60. The | Task, | A | Poem, | In Six Books. | By William Cowper, | Of The Inner Temple, Esq. | Fit ſurculus arbor. | Anonym. | To which are added, | By The Same Author, | An Epistle to Joseph Hill, Eſq. Tirocinium, or a | Review of Schools, and the History of John Gilpin. | London: | Printed For J. Johnson, No 72, St. Paul's | Church-Yard: | 1785.
In October, 1784, William Cawthorne Unwin,
"A friend whose worth deserves as warm a lay
As ever friendship penned,"
received from Cowper "four quires of verse" with the request that it might be read by him and, if approved, conveyed to Joseph Johnson, the publisher of Cowper's first volume.
"If, when you make the offer of my book [The Task], to Johnson, he should stroke his chin, and look up at the ceiling and cry 'Humph!', anticipate him, I beseech you, at once by saying 'that you know I should be sorry that he should undertake for me to his own disadvantage, or that my volume should be in any degree pressed upon him. I make him the offer merely because I think he would have reason to complain of me if I did not.' But, that punctilio once satisfied, it is a matter of indifference to me what publisher sends me forth." Johnson, however, accepted.
"My imagination tells me," says Cowper to Unwin, "(for I know you interest yourself in the success of my productions) that your heart fluttered when you approached his door, and that it felt itself discharged of a burthen when you came out again."
The "Advertisement," or preface, accounting for The Task, is worth reprinting. It runs:
"The hiſtory of the following production is briefly this. A lady, fond of blank verſe, demanded a poem of that kind from the author, and gave him the Sofa for a ſubject. He obeyed; and having much leiſure, connected another ſubject with it; and purſuing the train of thought to which his ſituation and turn of mind led him, brought forth at length, inſtead of the trifle which he at firſt intended, a ſerious affair—a Volume."