No. 7.
WILLIAM COWPER, THE POET.
Loose gown, trimmed with fur. White cap. Table with books and papers.
BORN 1731, DIED 1800.
By Jackson, after a Chalk Drawing from Life.
THE grandson of Spencer Cowper, Attorney-General, and great-nephew of Lord Chancellor Cowper, the first peer of the name. His father was Dr. John Cowper, chaplain to King George II., who married the daughter of Roger Donne, of Lidham Hall, county Norfolk. William, the eldest of two sons, was born at his father’s rectory of Great Berkhamstead.
Mrs. Cowper died in giving birth to a second son. She was an amiable and pretty woman, and much more deserving of the flattering epitaph (by her niece, Lady Walsingham) than most objects of elegiac praise, in the days when it might well be asked ‘where all the naughty people were buried.’
Even in these times when ‘The Task’ and the Homer lie unopened on the table, few readers of poetry are surely unacquainted with the ‘Address to my Mother’s Picture,’ written half a century after her death. The portrait was a present to William Cowper, from his cousin, Mrs. Bodham, and he writes her an enthusiastic letter of thanks ‘for the most acceptable gift the world could offer;’ sending her at the same time the lines to which we have alluded. ‘I have placed the painting so as to meet my eye the first thing in the morning, and the last at night, and I often get up from my bed to kiss it.’