted, and on the seventeenth of December she ended a troubled existence, distinguished by a sublime spirit of piety and friendship, that shone through long periods of calamity, and continued to glimmer through the distressful twilight of her declining faculties. Her death was uncommonly tranquil. Cowper saw her about half an hour before the moment of expiration, which passed without a struggle, or a groan, as the clock was striking one in the afternoon.

66

On the morning of that day he said to the servant who opened the window of his chamber : Sally is there life above stairs ?" A striking proof of his bestowing incessant attention on the sufferings of his aged Friend, although he had long appeared almost totally absorded in his own.

In the dusk of the evening he attended Mr. Johnson to survey the corpse; and after looking at it a few moments, he started suddenly away, with a vehement but unfinished sentence of passionate

sorrow.

He spoke of her no more.

DD 2

She

She was buried by torch-light, on the twenty-third of December, in the North isle of Dereham Church; and two of her friends, impressed with a just and deep sense of her extraordinary merit, have raised a marble Tablet to her memory with the following inscription:

IN MEMORY

Of MARY

(Widow of the Revd. MORLEY UNWIN,

and Mother of the Revd. WILLIAM CAWTHORN UNWIN),

Born at Ely 1724, buried in this Church 1796.

Trusting in God, with all her heart and mind,

This woman prov'd magnanimously kind;
Endur'd affliction's desolating hail,

And watch'd a Poet thro' misfortune's vale.

Her spotless dust, angelic guards, defend!

It is the dust of Unwin, Cowper's Friend!
That single title in itself is fame,

For all, who read his Verse, revere her name ».

The

The infinitely tender and deep sense of gratitude that Cowper, in his seasons of health, invariably manifested towards this zealous and faithful Guardian of his troubled existence, the agonies he suffered on our finding her under the oppression of a paralytic disease, during my first visit to Weston; and all his expressions to me concerning the comfort and support that his spirits had derived from her friendship, all made me peculiarly anxious to know, how he sustained the event of her death. It may be regarded as an instance of providential mercy to this afflicted Poet, whose sensibility of heart was so wonderfully acute, that his aged Friend, whose life he had so long considered as essential to his own, was taken from him at a time when the pressure of his malady, a perpetual low fever, both of body and mind, had in a great degree diminished the native energy of his faculties and affections.

Severe as the sufferings of melancholy were to his disordered frame, I am strongly inclined to believe, that the anguish of heart which he would otherwise have endured, must have been infinitely more severe. From this anguish he was so far preserved by the marvellous state of his own disturbed health, that instead of mourning the loss of a person, in whose life he had seemed to live, all perception of that loss was mercifully taken from him, and from the moment when he hurried away from the inanimate object of his filial attachment, he appeared to have no memory of her having existed, for he never asked a question concerning her funeral, nor ever mentioned her name.

Towards

Towards the Summer of 1797 his bodily health appeared to improve, but not to such a degree as to restore any comfortable activity to his mind. In June he wrote to me a brief Letter, but such as too forcibly expressed the cruelty of his distemper.

The process of digestion never passed regularly in his frame during the years that he resided in Norfolk. Medicine appeared to have little or no influence on his complaint, and his aversion at the sight of it was extreme.

From Asses' milk, of which he began a course on the twentyfirst of June in this year, he gained a considerable acquisition of bodily strength, and was enabled to bear an airing in an open carriage, before breakfast, with Mr. Johnson.

A depression of spirits, which suspended the studies of a Writer so eminently endeared to the Public, was considered by men of piety and learning, as a national misfortune, and several individuals of this description, though personally unknown to Cowper, wrote to him in the benevolent hope, that expressions of friendly praise, from persons, who could be influenced only by the most laudable motives in bestowing it, might reanimate the dejected spirit of a Poet, not sufficiently conscious of the public service that his Writings had rendered to his Country, and of that universal esteem, which they had so deservedly secured to their Author.

I cannot