r 12 years, during which he rendered
unwearied service to the royal family. At the Restoration he wrote some
loyal odes, but was disappointed by being refused the Mastership of the
Savoy, and retired to the country. He received a lease of Crown lands,
but his life in the country did not yield him the happiness he expected.
He is said by Pope to have _d._ of a fever brought on by lying in the
fields after a drinking-bout. The drinking-bout, however, is perhaps an
ill-natured addition. C.'s fame among his contemporaries was much greater
than that which posterity has accorded to him. His poems are marred by
conceits and a forced and artificial brilliancy. In some of them,
however, he sings pleasantly of gardens and country scenes. They comprise
_Miscellanies_, _The Mistress, or Love Poems_ (1647), _Pindaric Odes_,
and _The Davideis_, an epic on David (unfinished). He is at his best in
such imitations of Anacreon as _The Grasshopper_. His prose, especially
in his Essays, though now almost unread, is better than his verse; simple
and manly, it sometimes rises to eloquence. C. is buried in Westminster
Abbey near Spenser.

Ed., Grosart (1881), Waller (1903).

COWPER, WILLIAM (1731-1800).--Poet, was the _s._ of the Rev. John C.,
Rector of Great Berkhampstead, Herts, and Chaplain to George II. His
grandfather was a judge, and he was the grand-nephew of the 1st Earl C.,
the eminent Lord Chancellor. A shy and timid child, the death of his
mother when he was 6 years old, and the sufferings inflicted upon him by
a bullying schoolfellow at his first school, wounded his tender and
shrinking spirit irrecoverably. He was sent to Westminster School, where
he had for schoolfellows Churchill, the poet (_q.v._), and Warren
Hastings. The powerful legal influence of his family naturally suggested
his being destined for the law, and at 18 he entered the chambers of a
solicitor, where he had for a companion Thurlow, the future Chancellor, a
truly incongruous conjunction; the pair, however, seem to have got on
well together, and employed their time chiefly in "giggling and making
giggle." He then entered the Middle Temple, and in 1754 was called to the
Bar. This was perhaps the happiest period of his life, being enlivened by
the society of two cousins, Theodora and Harriet C. With the former he
fell in love; but his proposal of marriage was opposed by her _f._, who
had observed symptoms of morbidity in him, and he never met her again.
The lat