his former residence. Cowper, who visited him at
Eartham, in 1792, speaks of the house as "the most elegant mansion he
had ever inhabited, surrounded by the most delightful pleasure grounds
he had ever seen," and observes "he had no conception that a poet could
be the owner of such a paradise." The house was built, and the pleasure
grounds laid out by himself. Here I saw him in the next summer but one
after Cowper's visit. His habits appeared to me such as they were long
afterwards described by Mrs. Opie--those of extreme retirement, of
abstemiousness, and of family devotion. He was at that time employed on
his Life of Milton, and in educating his son, a promising boy, who under
the age of fourteen, had began to translate the Epistles of Horace into
tolerable blank verse. On accompanying me the next morning out of
"Paradise," the lad spoke to me with some sorrow of his father's refusal
to let him "join a pack of hounds in the neighbourhood." He died in his
20th year, a victim probably to the secluded life and the studious
habits to which his parent had so early devoted him. His mother, a
servant in the family, as I was told by Anna Seward, declared him to be
the son of a young orphan, named Howell, who having been benevolently
received by Hayley into his house, and through his means promoted in the
military service of the East India Company, soon after perished by
shipwreck. But the features of the boy told a different story, and one
more consonant to that of the poet, by whom he was always acknowledged
for his son. He was, for some time the pupil of Mr. Flaxman, who augured
highly of his abilities, and who, if the young man had lived, would
certainly have done all that could be done by example and instruction to
render him illustrious in his art and respectable as a man.

Considering his independence on any profession, the ease of his manners,
his talents for conversation, and his knowledge of modern languages, it
may be wondered that Hayley did not mix more in society, or visit other
countries besides his own. Once, indeed, when a young man he made an
excursion to Scotland; and, in the summer of 1790, passed three weeks at
Paris with his friends, Carwardine and Romney, from whence, much to the
scandal of the neighbourhood, he brought back a French governess for his
son. Mrs. Hayley had then left him, or rather had been gently forced out
of his house; and, afterwards when she begged for leave to return, was
denied it.