In scarlet mantle warm and velvet capp'd.
'Tis now become a history little known,
That once we call'd the pastoral house our own.

Before the rector's death, it seems, his pen had hardly realized the
cruel frailty of the tenure by which a home in a parsonage is held. Of
the family of Berkhampstead Rectory there was now left besides himself
only his brother John Cowper, Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge, whose
birth had cost their mother's life.

When Cowper was thirty-two and still living in the Temple, came the sad
and decisive crisis of his life. He went mad and attempted suicide.
What was the source of his madness? There is a vague tradition that it
arose from licentiousness, which, no doubt is sometimes the cause of
insanity. Hut in Cowper's case there is no proof of anything of the
kind; his confessions, after his conversion, of his own past sinfulness
point to nothing worse than general ungodliness and occasional excess
in wine; and the tradition derives a colour of probability only from
the loose lives of one or two of the wits and Bohemians with whom he
had lived. His virtuous love of Theodora was scarcely compatible with
low and gross amours. Generally, his madness is said to have been
religious, and the blame is laid on the same foe to human weal as that
of the sacrifice of Iphigenia. But when he first went mad, his
conversion to Evangelicism had not taken place; he had not led a
particularly religious life, nor been greatly given to religious
practices, though as a clergyman's son he naturally believed in
religion, had at times felt religious emotions, and when he found his
heart sinking had tried devotional books and prayers. The truth is his
malady was simple hypochondria, having its source in delicacy of
constitution and weakness of digestion, combined with the influence of