s evidently before him. To Mrs. Unwin he was
from the first strongly drawn. "I met Mrs. Unwin in the street," he
says, "and went home with her. She and I walked together near two
hours in the garden, and had a conversation which did me more good than
I should have received from an audience with the first prince in
Europe. That woman is a blessing to me, and I never see her without
being the better for her company." Mrs. Unwin's character is written in
her portrait with its prim but pleasant features; a Puritan and a
precisian she was, but she was not morose or sour, and she had a
boundless capacity for affection. Lady Hesketh, a woman of the world,
and a good judge in every respect, says of her at a later period, when
she had passed with Cowper through many sad and trying years: "She is
very far from grave; on the contrary, she is cheerful and gay, and
laughs _de bon coeur_ upon the smallest provocation. Amidst all the
little puritanical words which fall from her _de temps en temps_, she
seems to have by nature a quiet fund of gaiety; great indeed must it
have been, not to have been wholly overcome by the close confinement in
which she has lived, and the anxiety she must have undergone for one
whom she certainly loves as well as one human being can love another.
I will not say she idolizes him, because that she would think wrong;
but she certainly seems to possess the truest regard and affection for
this excellent creature, and, as I said before, has in the most literal
sense of those words, no will or shadow of inclination but what is his.
My account of Mrs. Unwin may seem perhaps to you, on comparing my
letters, contradictory; but when you consider that I began to write at
the first moment that I saw her, you will not wonder. Her character
develops itself by degrees; and though I might lead you to suppose her
grave and melancholy, she is not so by any means. When she speaks upon
grave subjects, she does express herself with a puritanical tone, and
in puritanical expressions, but on all subjects she seems to have a
great disposition to cheerfulness and mirth; and indeed had she not,
she could not have gone through all she has. I must say, too, that she
seems to be very well read in the English poets, as appears by several
little quotations, which she makes from time to time, and has a true
taste for what is excellent in that way."

When Cowper became an author he paid the highest respect to Mrs. Unwin
as an in