COWPER AT WESTMINSTER.

William Cowper, "the most popular poet of his generation, and the best of English letter-writers," was the son of Dr. John Cowper, rector of Great Berkhampstead, Herts, and was born at the parsonage-house, in 1731. In his sixth year he lost his mother, of whom he always retained the most affectionate recollection: the deprivation of her tenderness laid the seeds of those infirmities which afterward afflicted his manhood. In the year of his mother's death, he was, as he himself describes it, "taken from the nursery, and from the immediate care of a most indulgent mother," and sent out of his father's house to a considerable school kept by a Dr. Pitman, at Market-street. Here for two years he suffered much from ill-treatment by his rough companions: his sensibility and delicate health were the objects of their cruelty and ridicule; and one boy so relentlessly persecuted him that he was expelled, and Cowper was removed from the school. Cowper retained in late years a painful recollection of the terror with which this boy inspired him. "His savage

treatment of me," he says, "impressed such a dread of his figure on my mind, that I well remember being afraid to lift my eyes upon him higher than his knees; and that I knew him better by his shoe-buckle than by any other part of his dress." To the brutality of this boy's character, and the general impression left upon Cowper's mind by the tyranny he had undergone at Dr. Pitman's, may be traced Cowper's prejudice against the whole system of public education, so forcibly expressed in his poem called Tirocinium; or, a Review of Schools.

About this time Cowper was attacked with an inflammation in the eyes, and was placed in the house of an oculist, where he remained two years, and was but imperfectly cured.

At the end of this time, at the age of ten, he was removed to Westminster School. The sudden change from the isolation of the oculist's house to the activity of a large public school, and the collision with its variety of characters and tempers, helped to feed and foster the moods of dejection to which Cowper was subject. His constitutional despondency was deepened by his sense of solitude in being surrounded by strangers; and thus, thrown in upon himself, he took refuge in brooding over his spiritual condition. This tendency had first manifested itself at Dr. Pitman's school, and next at Westminster. Passing one evening through St. Margaret's churchyard, he saw a light glimmering at a distance from the lantern of a grave-digger, who, as Cowper approached, threw up a skull that struck him on the leg. "This little incident," he observes, "was an alarm to my con

science; for the event may be remembered among the best religious documents I received at Westminster." He sought hope in religious consolations, and then hopelessly abandoned them; and he was struck with lowness of spirits, and intimations of a consumptive habit, which the watchful sympathies of home might possibly have averted or subdued.

Nevertheless, Cowper appears to have been sufficiently strong and healthy to excel at cricket and football; and he persevered so successfully in his studies, that he stood in high favor with the master for his scholarship. Looking back many years afterward on this part of his life, he only regretted the lack of his religious instruction. Latin and Greek, he complains, were all that he acquired. The duty of the school-boy absorbed every other, with the single exception of the periodical preparations for confirmation, to which we find this interesting testimony in his letters:

"That I may do justice to the place of my education, I must relate one mark of religious discipline, which, in my time, was observed at Westminster; I mean the pains which Dr. Nichols took to prepare us for confirmation. The old man acquitted himself of this duty like one who had a deep sense of its importance; and I believe most of us were struck by his manner, and affected by his exhortations."

Cowper translated twenty of Vinny Bourne's poems into English, and his allusions to his old favorite usher of the fifth form at Westminster are frequent.*

"I remember (says Cowper) seeing the Duke of Richmond set fire to Vinny's greasy locks, and box his ears to put it out again." And again, writing to Mr. Rose, Cowper says: "I shall have great pleasure in taking now and then a peep at my old friend, Vincent Bourne; the neatest of all men in his versification, though, when I was under his ushership at Westminster, the most slovenly in his person. He was so inattentive to his boys, and so indifferent whether they brought good or bad exercises, or none at all, that he seemed determined, as he was the best, so he should be the last, Latin poet of the Westminster line; a plot, which I believe he exercised very successfully: for I have not heard of any one who has at all deserved to be compared with him," Even in the time of his last illness, we find that Cowper's dreary thoughts were, for the moment, charmed away by the poems of his old favorite, Vincent Bourne.

Among Cowper's cotemporaries at Westminster were William (afterward Sir William) Russell, whose premature death he had early occasion to deplore; Cumberland, the essayist, with whom

* Vincent or Vinny Bourne, the elegant Latin poet, and usher of Westminster School, where he was educated, died in 1747. Cowper has left also this feeling tribute to his old

tutor :

to him.

"I love the memory of Vinny Bourne. I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way, except Ovid, and not at all inferior It is not common t meet with an author who can make you smile, and yet at nobody's expense; who is always entertaining, and yet always harmless; and who, though always elegant, and classical in a degree not always found even in the classics themselves, charms more by the simplicity and playfulness of his ideas than by the neatness and purity of his verse: yet such was poor Vinny."

Vinny's Latin translations of the ballads of "Tweedside," "William and Margaret," and Rowe's "Despairing beside a Clear Stream," in sweetness of numbers and elegant expressions equal the originals, and are considered scarcely inferior to anything in Ovid or Tibullus.

he lodged; Impey, and Hastings, afterward distinguished in India; and G. Colman, Lloyd, and Churchill; these, with a few other Westminster men, limited to seven, formed the Nonsense Club. Cowper likewise speaks of the five brothers Bagot, his school-fellows, as 66 very amiable and valuable boys." With one of them, Walter Bagot, he renewed his intimacy twenty years after they left school: "I felt much affection for him," says Cowper; and the more so, because it was plain that after so long a time he still retained his for me.' Such a renewal of school-friendship is very rare.

Cowper was taken from Westminster at eighteen. He has left, amidst many recollections of a less cheerful cast, the following pleasing picture:

Be it a weakness, it deserves some praise,
We love the play-place of our early days;
The scene is touching, and the heart is stone
That feels not at the sight, and feels at noue.
The walls on which we tried our graving skill,
The very name we carved, subsisting still;

The bench on which we sat while deep employed,
Though mangled, hacked, and hewed, not yet destroyed;
The little ones, unbuttoned, glowing hot,
Playing our games, and on the very spot;
As happy as we once, to kneel and draw
The chalky ring, and knuckle down at taw;
To pitch the ball into the grounded hat,
Or drive it devious with a dextrous pat;
The pleasing spectacle at once excites
Such recollection of our own delights,
That, viewing it, we seem almost to attain
Our innocent, sweet simple years again.
This fond attachment to the well-known place,
Whence first we started into life's long race,
Maintains its hold with such unfailing sway,
We feel it even in age, and at our latest day.

WARREN HASTINGS AT WESTMINSTER.

Few men stand so prominently from the historic canvas of the eighteenth century as Warren Hastings, the first GovernorGeneral of Bengal. He was born in 1732, and left a little orphan, destined to strange and memorable vicissitudes of fortune. Of his childhood, Lord Macaulay has painted this impressive picture:

"The child was sent early to the village school (of Daylsford, in Worcestershire), where he learned his letters on the same bench with the sons of the peasantry; nor did anything in his garb or fare indicate that his life was to take a widely different course from that of the young rustics with whom he studied and played. But no cloud could overcast the dawn of so much genius and so much ambition. The very plowmen observed, and long remembered, how kindly little Warren took to his book. When he was eight years old he went up to London, and was sent to a school at Newington, where he was well taught but ill fed. He always attributed the smallness of his stature to the hard and scanty fare of this seminary. At ten, he was removed to Westminster school. Vinny Bourne was one of the masters. Churchill, Colman, Lloyd, Cumberland, Cowper, were among the students. Warren was distinguished among his comrades as an excellent swimmer, boatman, and scholar. At fourteen, he was first in the examination for the foundation. His name in gilded letters on the walls of the dormitory still attests his victory over many elder com peers. He stayed two years longer at the school, and was looking forward to a student

ship at Christchurch, when he was removed from Westminster to fill a writership obtained for him in the service of the East India Company. He was placed for a few months at a commercial academy, to study arithmetic and book-keeping; and in January, 1750, a few days after he had completed his seventeenth year, he sailed for Bengal, and arrived at his destination in the October following "

It is worthy of remark, that Warren Hastings was removed from Westminster through the death of his uncle, who bequeathed him to the care of a friend, who was desirous to get rid of his charge as soon as possible. Dr. Nichols, the head-master at Westminster, made strong remonstrances against the removal of a youth who seemed likely to be one of the first scholars of the age. He even offered to bear the expense of sending his favorite pupil to Oxford. But the guardian was inflexible, obtained for the youth the writership, and he was sent to India. Here he rose through indomitable force of will, which was the most striking peculiarity of his character, to be Governor-General of Bengal. Lord Macaulay touchingly says:

"When, under a tropical sun, he ruled fifty millions of Asiatics, his hopes, amidst all the cares of war, finance, and legislation, still pointed to Daylsford. And when his long public life, so singularly chequered with good and evil, with glory and obloquy, had at length closed for ever, it was to Daylsford he retired to die."

GIBBON, THE HISTORIAN

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HIS SCHOOLS AND PLAN OF STUDY.

Edward Gibbon, the celebrated historian, was born at Putney, in Surrey, 1737, in a house situated between the roads which lead to Wandsworth and Wimbledon.

From his own account we learn that in childhood Gibbon's health was delicate, and that his early education was principally conducted by his aunt, Mrs. Porter. At the age of nine, he was sent to a boarding-school at Kingston-upon-Thames, where he remained two years, but made little progress, on account of his ill-health. The same cause prevented his attention to study at Westminster School, whither he was sent in 1749; and "his riper age was left to acquire the beauties of the Latin and the rudiments of the Greek tongue." After residing for a short time with the Rev. Philip Francis, the translator of Horace, he was removed, in 1752, to Oxford, where he matriculated as a gentleman commoner of Magdalen College, in his fifteenth year. Though his frequent absence from school had prevented him from obtaining much knowledge of Latin and Greek, his love of reading had led him to peruse many historical and geographical works; and he arrived at Oxford, according to his own account, "with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a school-boy would have been ashamed." His imperfect education was not improved during his residence at Oxford: his tutors he describes as easy men,

who preferred receiving their fees to attending to the instruction of their pupils; and after leading a somewhat dissipated life for fourteen months, he embraced the Roman Catholic faith.

With the object of reclaiming Gibbon to Protestantism, his father sent him to Lausanne, in Switzerland, to reside with M. Pavillard, a Calvinist minister, whose arguments and Gibbon's own studies led him in the following year to profess his belief in the doctrines of the Protestant church. He remained in Switzerland for five years, during which time he studied hard, to remedy the defects of his early education. He had now become perfectly acquainted with the French language, in which he composed his first work. His biographer, Lord Sheffield, observes that "Gibbon's residence at Lausanne was highly favorable to his progress in knowledge, and the formation of regular habits of study;" to this fortunate period of retirement and application, he was chiefly indebted for his future reputation as a writer and a thinker; and for his production of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the most brilliant work in modern historical literature.

ARCHDEACON PALEY AT CAMBRIDGE.

Paley was fortunate in his education. He was born at Peterborough, in 1743: during his infancy, his father removed to Giggleswick, in Yorkshire, having been appointed head-master of King Edward's School, in that place. He was educated under his paternal roof, and soon distinguished himself by great abilities, a studious disposition, and a rare ripeness of intellect. In his seventeenth year he was entered a sizar of Christ's College, Cambridge; when his father declared that he would turn out a very great man, for he had by far the clearest head he had ever met with in his life. The event fully verified his parent's declaration. He graduated in 1763, and was senior wrangler. After completing his academical course, he became tutor in an academy at Greenwich; next curate of Greenwich; and fellow of his College, and lectured in the University on Moral Philosophy and the Greek Testament. Among his preferments he received the archdeaconry of Carlisle. As a writer he is distinguished for power of intellect, skill in argument, and strong, exact, and clear style. His great works are on Moral and Political Philosophy, the Evidences of Christianity, and Natural Theology. Both in his metaphysical and ethical views, Paley was a follower of Locke. His merits are thus summed up by Bishop Turton:

"It has long been deemed the glory of Socrates, that he brought Philosophy from the schools of the learned to the habitations of men-by stripping it of its technicalities, and