‘Abbot is painting me so true,
That, trust me, you would stare,
And hardly know, at the first view,
If I were here, or there!’
It was much to be regretted that, with no lack of kind and judicious friends—and Hayley in particular, with his good sense and true affection,—Cowper should have fallen about this time under the baneful influence of a fanatic, one Teedon, a schoolmaster, who had long been a pensioner on his and Mrs. Unwin’s bounty, at Olney. Cowper constantly spoke of him in his letters to William Unwin and others as foolish Mr. Teedon’s ridiculous vanity and strange delusions, who prided himself on the immediate answers to any prayer he might consider it advisable to put up, as also on wonderful spiritual and audible communications. This empty-headed man became an object of reverence rather than contempt in the eyes of Cowper, and of poor Mrs. Unwin herself, in her debilitated state of health. Cowper began to believe in Teedon, and to bend beneath his influence. Had Mr. Newton not strained the spiritual curb too tightly, he would, in all probability, have retained his hold over the minds of his two friends, and not exposed them to the subjugation of one uneducated as Samuel Teedon. But enough of this contemptible man. The friends now began to prepare for the great enterprise, and we are not surprised to hear Cowper say, ‘A thousand lions, monsters, and giants, are in the way; but I suppose they will vanish if I have the courage to face them. Mrs. Unwin, whose weakness might justify such fears, has none.’ A coach, with four steeds, is ordered from London to convey them on their desperate way; the journey is to be a species of royal progress. ‘General Cowper, who lives at Ham—is Ham near Kingston?—is to meet me on the road, ditto my friend Carwardine and others. When other men leave home, they make no disturbance; when I travel, houses are turned upside down, people turned out of their beds at unearthly hours, and every imaginable trouble given. All the counties through which I pass appear to be in an uproar. What a change for a man who has seen no bustle, and made none for twenty years together!’ He is scrupulous respecting the numbers that will accompany him,—‘for Johnny of Norfolk, who is with us, would be broken-hearted if left behind.’ It would be the same with his dog Beau, who paid a wonderful tribute to Abbot’s portrait of his master, by going up to it, and wagging his tail furiously; while Sam, the gardener’s boy, made a low bow to the same effigy.
The travellers reached Eartham at last, Hayley’s home, about six miles from Chichester, and five from Arundel. ‘Here,’ writes Cowper on his arrival, ‘we are as happy as it is possible for terrestrial good to make us.’ He looked from the library window on a fine landscape, bounded by the sea, a deep-wooded valley, and hills which we should call mountains in Buckinghamshire. Hayley and Cowper were both very busy with their several works in the morning, and Johnny, as usual, was his cousin’s transcriber. The kind host, thinking to do honour to his guest, invited the ex-Chancellor Thurlow to meet his old acquaintance, but his Lordship would not come. There were, however, pleasant visitors at Eartham, with whom Cowper fraternised,—Charlotte Smith the novelist, and Romney the admirable painter. ‘Hayley has given me a picture of himself by this charming artist, who is making an excellent portrait of me in pastel.’
‘Mrs. Unwin,’ he says, ‘has benefited much by the change, and has many young friends, who all volunteer to drag her chair round the pretty grounds.’ In spite of all these pleasant surroundings, the two friends became home-sick, and returned to Weston, where they found (after the manner of less gifted mortals) that chaos had reigned in their absence. Cowper resumed his Miltonic labours, and began preparing Homer for a new edition. ‘I play at push-pin with Homer every morning before breakfast, furbishing and polishing, as Paris did his armour.’ Speaking of his assurance in having undertaken works of such importance, he quotes Ranger’s observation in the Suspicious Husband: ‘There is a degree of assurance in your modest men, which we impudent fellows never arrive at.’
Poor Cowper! He was again gradually sinking back into despondency, though he combated the advances of the enemy as far as in him lay. ‘I am cheerful on paper sometimes when I am actually the most dejected of creatures. I keep melancholy out of my letters as much as I can, that I may, if possible, by assuming a less gloomy air, deceive myself, and improve fiction into reality.’ He is to sit for his portrait once more to Lawrence, and he only wishes his face were moveable, to take off and on at pleasure, so that he might pack it in a box, and send it to the artist. On Hayley’s second visit to Weston, he found Cowper tolerably well in appearance. Young Mr. Rose was there, the bearer of an invitation from Lord Spencer, who wished Cowper to meet Gibbon. ‘We did all we could to make him accept, urging the benefit he would derive from such genial society, and the delight he would experience from revelling in the treasures of the magnificent library. But our arguments were all in vain; Cowper was unequal to the exertion.’ So Rose and Hayley were his ambassadors to Althorp, laden with his excuses. It is our intention to dwell as briefly as is consistent with the narrative on the sad scenes now enacting at Weston. A fearful relapse had befallen Cowper; Mrs. Unwin’s state bordered on imbecility; and Lady Hesketh, who had lately taken up her abode with her two afflicted friends, seemed powerless to cheer them, and Hayley, whom she summoned to their aid, was shocked to find that Cowper scarcely recognised him, and manifested no pleasure in his society. It was with the greatest difficulty that he could now be induced to taste food, and this system of course increased his malady, by reducing his strength. One morning a letter arrived from Lord Spencer, announcing that the long-looked-for pension had at length been granted,—a circumstance which was a great relief to his friends, but, alas! brought no satisfaction to the sufferer’s bewildered mind. Change of air and scene were recommended. Lady Hesketh, whose own health was greatly impaired, went to London, and Cowper and Mrs. Unwin were conveyed into Norfolk under the kind charge of ‘Johnny’ Johnson. They went first to a village called Tuddenham, and afterwards to Mundsley, on the coast. Johnson accompanied Cowper in all his rambles, and one day, calling on Mrs. Bodham, their cousin, to whom we have already alluded, Cowper saw the portrait of himself painted by Abbot; he looked at it for some time, and then, wringing his hands, uttered a vehement wish that he were now as happy as when he sat for that picture.
He had always been very fond of coast scenery; and in one of his early letters to William Unwin he speaks of his astonishment at the number of people who can look on the sea without emotion, or, indeed, reflection of any kind. ‘In all its various forms, it is an object of all others most calculated to affect us with lasting impressions of that awful Power which created and controls it. Before I gave my mind to religion, the waves used to preach to me, and I always listened. One of Shakespeare’s characters, Lorenzo, says: “I am never merry when I hear sweet music.” The sight and the sound of the ocean, produces the same effect on me that harmony did on Jessica.’ He began to write again to Lady Hesketh, but his letters were most gloomy, and must have been painful in the extreme for the recipient.
In the first he thus expresses himself: ‘The most forlorn of beings, I tread the shore, under the burthen of infinite despair, which I once trod all cheerfulness and joy.’ He fancies the vessels he sees in the offing were coming to seize him; he shrinks from the precipice of the cliff on which he walks, though, perhaps, it would be better for him to be dashed to pieces. A solitary pillar of rock seems an emblem of himself: ‘Torn from my natural connections, I stand alone, in expectation of the storm that shall displace me;’ and so on in the same terrible strain. He begins to suspect his faithful friend Johnson (whom he no longer calls ‘Johnny’) of wishing to control him, and writes to Lady Hesketh, as if compelled to do so by stealth: ‘Dear Weston! I shall never see Weston again, or you either. I have been tossed like a ball to a far country, from which there is no rebound for me.’ Johnson now moved his patients to a new residence, Dunham Lodge, in the neighbourhood of Swaffham, and never slackened in his attendance on his kinsman,—reading aloud to him for hours a series of works of fiction, on which Cowper never made any comment, though they appeared to rivet his attention. He tells Lady Hesketh, notwithstanding, that he loses every other sentence, from the inevitable wanderings of his mind. ‘My thoughts are like loose and dry sand, which slips the sooner away the closer it is grasped.’ Cowper could not bear now to be left alone, and if he were so for a short time, he would watch on the hall door steps for the barking of dogs at a distance, to announce his kinsman’s return. Mrs. Powley, Mrs. Unwin’s daughter, came with her husband to visit her mother, and was much touched by the affection which Cowper still manifested for his Mary, even in moments of the deepest dejection. By degrees he was induced to listen composedly, both to the reading of the Bible, and also to family prayers, which at first his companions feared might excite instead of soothing him. Johnson laid a kind trap in order to coax the invalid into a renewal of his literary occupations. One day he designedly mentioned in Cowper’s hearing, that, in the new edition of Pope’s Homer, by Wakefield, there were some passages in which the two translations were compared. The next morning he placed all the volumes of the work in a large unfrequented room, through which Cowper always passed on his way from his morning visit to Mrs. Unwin; and the next day Johnson found, to his great satisfaction, that his kinsman had examined the books, and made some corrections and revisions, an occupation which Cowper continued for some little time with apparent interest. But this improvement did not last long: the melancholy household moved again to Mundsley, and then to Johnson’s own home, at Dereham, which was considered less dreary than the house of Dunham Lodge. It was there that, on the 17th of December, Mrs. Unwin, Cowper’s faithful and devoted Mary, passed away from earth calmly and peacefully. In the morning of that day, when the maid opened the shutters, Cowper asked, ‘Is there still life upstairs?’ She died in the afternoon, and he went up with Mr. Johnson to take a farewell look; and, after silently gazing on the lifeless form for some time, he burst into a paroxysm of tears, left the room, ‘and never,’ says Hayley, ‘spoke of her more.’