mpton Row. Ashley Cowper was a very little man
in a white hat lined with yellow, and his nephew used to say that he
would one day he picked by mistake for a mushroom. His fellow-clerk in
the office, and his accomplice in giggling and making giggle, was one
strangely mated with him; the strong, aspiring, and unscrupulous
Thurlow, who though fond of pleasure was at the same time preparing
himself to push his way to wealth and power. Cowper felt that Thurlow
would reach the summit of ambition, while he would himself remain
below, and made his friend promise when he was Chancellor to give him
something. When Thurlow was Chancellor, he gave Cowper his advice on
translating Homer.

At the end of his three years with the attorney, Cowper took chambers
in the Middle, from which he afterwards removed to the Inner Temple.
The Temple is now a pile of law offices. In those days it was still a
Society. One of Cowper's set says of it: "The Temple is the barrier
that divides the City and suburbs; and the gentlemen who reside there
seem influenced by the situation of the place they inhabit. Templars
are in general a kind of citizen courtiers. They aim at the air and
the mien of the drawing-room, but the holy-day smoothness of a
'prentice, heightened with some additional touches of the rake or
coxcomb, betrays itself in everything they do. The Temple, however, is
stocked with its peculiar beaux, wits, poets, critics, and every
character in the gay world; and it is a thousand pities that so pretty
a society should be disgraced with a few dull fellows, who can submit
to puzzle themselves with cases and reports, and have not taste enough
to follow the genteel method of studying the law." Cowper at all events
studied law by the genteel method; he read it almost as little in the
Temple as he had in the attorney's office, though in due course of time
he was formally called to the Bar, and even managed in some way to
acquire a reputation, which when he had entirely given up the
profession brought him a curious offer of a readership at Lyons Inn.
His time was given to literature, and he became a member of a little
circle of men of letters and journalists which had its social centre in
the Nonsense Club, consisting of seven Westminster men who dined
together every Thursday. In the set were Bonnell Thornton and Colman,
twin wits, fellow-writers of the periodical essays which were the rage
in that day, joint proprietors of the _St. James