The clouds now gathered heavily over the biography of Cowper. Mrs. Unwin had two paralytic strokes, the old friends began to torture one another. She was silent save when she was irritable, indifferent except when exacting. At last, not a day too soon, Lady Hesketh came to Weston. They were moved into Norfolk—but why prolong the tale? Mrs. Unwin died at East Dereham on the 17th of December, 1796. Thirty-one years had gone since the poet and she first met by chance in Huntingdon. Cowper himself died in April, 1800. His last days were made physically comfortable by the kindness of some Norfolk cousins, and the devotion of a Miss Perowne. But he died in wretchedness and gloom.
The Castaway was his last original poem:
‘I therefore purpose not or dream
Descanting on his fate,
To give the melancholy theme
A more enduring date;
But misery still delights to trace
Its semblance in another's case.’
Everybody interested in Cowper has of course to make out, as best he may, a picture of the poet for his own use. It is curious how sometimes little scraps of things serve to do this better than deliberate efforts. In 1800, the year of Cowper's death, his relative, a Dr. Johnson, wrote a letter to John Newton, sending good wishes to the old gentleman, and to his niece, Miss Catlett; and added: 'Poor dear Mr. Cowper, oh that he were as tolerable as he was, even in those days when, dining at his house in Buckinghamshire with you and that lady, I could not help smiling to see his pleasant face when he said, "Miss Catlett, shall I give you a piece of cutlet?"' It was a very small joke indeed, and it is a very humble little quotation, but for me it has long served, in the mind's eye, for a vignette of the poet, doomed yet debonnaire. Romney's picture, with that frightful nightcap and eyes gleaming with madness, is a pestilent thing one would forget if one could. Cowper's pleasant face when he said, 'Miss Catlett, shall I give you a piece of cutlet?' is a much more agreeable picture to find a small corner for in one's memory.
GEORGE BORROW
Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, in his delightful Memories and Portraits, takes occasion to tell us, amongst a good many other things of the sort, that he has a great fancy for The Bible in Spain, by Mr. George Borrow. He has not, indeed, read it quite so often as he has Mr. George Meredith's Egoist, but still he is very fond of it. It is interesting to know this, interesting, that is, to the great Clan Stevenson who owe suit and service to their liege lord; but so far as Borrow is concerned, it does not matter, to speak frankly, two straws. The author of Lavengro, The Romany Rye, The Bible in Spain, and Wild Wales is one of those kings of literature who never need to number their tribe. His personality will always secure him an attendant company, who, when he pipes, must dance. A queer company it is too, even as was the company he kept himself, composed as it is of saints and sinners, gentle and simple, master and man, mistresses and maids; of those who, learned in the tongues, have read everything else, and of those who have read nothing else and do not want to. People there are for whom Borrow's books play the same part as did horses and dogs for the gentleman in the tall white hat, whom David Copperfield met on the top of the Canterbury coach. ''Orses and dorgs,' said that gentleman, 'is some men's fancy. They are wittles and drink to me, lodging, wife and children, reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, snuff, tobacker, and sleep.'
Nothing, indeed, is more disagreeable, even offensive, than to have anybody else's favourite author thrust down your throat. 'Love me, love my dog,' is a maxim of behaviour which deserves all the odium Charles Lamb has heaped upon it. Still, it would be hard to go through life arm-in-arm with anyone who had stuck in the middle of Guy Mannering, or had bidden a final farewell to Jeannie Deans in the barn with the robbers near Gunnerly Hill in Lincolnshire. But, oddly enough, Borrow excites no such feelings. It is quite possible to live amicably in the same house with a person who has stuck hopelessly in the middle of Wild Wales, and who braves it out (what impudence!) by the assertion that the book is full of things like this: 'Nothing worthy of commemoration took place during the two following days, save that myself and family took an evening walk on the Wednesday up the side of the Berwyn, for the purpose of botanising, in which we were attended by John Jones. There, amongst other plants, we found a curious moss which our good friend said was called in Welsh Corn Carw, or deer's horn, and which he said the deer were very fond of. On the Thursday he and I started on an expedition on foot to Ruthyn, distant about fourteen miles, proposing to return in the evening.'
The book is full of things like this, and must be pronounced as arrant a bit of book-making as ever was. But judgment is not always followed by execution, and a more mirth-provoking error can hardly be imagined than for anyone to suppose that the admission of the fact—sometimes doubtless a damaging fact—namely, book-making, will for one moment shake the faithful in their certitude that Wild Wales is a delightful book; not so delightful, indeed, as Lavengro, The Romany, or The Bible in Spain, but still delightful because issuing from the same mint as they, stamped with the same physiognomy, and bearing the same bewitching inscription.
It is a mercy the people we love do not know how much we must forgive them. Oh the liberties they would take, the things they would do, were it to be revealed to them that their roots have gone far too deep into our soil for us to disturb them under any provocation whatsoever!