classical. Cowper was under Vincent Bourne, his portrait of whom is in
some respects a picture not only of its immediate subject, but of the
schoolmaster of the last century. "I love the memory of Vinny Bourne.
I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or
any of the writers in his way, except Ovid, and not at all inferior to
him. I love him too with a love of partiality, because he was usher of
the fifth form at Westminster when I passed through it. He was so
good-natured and so indolent that I lost more than I got by him, for he
made me as idle as himself. He was such a sloven, as if he had trusted
to his genius as a cloak for everything that could disgust you in his
person; and indeed in his writings he has almost made amends for all. .
. . . I remember seeing the Duke of Richmond set fire to his greasy
locks and box his ears to put it out again." Cowper learned, if not to
write Latin verses as well as Vinny Bourne himself, to write them very
well, as his Latin versions of some of his own short poems bear
witness. Not only so, but he evidently became a good classical
scholar, as classical scholarship was in those days, and acquired the
literary form of which the classics are the best school. Out of school
hours he studied independently, as clever boys under the unexacting
rule of the old public schools often did, and read through the whole of
the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ with a friend. He also probably picked up at
Westminster much of the little knowledge of the world which he ever
possessed. Among his schoolfellows was Warren Hastings, in whose guilt
as proconsul he afterwards, for the sake of Auld Lang Syne, refused to
believe, and Impey, whose character has had the ill-fortune to be
required as the shade in Macaulay's fancy picture of Hastings.

On leaving Westminster, Cowper, at eighteen, went to live with Mr.
Chapman, an attorney, to whom he was articled, being destined for the
Law. He chose that profession, he says, not of his own accord, but to
gratify an indulgent father, who may have been led into the error by a
recollection of the legal honours of the family, as well as by the
"silver pence" which his promising son had won by his Latin verses at
Westminster School. The youth duly slept at the attorney's house in
Ely Place. His days were spent in "giggling and making giggle" with
his cousins, Theodora and Harriet, the daughters of Ashley Cowper, in
the neighbouring Southa