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 Southampton 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