high ambition, and a high estimate of excellence of every kind; nay, even a burning desire to advance towards victory or success, accompanied by a kind of inward trembling and doubt, sometimes amounting to absolute terror, which is proportioned in its intensity to those exalted aspirations with which it alter nates. Who is there capable of dealing with these strange contradictions of our nature, but woman-kind, sympathizing, hoping, trusting woman? To the generality of men they are either beneath attention, or totally incomprehensible. Yet many a schoolboy, in his first great public examination, has felt something of this. But then the very memory of such a sensation must be ignored by men in their own experience, and only recognized as a subject for ridicule in the experience of others. There are, as we all know, occasions on which ridicule is the greatest cruelty; and this state of alternation betwixt ambition and despair is one. It is like heaping hot ashes on the head, while torture lacerates the limbs. Women are quick to perceive when the suffering mind can bear no more, when the agitated feelings require soothing rather than stimulating; and when the balance of reason, as well as satisfaction, requires the total re-adjustment of a skilful and delicate hand. Cowper, though well advanced in manhood, was but young in experience of the active conflict incident to public life, when this terrible arresting of his mental and physical exertions first took place. He had no one then to whom he could confide the morbid apprehensions to which his mind became a prey, or he might probably never have had to record those deeply affecting descriptions of his own sufferings, with which his letters abound. "Dazzled," he says, "by the splendid proposal, and not immediately reflecting upon my incapacity to execute a business of so public a nature, I at once accepted it; but at the same time (such was the will of Him whose hand was in the whole matter), seemed to receive a dagger in my heart. The wound was given, and every moment added to the smart of it. All the considerations by which I endeavoured to compose my mind to its former tranquillity, did but torment me the more, proving miserable comforters and counsellors of no value. I returned to my chambers thoughtful and unhappy; my countenance fell; and my friend was astonished, instead of that additional cheerfulness he might so reasonably expect, to find an air of deep melancholy in all I said or did." Again, when describing the condition of deeper misery which ensued, he says, "I felt myself pressed by necessity on either side, with nothing but despair in prospect. . . . In this situation, such a fit of passion has sometimes seized me, when alone in my chambers, that I have cried out aloud, and cursed the hour of my birth, lifting up my eyes to heaven at the same time, not as a suppliant, but in the spirit of reproach and blasphemy against my Maker. A thought would sometimes come across my mind, that my sins had perhaps brought this distress upon me, that the hand of Divine vengeance was in it; but in the pride of my heart I presently acquitted myself, and thereby impiously, charged God with injustice, saying, 'What sins have I committed to deserve this?'" We see here that the wretched sufferer was rapidly approaching to a condition of absolute madness, upon which it is alike painful and unnecessary to dwell. We rather trace, one step farther, the manifestation of that yearning for female sympathy and companionship which seems to have characterized the whole of his life, and which would most probably have found its entire satisfaction in the society of a mother, who could have understood the peculiarities of his morbid constitution of body as well as mind, and who might possibly, by her judicious treatment, have imparted more of health and vigour to both. Poor "stricken deer!" It is not difficult to imagine some of the sensations with which he must have looked upon the world again after the first dark cloud had passed. His world, however, was at that time, happily for him, clothed in a very retired and peaceful aspect. His habitation he believed to have been chosen for him by the appointment of a kind Providence, exactly where he should meet with such a friend as his feeble constitution and already shattered nerves so much required. This friend was Mary Unwin, a lady justly celebrated now as having inspired so lasting and so pure a friendship, and as being "the poet's prop and stay-his affectionate nurse and beloved friend for more than thirty years of his life;" of whom he speaks as "a lady who supplied to me the place of my own mother-my own invaluable mother." After six-andtwenty years of this companionship, the poet sang Seek aid from heaven, as some have feigned they drew ! An eloquence scarce given to mortals, new, "That ere through age or woe I shed my wings, "But thou hast little need. There is a book, "There all thy deeds, my faithful Mary, shine, WE have now to consider the position of youth under disadvantages still greater than those which attended the early years of the poet Cowper. A mother lost in childhood is universally allowed to be one of the heaviest calamities which can attend our earthly lot. But a mother inattentive or insensible to the duties of a mother, is far worse. A woman ungoverned herself, can never be capable of rightly governing others; capricious herself, she can never be consistent in her discipline; irrational herself, she can never exercise that influence which, to be of any value, must have its foundation in reason and right principle. If it is a melancholy task to contemplate the motherless youth of Cowper, it is much more so to watch the early steps by which Byron trod his wayward course, untaught by any human being how to make his life acceptable to God or happy to himself-untaught in all those higher offices of genius by which things holy, just, and true are represented under the noblest and most attractive forms. All who have been favourites with the public, have |