he could no longer enjoy it without appearing deficient in gratitude towards the compassionate and generous guardian of his sequestered life. No person can justly blame Mrs. Unwin for feeling apprehensive that Cowper's intimacy with a lady of such extraordinary talents might lead him into perplexities, of which he was by no means aware. This remark was suggested by a few elegant and tender verses, addressed by the Poet to Lady Austen, and shown to me by that lady.
"Those who were acquainted with the unsuspecting innocence and sportive gaiety of Cowper, would readily allow, if they had seen the verses to which I allude, that they are such as he might have addressed to a real sister; but a lady only called by that endearing name may be easily pardoned, if she was induced by them to hope that they might possibly be a prelude to a still dearer alliance. To me they appeared expressive of that peculiarity in his character, a gay and tender gallantry, perfectly distinct from amorous attachment. If the lady, who was the subject of the verses, had given them to me with a permission to print them, I should have thought the Poet himself might have approved of their appearance, accompanied with such a commentary."
The endeavours to make everything pleasant all round are very characteristic of Hayley, and in this case ludicrous. He softens here and subdues there, and, where this is impossible, makes omissions which leave the matter almost unintelligible. But the substance of the whole apparently is that Lady Austen was in love with Cowper, and believed him to be so with her; that Mrs. Unwin was jealous, and that Cowper thereupon broke off the connexion. Then was Lady Austen's belief right, or had she misunderstood him? That she would gladly have married him is unquestionable, and I cannot doubt that a tender feeling towards her was growing up in his mind also, but that, as he looked back on the past and upon Mrs. Unwin's kindness and tenderness (although his intended marriage with her was probably quite abandoned by this time), he felt that it would be ungrateful on his part to forsake her for another. That he should write of Lady Austen, as we have seen, with some- thing like asperity, is easily intelligible, especially when we remember that his letters were only intended for the sight of William Unwin.
The "elegant and tender verses" of which Hayley speaks are printed for the first time in the present volume; and one is constrained to say that a woman who was not an actual sister could only put one interpretation upon them. And if they were not intended to bear this interpretation, they seem to me to be a thoughtless sporting with a woman's peace. The loss of Lady Austen's friendship was a serious one for him.[1] He had need of such friends. Melancholy was increasing upon him again, and this breach seems to have deepened it greatly. "When I was writing "The Task,'" he said afterwards, "I was often supremely unhappy." And in a letter writen at the time
- ↑ Lady Austen afterwards married a Frenchman, M. de Tardiff. She died in 1802, whilst Hayley's first volume was going through the press.
