his first years in a solicitor’s office, as we gather from the letter in which he reminds Lady Hesketh how he and Thurlow used to pass the time with her and her sister, Theodora, the object of his fruitless love.  “There was I, and the future Lord Chancellor,” he wrote, “constantly employed from morning to night in giggling and making giggle, instead of studying the law.”  Such was his life till the first attack of madness came at the age of thirty-two.  He had already, it is true, on one occasion, felt an ominous shock as a schoolboy at Westminster, when a skull thrown up by a gravedigger at St. Margaret’s rolled towards him and struck him on the leg.  Again, in his chambers in the Middle Temple, he suffered for a time from religious melancholy, which he did his best to combat with the aid of the poems of George Herbert.  Even at the age of twenty-three he told Robert Lloyd in a rhymed epistle that he “addressed the muse,” not in order to show his genius or his wit,

  But to divert a fierce banditti
  (Sworn foe to everything that’s witty)
  That, in a black infernal train,
  Make cruel inroads in my brain,
  And daily threaten to drive thence
  My little garrison of sense.

It was not till after his release from the St. Alban’s madhouse in his thirties, however, that he began to build a little new world of pleasures on the ruins of the old.  He now set himself of necessity to the task of creating a refuge within sight of the Cross, where he could live, in his brighter moments, a sort of Epicurean of evangelical piety.  He was a damned soul that must occupy itself at all costs and not damn itself still deeper in the process.  His round of recreation, it must be admitted, was for the most part such as would make the average modern pleasure-seeker quail worse than any inferno of miseries.  Only a nature of peculiar sweetness could charm us from the atmosphere of endless sermons and hymns in which Cowper learned to be happy in the Unwins’ Huntingdon home.  Breakfast, he tells us, was between eight and nine.  Then, “till eleven, we read either the Scripture, or the sermons of some faithful preacher of those holy mysteries.”  Church was at eleven.  After that he was at liberty to read, walk, ride, or work in the garden till the three o’clock dinner.  Then to the garden, “where with Mrs. Unwin and her son I have generally the pleasure of religious conversation till tea-time.”  After tea came a four-mile walk, and “at night we read and converse, as before, till supper, and commonly finish the evening either with hymns or a sermon; and last of all the family are called to prayers.”  In those days, it may be, evangelical religion had some of the attractions of a new discovery.  Theories of religion were probably as exciting a theme of discussion in the age of Wesley as theories of art and literature in the age of cubism and vers libre.  One has to remember this in order to be able to realize that, as Cowper said, “such a life as this is