Chapter 8

1A connexion has also been imagined with cow (O. Eng.cu; common in Scandinavian languages, and of similar root to Skr.go, whence also Gr.βοῦς, Lat.bos), the female bovine animal, on account of its timidity.

COWDENBEATH,a police burgh, Fifeshire, Scotland, 5¾ m. N.E. of Dunfermline by the North British railway. Pop. (1891) 4249; (1901) 7908. The principal industry is coal-mining, and the public buildings include churches, schools and a hall. Meetings in connexion with the adoption and promulgation of the Covenant were held in the old parish church of Beath.

COWELL, JOHN(1554-1611), English jurist, was born at Ernsborough, Devonshire. He was educated at Eton, and King’s College, Cambridge, ultimately becoming professor of civil law in that university, and master of Trinity Hall. In 1607 he compiled a law dictionary,The Interpreter, in which he exalted the king’s prerogative so much that he was prosecuted before the House of Commons by Sir Edward Coke, and saved from imprisonment only by the interposition of James I. His book was burnt by order of the House of Commons. Dr Cowell also wrote a work entitledInstitutiones Juris Anglicani. He died at Oxford on the 11th of October 1611.

COWEN, FREDERIC HYMEN(1852- ), English musical composer, was born at Kingston, Jamaica, on the 29th of January 1852. At four years old he was brought to England, where his father became treasurer to the opera at Her Majesty’s theatre, and private secretary to the earl of Dudley. His first teacher was Henry Russell, and his first published composition appeared when he was but six years old. He studied the piano with Benedict, and composition with Goss; in 1865 he was at Leipzig under Hauptmann, Moscheles, Reinecke and Plaidy. Returning home on the outbreak of the Austro-Prussian War, he appeared as a composer for the orchestra in an overture played at the Promenade Concerts at Covent Garden in September 1866. In the following autumn he went to Berlin, where he was under Kiel, at Stern’s conservatorium. A symphony and a piano concerto were given in St James’s Hall in 1869, and from that time Cowen has been recognized as primarily a composer, his talents as a pianist being subordinate, although his public appearances were numerous for some time afterwards. His cantata,The Rose Maiden, was given in London in 1870, his second symphony by the Liverpool Philharmonic Society in 1872, and his first festival work,The Corsair, in 1876 at Birmingham. In that year his opera,Pauline, was given by the Carl Rosa Company with moderate success. In 1884 he conducted five concerts of the Philharmonic Society, and in 1888, on the resignation of Arthur Sullivan, became the regular conductor of the society, resigning the post in 1892. In the year of his appointment, 1888, he went to Melbourne as the conductor of the daily concerts given in connexion with the Exhibition there. In 1896 Cowen was appointed conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society and of the Manchester orchestra, in succession to Sir Charles Hallé. In 1899 he was reappointed conductor of the Philharmonic Society. His works include:—Operettas:Garibaldi(1860) andOne Too Many(1874); operas:Pauline(1876),Thorgrim(1890),Signa(Milan, 1893), andHarold(1895); oratorios:The Deluge(1878),St Ursula(1881),Ruth(1887),Song of Thanksgiving(1888),The Transfiguration(1895); cantatas:The Rose Maiden(1870),The Corsair(1876),The Sleeping Beauty(1885),St John’s Eve(1889),The Water Lily(1893),Ode to the Passions(1898), besides short cantatas for female voices; a large number of songs, ranging from the popular “ballad” to more artistic lyrics, anthems, part-songs, duets, &c.; six symphonies, among which No 3, the “Scandinavian,” has had the greatest success; four overtures; suites,The Language of Flowers(1880),In the Olden Times(1883),In Fairyland(1896); four English dances (1896); a concerto for piano and orchestra, and a fantasia for the same played by M. Paderewski (1900); a quartet in C minor, and a trio in A minor, both early works; pianoforte pieces, &c. Cowen is never so happy as when treating of fantastic or fairy subjects; and whether in his cantatas for female voices, his charmingSleepingBeauty, hisWater Lilyor his pretty overture,The Butterfly’s Ball(1901), he succeeds wonderfully in finding graceful expression for the poetical idea. His dance music, such as is to be found in various orchestral suites, is refined, original and admirably instrumented; and if he is seldom as successful in portraying the graver aspects of emotion, the vogue of his semi-sacred songs has been widespread.

COWEN, JOSEPH(1831-1900), English politician and journalist, son of Sir Joseph Cowen, a prominent citizen and mine-owner of Newcastle-on-Tyne, was born in 1831, and was educated at Edinburgh University. In 1874 he was elected member of parliament for the borough on the death of his father, who had held the seat as a Liberal since 1865. Joseph Cowen was at that time a strong Radical on domestic questions, an advocate of co-operation, an admirer of Garibaldi, Mazzini and Kossuth, a sympathizer with Irish Nationalism, and one who in speech, dress and manner identified himself with the North-country mining class. Short in stature and uncouth in appearance, his individuality first shocked and then by its earnestness impressed the House of Commons; and his sturdy independence of party ties, combined with a gift of rough but genuine eloquence (of which his speech on the Royal Title Bill of 1876 was an example), rapidly made him one of the best-known public men in the country. He was, moreover, an Imperialist and a Colonial Federationist at a time when Liberalism was tied and bound to the Manchester traditions; and, to the consternation of the official wire-pullers, he vigorously supported Disraeli’s foreign policy, and in 1881 opposed the Gladstonian settlement with the Boers. His independence (which his detractors attributed in some degree to his alleged susceptibility to Tory compliments) brought him into collision both with the Liberal caucus and with the party organization in Newcastle itself, but Cowen’s personal popularity and his remarkable powers as an orator triumphed in his own birthplace, and he was again elected in 1885 in spite of Liberal opposition. Shortly afterwards, however, he retired both from parliament and from public life, professing his disgust at the party intrigues of politics, and devoted himself to conducting his newspaper, theNewcastle Daily Chronicle, and to his private business as a mine-owner. In this capacity he exercised a wide influence on local opinion, and the revolt of the Newcastle electorate in later years against doctrinaire Radicalism was largely due to his constant preaching of a broader outlook on national affairs. He continued behind the scenes to play a powerful part in forming North-country opinion until his death on the 18th of February 1900.

His letters were published by his daughter in 1909.

COWES,a seaport and watering-place in the Isle of Wight, England, 12 m. S.S.E. of Southampton. West Cowes is separated from East Cowes by the picturesque estuary of the river Medina, the two towns (each of which is an urban district) lying on opposite sides of its mouth at the apex of the northern coast of the island. Pop. (1901) West Cowes, 8652; East Cowes, 3196. The port between them is the chief on the island, and is the headquarters of the Royal Yacht Squadron (founded in 1812); it is in regular steamship communication with Southampton and Portsmouth. West Cowes is served by the Isle of Wight Central railway. A steam ferry and a floating bridge across the Medina, here 600 yds. broad, unite the towns. Behind the harbour the houses rise picturesquely on gentle wooded slopes, and numerous villas adorn the vicinity. The towns owe their origin to two forts or castles, built on each side of the mouth of the Medina by Henry VIII. in 1540, for the defence of the coast; the eastern one has disappeared, but the west castle remains and is used as the club-house of the Yacht Squadron. The marine parade of West Cowes, and the public promenade called the Green, are close to the castle. The industrial population is chiefly employed in the shipbuilding yards, in the manufacture of ships’ fittings, and in engineering works. The harbour is under an elective body of commissioners. On the opposite side of the Medina a broad carriageway leads to East Cowes Castle, a handsome edifice built by John Nash, the favourite architect of George IV., in 1798, and immediately beyond it are the grounds surroundingOsborne House (seeOsborne), built in 1845 after the property had been purchased by Queen Victoria, the church of St Mildred, Whippingham, lying a mile to the south.

COWL(through Fr.coule, from Lat.cucullusorcuculla, a covering; the word is found in various forms in most European languages, cf. Ger.KugelorKigel, Dutchkovel, Irishcochalorcochull; the ultimate origin may be the rootkal, found in Lat.clam, secretly, and Gr.καλύπτειν, to hide, cover up), an outer garment worn by both sexes in the middle ages; a part of the monastic dress, hence the phrase “to take the cowl,” signifying entry upon the religious life. Thecucullusworn by the early Egyptian anchorites was a hood covering the head and neck. Later generations lengthened the garment until it reached to the heels, and St Benedict issued a rule restricting its length to two cubits. Chapter 55 of hisInstituteprescribes the following dress in temperate climates: a cowl and tunic, thick in winter and thin in summer, with a scapular for working hours and shoes and stockings, all of simple material and make. In the 14th century the cowl and the frock were frequently confounded, but the council of Vienne defined the former as “a habit long and full without sleeves,” and the latter as “a long habit with long and wide sleeves.” While the term thus seems strictly to imply a hooded gown it is often applied to the hood alone. It is also used to describe a loose vestment worn over the frock in the winter season and during the night office.

The word “cowl” is also applied to a hood-shaped covering to a chimney or ventilating shaft, to help down-draught, and to clear the up-current of foul air (seeVentilation).

COWLEY, ABRAHAM(1618-1667), English poet, was born in the city of London late in 1618. His father, a wealthy citizen, who died shortly before his birth, was a stationer. His mother was wholly given to works of devotion, but it happened that there lay in her parlour a copy ofThe Faery Queen. This became the favourite reading of her son, and he had twice devoured it all before he was sent to school. As early as 1628, that is, in his tenth year, he composed hisTragicall History of Piramus and Thisbe, an epical romance written in a six-line stanza, of his own invention. It is not too much to say that this work is the most astonishing feat of imaginative precocity on record; it is marked by no great faults of immaturity, and possesses constructive merits of a very high order. Two years later the child wrote another and still more ambitious poem,Constantia and Philetus, being sent about the same time to Westminster school. Here he displayed the most extraordinary mental precocity and versatility, and wrote in his thirteenth year yet another poem, theElegy on the Death of Dudley, Lord Carlton. These three poems of considerable size, and some smaller ones, were collected in 1633, and published in a volume entitledPoetical Blossoms, dedicated to the head master of the school, and prefaced by many laudatory verses by schoolfellows. The author at once became famous, although he had not, even yet, completed his fifteenth year. His next composition was a pastoral comedy, entitledLove’s Riddle, a marvellous production for a boy of sixteen, airy, correct and harmonious in language, and rapid in movement. The style is not without resemblance to that of Randolph, whose earliest works, however, were at that time only just printed. In 1637 Cowley was elected into Trinity College, Cambridge, where he betook himself with enthusiasm to the study of all kinds of learning, and early distinguished himself as a ripe scholar. It was about this time that he composed his scriptural epic on the history of King David, one book of which still exists in the Latin original, the rest being superseded in favour of an English version in four books, called theDavideis, which he published a long time after. This his most grave and important work is remarkable as having suggested to Milton several points which he afterwards made use of. The epic, written in a very dreary and turgid manner, but in good rhymed heroic verse, deals with the adventures of King David from his boyhood to the smiting of Amalek by Saul, where it abruptly closes. In 1638Love’s Riddleand a Latin comedy, theNaufragium Joculare, were printed, and in 1641 the passage of Prince Charles through Cambridge gave occasion to the production of another dramatic work,The Guardian, which was acted before the royal visitor with much success. During the civil war this play was privately performed at Dublin, but it was not printed till 1650. It is bright and amusing, in the style common to the “sons” of Ben Jonson, the university wits who wrote more for the closet than the public stage.

The learned quiet of the young poet’s life was broken up by the Civil War; he warmly espoused the royalist side. He became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, but was ejected by the Parliamentarians in 1643. He made his way to Oxford, where he enjoyed the friendship of Lord Falkland, and was tossed, in the tumult of affairs, into the personal confidence of the royal family itself. After the battle of Marston Moor he followed the queen to Paris, and the exile so commenced lasted twelve years. This period was spent almost entirely in the royal service, “bearing a share in the distresses of the royal family, or labouring in their affairs. To this purpose he performed several dangerous journeys into Jersey, Scotland, Flanders, Holland, or wherever else the king’s troubles required his attendance. But the chief testimony of his fidelity was the laborious service he underwent in maintaining the constant correspondence between the late king and the queen his wife. In that weighty trust he behaved himself with indefatigable integrity and unsuspected secrecy; for he ciphered and deciphered with his own hand the greatest part of all the letters that passed between their majesties, and managed a vast intelligence in many other parts, which for some years together took up all his days, and two or three nights every week.” In spite of these labours he did not refrain from literary industry. During his exile he met with the works of Pindar, and determined to reproduce their lofty lyric passion in English. At the same time he occupied himself in writing a history of the Civil War, which he completed as far as the battle of Newbury, but unfortunately afterwards destroyed. In 1647 a collection of his love verses, entitledThe Mistress, was published, and in the next year a volume of wretched satires,The Four Ages of England, was brought out under his name, with the composition of which he had nothing to do. In spite of the troubles of the times, so fatal to poetic fame, his reputation steadily increased, and when, on his return to England in 1656, he published a volume of his collected poetical works, he found himself without a rival in public esteem. This volume included the later works already mentioned, thePindarique Odes, theDavideis, theMistressand someMiscellanies. Among the latter are to be found Cowley’s most vital pieces. This section of his works opens with the famous aspiration—

“What shall I do to be for ever known,And make the coming age my own?”

“What shall I do to be for ever known,

And make the coming age my own?”

It contains elegies on Wotton, Vandyck, Falkland, William Hervey and Crashaw, the last two being among Cowley’s finest poems, brilliant, sonorous and original; the amusing ballad ofThe Chronicle, giving a fictitious catalogue of his supposed amours; various gnomic pieces; and some charming paraphrases from Anacreon. ThePindarique Odescontain weighty lines and passages, buried in irregular and inharmonious masses of moral verbiage. Not more than one or two are good throughout, but a full posy of beauties may easily be culled from them. The long cadences of the Alexandrines with which most of the strophes close, continued to echo in English poetry from Dryden down to Gray, but theOdesthemselves, which were found to be obscure by the poet’s contemporaries, immediately fell into disesteem.The Mistresswas the most popular poetic reading of the age, and is now the least read of all Cowley’s works. It was the last and most violent expression of the amatory affectation of the 17th century, an affectation which had been endurable in Donne and other early writers because it had been the vehicle of sincere emotion, but was unendurable in Cowley because in him it represented nothing but a perfunctory exercise, a mere exhibition of literary calisthenics. He appears to have been of a cold, or at least of a timid, disposition; in the face of these elaborately erotic volumes, we are told that to the end of his days he never summoned up courage to speak of love to a single woman in real life. The “Leonora” ofThe Chronicleis said to have been theonly woman he ever loved, and she married the brother of his biographer, Sprat.

Soon after his return to England he was seized in mistake for another person, and only obtained his liberty on a bail of £1000. In 1658 he revised and altered his play ofThe Guardian, and prepared it for the press under the title ofThe Cutter of Coleman Street, but it did not appear until 1663. Late in 1658 Oliver Cromwell died, and Cowley took advantage of the confusion of affairs to escape to Paris, where he remained until the Restoration brought him back in Charles’s train. He published in 1663Verses upon several occasions, in whichThe Complaintis included.

Wearied with the broils and fatigues of a political life, Cowley obtained permission to retire into the country; through his friend, Lord St Albans, he obtained a property near Chertsey, and here, devoting himself to the study of botany, and buried in his books, he lived in comparative solitude until his death. He took a great and practical interest in experimental science, and he was one of those who were most prominent in advocating the foundation of an academy for the protection of scientific enterprise. Cowley’s pamphlet onThe Advancement of Experimental Philosophy, 1661, led directly to the foundation of the Royal Society, to which body Cowley, in March 1667, at the suggestion of Evelyn, addressed an ode which is the latest and one of the strongest of his poems. He died in the Porch House, in Chertsey, on the 28th of July 1667, in consequence of having caught a cold while superintending his farm-labourers in the meadows late on a summer evening. On the 3rd of August Cowley was buried in Westminster Abbey beside the ashes of Chaucer and Spenser, where in 1675 the duke of Buckingham erected a monument to his memory. HisPoëmata Latina, including six books “Plantarum,” were printed in 1668.

Throughout their parallel lives the fame of Cowley completely eclipsed that of Milton, but posterity instantly and finally reversed the judgment of their contemporaries. The poetry of Cowley rapidly fell into a neglect as unjust as the earlier popularity had been. As a prose writer, especially as an essayist, he holds, and will not lose, a high position in literature; as a poet it is hardly possible that he can enjoy more than a very partial revival. The want of nature, the obvious and awkward art, the defective melody of his poems, destroy the interest that their ingenuity and occasional majesty would otherwise excite. He had lofty views of the mission of a poet and an insatiable ambition, but his chief claim to poetic life is the dowry of sonorous lyric style which he passed down to Dryden and his successors of the 18th century.

The works of Cowley were collected in 1668, when Thomas Sprat, afterwards bishop of Rochester, brought out a splendid edition in folio, to which he prefixed a graceful and elegant life of the poet. There were many reprints of this collection, which formed the standard edition till 1881, when it was superseded by A. B. Grosart’s privately printed edition in two volumes, for the Chertsey Worthies library. The Essays have frequently been revived with approval.

(E. G.)

COWLEY, HANNAH(1743-1809), English dramatist and poet, daughter of Philip Parkhouse, a bookseller at Tiverton, Devonshire, was born in 1743. When about twenty-five years old she married Mr Cowley, of the East India Company’s service, who died in 1797. Some years after her marriage, being at the theatre with her husband, she expressed the opinion that she could write as good a piece as the one being performed, and within a fortnight she had written her first play,The Runaway. She sent it to Garrick, who produced it at Drury Lane in 1776. Between then and 1795 she wrote twelve more plays, all of which (with one exception) were produced at Drury Lane or Covent Garden; andThe Belle’s Stratagem(1782), with one or two others, still survives in the list of acting plays. Among other, pieces wereAlbina,Countess Raimond,A Bold Stroke for a Husband,More Ways than One, andA School for Greybeards, or The Mourning Bride. Mrs Cowley was the author of a number of indifferent poems, mainly historical, and under the name of “Anna Matilda,” which has since become proverbial, she carried on a sentimental correspondence in theWorldwith Robert Merry. She died at Tiverton on the 11th of March 1809.

COWLEY, HENRY RICHARD CHARLES WELLESLEY,1st Earl(1804-1884), British diplomatist, was the eldest son of Henry Wellesley, 1st Baron Cowley (1773-1847), and Charlotte, daughter of Charles, 1st Earl Cadogan, and was consequently a nephew of the duke of Wellington and of the marquess Wellesley. Born on the 17th of June 1804, he entered the diplomatic service in 1824, receiving his first important appointment in 1848, when he became minister plenipotentiary to the Swiss cantons; and in the same year he was sent to Frankfort to watch the proceedings of the German parliament. This was followed by his appointment as envoy extraordinary to the new Germanic confederation, a position which he only held for a short time, as he was chosen in 1852 to succeed the 1st marquess of Normanby as the British ambassador in Paris. Baron Cowley, as Wellesley had been since his father’s death in 1847, held this important post for fifteen years, and the story of his diplomatic life in Paris cannot be separated from the general history of England and France. As minister during the greater part of the reign of Napoleon III., he conducted the delicate negotiations between the two countries during the time of those eastern complications which preceded and followed the Crimean War, and also during the excitement and unrest produced by the attempt made in 1858 by Felice Orsini to assassinate theemperorof the French; while his diplomatic skill was no less in evidence during the war between France and Austria and the subsequent course of events in Italy. In 1857 he had been created Earl Cowley and Viscount Dangan; in 1866 he was made a knight of the Garter; and having assisted Richard Cobden to conclude the commercial treaty between Great Britain and France in 1860, he retired in 1867 from a position which he had filled with distinction to himself and with benefit to his country. In 1863 Cowley had inherited the estate of Draycot in Wiltshire from his kinsman the 5th earl of Mornington, and he lived in retirement until his death on the 15th of July 1884. He had married in 1833 Olivia Cecilia (d. 1885), daughter of Charlotte, baroness de Ros and Lord Henry Fitzgerald, by whom he had three sons and two daughters, and was succeeded in his titles by his eldest son, William Henry, 2nd Earl Cowley (1834-1895), father of Henry Arthur Mornington, 3rd earl (b. 1866).

COWLEY FATHERS,the name commonly given to the members of the Society of Mission Priests of St John the Evangelist, an Anglican religious community, the headquarters of which are in England, at Cowley St John, close to Oxford. The society was founded in 1865 by the Rev. R. M. Benson “for the cultivation of a life dedicated to God according to the principles of poverty, chastity and obedience.” The society, which is occupied both with educational and missionary work, has a house in London and branch houses at Bombay and Poona in India, at Cape Town and at St Cuthbert’s, Kaffraria, in South Africa; and at Boston in the United States of America. The costume of the Cowley Fathers consists of a black frock or cassock confined by a black cord and a long black cloak.

COWPENS,a town of Spartanburg county, South Carolina, U.S.A., in the N. part of the state. Pop. (1900) 692; (1910) 1101. It is served by the Southern railway. In colonial days cattle were rounded up and branded here—whence the name. Seven miles N. of the town is the field of the battle of Cowpens, fought on the 17th of January 1781, during the War of American Independence, between the Americans under Gen. Daniel Morgan and the British under Gen. Banastre Tarleton, the British being defeated. A monument was erected on the battlefield in 1859, but was much defaced during the Civil War. The town of Cowpens was founded in 1876, and was incorporated in 1880.

COWPER, WILLIAM COWPER,1st Earl(c. 1665-1723), lord chancellor of England, was the son of Sir William Cowper, Bart., of Ratling Court, Kent, a Whig member of parliament of some mark in the two last Stuart reigns. Educated at St Albans school, Cowper was called to the bar in 1688; having promptly given his allegiance to the prince of Orange on his landing in England, he was made recorder of Colchester in 1694, and in 1695 entered parliament as member for Hertford. Heenjoyed a large practice at the bar, and had the reputation of being one of the most effective parliamentary orators of his generation. He lost his seat in parliament in 1702 owing to the unpopularity caused by the trial of his brother Spencer on a charge of murder. In 1705 he was appointed lord keeper of the great seal, and took his seat on the woolsack without a peerage. In the following year he conducted the negotiations between the English and Scottish commissioners for arranging the union with Scotland. In November of the same year (1706) he succeeded to his father’s baronetcy; and on the 14th of December he was raised to the peerage as Baron Cowper of Wingham, Kent.

When the union with Scotland came into operation in May 1707 the queen in council named Cowper lord high chancellor of Great Britain, he being the first to hold this office. He presided at the trial of Dr Sacheverell in 1710, but resigned the seal when Harley and Bolingbroke took office in the same year. On the death of Queen Anne, George I. appointed Cowper one of the lords justices for governing the country during the king’s absence, and a few weeks later he again became lord chancellor. A paper which he drew up for the guidance of the new king on constitutional matters, entitledAn Impartial History of Parties, marks the advance of English opinion towards party government in the modern sense. It was published by Lord Campbell in hisLives of the Lord Chancellors. Cowper supported the impeachment of Lord Oxford for high treason in 1715, and in 1716 presided as lord high steward at the trials of the peers charged with complicity in the Jacobite rising, his sentences on whom have been censured as unnecessarily severe. He warmly supported the septennial bill in the same year. On the 18th of March 1718 he was created Viscount Fordwich and Earl Cowper, and a month later he resigned office on the plea of ill-health, but probably in reality because George I. accused him of espousing the prince of Wales’s side in his quarrel with the king. Taking the lead against his former colleagues, Cowper opposed the proposal brought forward in 1719 to limit the number of peers, and also the bill of pains and penalties against Atterbury in 1723. In his last years he was accused, but probably without reason, of active sympathy with the Jacobites. He died at his residence, Colne Green, built by himself on the site of the present mansion of Panshanger on the 10th of October 1723.

Cowper was not a great lawyer, but Burnet says that “he managed the court of chancery with impartial justice and great despatch”; the most eminent of his contemporaries agreed in extolling his oratory and his virtues. He was twice married—first, about 1686, to Judith, daughter and heiress of Sir Robert Booth, a London merchant; and secondly, in 1706, to Mary, daughter of John Clavering, of Chopwell, Durham. Swift (Examiner, xvii., xxii.) alludes to an allegation that Cowper had been guilty of bigamy, a slander for which there appears to have been no solid foundation. His younger brother, Spencer Cowper (1669-1728), was tried for the murder of Sarah Stout in 1699, but was acquitted; the lady, who had fallen in love with Cowper, having in fact committed suicide on account of his inattention. He was one of the managers of the impeachment of Sacheverell; was attorney-general to the prince of Wales (1714), chief justice of Chester (1717), and judge of the common pleas (1727). He was grandfather of William Cowper, the poet.

The 1st earl left two sons and two daughters by his second wife. The eldest son, William (1709-1764), who succeeded to the title, assumed the name of Clavering in addition to that of Cowper on the death of his maternal uncle. His wife was a daughter of the earl of Grantham, and grand-daughter of the earl of Ossory. The son of this marriage, George Nassau, 3rd Earl Cowper (1738-1789), inherited the estates of the earl of Grantham; and in 1778 he was created by the emperor Joseph II. a prince of the Holy Roman Empire. The 5th earl (1778-1837) married a daughter of Lord Melbourne, the prime minister, by whom he had two sons; and his widow married as her second husband Lord Palmerston, who devised his property of Broadlands to her second son, William Francis Cowper-Temple (1811-1888), who was created Baron Mount Temple in 1880. The elder son, George Augustus Frederick (1806-1856), 6th Earl Cowper, married Anne Florence, daughter of Thomas Philip, earl de Grey; and this lady at her father’s death becamesuo jurebaroness Lucas of Cradwell. Francis Thomas de Grey, 7th Earl Cowper (1834-1905), in addition to the other family titles, became in 1871 10th Baron Dingwall in the peerage of Scotland, and 8th Baron Butler of Moore Park in the peerage of Ireland as heir-general of Thomas, earl of Ossory, son of the 1st duke of Ormonde; the attainder of 1715 affecting those titles having been reversed in July 1871. On the death of his mother he also inherited the barony of Lucas of Cradwell. On the death without issue in 1905 of the 7th earl, who was lord lieutenant of Ireland 1880-1882, the earldom and barony of Cowper, together with the viscountcy of Fordwich, became extinct; the barony of Butler fell into abeyance among his sisters and their heirs, and the baronies of Lucas and Dingwall devolved on his nephew, Auberon Thomas Herbert (b. 1876).

SeePrivate Diary of Earl Cowper, edited by E. C. Hawtrey for the Roxburghe Club (Eton, 1833);The Diary of Mary, Countess Cowper, edited by the Hon. Spencer Cowper (London, 1864); Lord Campbell,Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal(8 vols., London, 1845-1869); Edward Foss,The Judges of England(9 vols., London, 1848-1864); Gilbert Burnet,History of his Own Time(6 vols., Oxford, 1833); T. B. Howell,State Trials, vol. xii.-xv. (33 vols., London, 1809-1828); G. E. C.,Complete Peerage(London, 1889).

(R. J. M.)

COWPER, WILLIAM(1731-1800), English poet, was born in the rectory (now rebuilt) of Great Berkhampstead, Hertfordshire, on the 26th of November (O.S. 15th) 1731, his father the Rev. John Cowper being rector of the parish as well as a chaplain to George II. On both the father’s and the mother’s side he was of ancient lineage. The father could trace his family back to the time of Edward IV. when the Cowpers were Sussex landowners, while his mother, Ann, daughter of Roger Donne of Ludham Hall, Norfolk, was of the same race as the poet Donne, and the family claimed to have Plantagenet blood in its veins. Of more human interest were Cowper’s immediate predecessors. His grandfather was that Spencer Cowper who, after being tried for his life on a charge of murder, lived to be a judge of the court of common pleas, while his elder brother became lord chancellor and Earl Cowper, a title which became extinct in 1905. Here is the poet’s genealogical tree.

The Rev. John Cowper was twice married. Cowper’s mother, to whom the memorable lines were written beginning “Oh that these lips had language,” was his first wife. She died in 1737 at the age of thirty-four, when the poet was but six years old, and she is buried in Berkhampstead church. Cowper’s stepmother is buried in Bath, and a tablet on the walls of the cathedral commemorates her memory. The father, who appears to have been a conscientious clergyman with no special interest in his sons, died in 1756 and was buried in the Cowper tomb at Panshanger. Only one other of his seven children grew to manhood—John, who was born in 1737.

The poet appears to have attended a dame’s school in earliest infancy, but on his mother’s death, when he was six years old, he was sent to boarding-school, to a Dr Pitman at Markyate, avillage 6 m. from Berkhampstead. From 1738 to 1741 he was placed in the care of an oculist, as he suffered from inflammation of the eyes. In the latter year he was sent to Westminster school, where he had Warren Hastings, Impey, Lloyd, Churchill and Colman for schoolfellows. It was at the Markyate school that he suffered the tyranny that he commemorated inTirocinium. His days at Westminster, Southey thinks, were “probably the happiest in his life,” but a boy of nervous temperament is always unhappy at school. At the age of eighteen Cowper entered a solicitor’s office in Ely Place, Holborn. Here he had Thurlow, the future lord chancellor, as a fellow-clerk, and it is stated that Thurlow promised to help his less pushful comrade in the days of realized ambition. Three years in Ely Place were rendered happy by frequent visits to his uncle Ashley’s house in Southampton Row, where he fell deeply in love with his cousin Theodora Cowper. At twenty-one years of age he took chambers in the Middle Temple, where we first hear of the dejection of spirits that accompanied him periodically through manhood. He was called to the bar in 1754. In 1759 he removed to the Inner Temple and was made a commissioner of bankrupts. His devotion to his cousin, however, was a source of unhappiness. Her father, possibly influenced by Cowper’s melancholy tendencies, perhaps possessed by prejudices against the marriage of cousins, interposed, and the lovers were separated—as it turned out for ever. During three years he was a member of the Nonsense Club with his two schoolfellows from Westminster, Churchill and Lloyd, and he wrote sundry verses in magazines and translated two books of Voltaire’sHenriade. A crisis occurred in Cowper’s life when his cousin Major Cowper nominated him to a clerkship in the House of Lords. It involved a preliminary appearance at the bar of the house. The prospect drove him insane, and he attempted suicide; he purchased poison, he placed a penknife at his heart, but hesitated to apply either measure of self-destruction. He has told, in dramatic manner, of his more desperate endeavour to hang himself with a garter. Here he all but succeeded. His friends were informed, and he was sent to a private lunatic asylum at St Albans, where he remained for eighteen months under the charge of Dr Nathaniel Cotton, the author ofVisions. Upon his recovery he removed to Huntingdon in order to be near his brother John, who was a fellow of St Benet’s College, Cambridge. John had visited his brother at St Albans and arranged this. An attempt to secure suitable lodgings nearer to Cambridge had been ineffectual. In June 1765 he reached Huntingdon, and his life here was essentially happy. His illness had broken him off from all his old friends save only his cousin Lady Hesketh, Theodora’s sister, but new acquaintances were made, the Unwins being the most valued. This family consisted of Morley Unwin (a clergyman), his wife Mary, and his son (William) and daughter (Susannah). The son struck up a warm friendship which his family shared. Cowper entered the circle as a boarder in November (1765). All went serenely until in July 1767 Morley Unwin was thrown from his horse and killed. A very short time before this event the Unwins had received a visit from the Rev. John Newton (q.v.), the curate of Olney in Buckinghamshire, with whom they became friends. Newton suggested that the widow and her children with Cowper should take up their abode in Olney. This was achieved in the closing months of 1767. Here Cowper was to reside for nineteen years, and he was to render the town and its neighbourhood memorable by his presence and by his poetry. His residence in the Market Place was converted into a Cowper Museum a hundred years after his death, in 1900. Here his life went on its placid course, interrupted only by the death of his brother in 1770, until 1773, when he became again deranged. It can scarcely be doubted that this second attack interrupted the contemplated marriage of Cowper with Mary Unwin, although Southey could find no evidence of the circumstance and Newton was not informed of it. J. C. Bailey brings final evidence of this (The Poems of Cowper, page 15). The fact was kept secret in later years in order to spare the feelings of Theodora Cowper, who thought that her cousin had remained as faithful as she had done to their early love.

It was not until 1776 that the poet’s mind cleared again. In 1779 he made his first appearance as an author by theOlney Hymns, written in conjunction with Newton, Cowper’s verses being indicated by a “C.” Mrs Unwin suggested secular verse, and Cowper wrote much, and in 1782 when he was fifty-one years old there appearedPoems of William Cowper of the Inner Temple, Esq.: London, Printed for J. Johnson, No. 72 St Paul’s Churchyard. The volume contained “Table Talk,” “The Progress of Error,” “Truth,” “Expostulation” and much else that survives to be read in our day by virtue of the poet’s finer work. This finer work was the outcome of his friendship with Lady Austen, a widow who, on a visit to her sister, the wife of the vicar of the neighbouring village of Clifton, made the acquaintance of Cowper and Mrs Unwin. The three became great friends. Lady Austen determined to give up her house in London and to settle in Olney. She suggestedThe Taskand inspiredJohn GilpinandThe Royal George. But in 1784 the friendship was at an end, doubtless through Mrs Unwin’s jealousy of Lady Austen. Cowper’s second volume appeared in 1785;—The Task: A Poem in Six Books. By William Cowper of the Inner Temple, Esq.; To which are added by the same author An Epistle to Joseph Hill, Esq., Tirocinium or a Review of Schools, and the History of John Gilpin: London, Printed for J. Johnson, No. 72 St Paul’s Church Yard; 1785.His first book had been a failure, one critic even declaring that “Mr Cowper was certainly a good, pious man, but without one spark of poetic fire.” This second book was an instantaneous success, and indeed marks an epoch in literary history. But before its publication—in 1784—the poet had commenced the translation of Homer. In 1786 his life at Olney was cheered by Lady Hesketh taking up a temporary residence there. The cousins met after an interval of twenty-three years, and Lady Hesketh was to be Cowper’s good angel to the end, even though her letters disclose a considerable impatience with Mrs Unwin. At the end of 1786 a removal was made to Weston Underwood, the neighbouring village which Cowper had frequently visited as the guest of his Roman Catholic friends the Throckmortons. This was to be his home for yet another ten years. Here he completed his translation of Homer, materially assisted by Mr Throckmorton’s chaplain Dr Gregson. There are six more months of insanity to record in 1787. In 1790, a year before theHomerwas published, commenced his friendship with his cousin John Johnson, known to all biographers of the poet as “Johnny of Norfolk.” Johnson also aspired to be a poet, and visited his cousin armed with a manuscript. Cowper discouraged the poetry, but loved the writer, and the two became great friends. New friends were wanted, for in 1792 Mrs Unwin had a paralytic stroke, and henceforth she was a hopeless invalid. A new and valued friend of this period was Hayley, famous in his own day as a poet and in history for his association with Romney and Cowper. He was drawn to Cowper by the fact that both were contemplating an edition of “Milton,” Cowper having received a commission to edit, writing notes and translating the Latin and Italian poems. The work was never completed. In 1794 Cowper was again insane and his lifework was over. In the following year a removal took place into Norfolk under the loving care of John Johnson. Johnson took Cowper and Mary Unwin to North Tuddenham, thence to Mundesley, then to Dunham Lodge, near Swaffham, and finally in October 1796 they moved to East Dereham. In December of that year Mrs Unwin died. Cowper lingered on, dying on the 25th of April 1800. The poet is buried near Mrs Unwin in East Dereham church.

Cowper is among the poets who are epoch-makers. He brought a new spirit into English verse, and redeemed it from the artificiality and the rhetoric of many of his predecessors. With him began the “enthusiasm of humanity” that was afterwards to become so marked in the poetry of Burns and Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron. With him began the deep sympathy with nature, and love of animal life, which was to characterize so much of later poetry.

Although Cowper cannot rank among the world’s greatest poets or even among the most distinguished of poets of his own country, his place is a very high one. He had what is a rarequality among English poets, the gift of humour, which was very singularly absent from others who possessed many other of the higher qualities of the intellect. Certain of his poems, moreover,—for example, “To Mary,” “The Receipt of my Mother’s Portrait,” and the ballad “On the Loss of the Royal George,”—will, it may safely be affirmed, continue to be familiar to each successive generation in a way that pertains to few things in literature. Added to this, one may note Cowper’s distinction as a letter-writer. He ranks among the half-dozen greatest letter-writers in the English language, and he was perhaps the only great letter-writer with whom the felicity was due to the power of what he has seen rather than what he has read.

Bibliography.—The first important life of Cowper was by Hayley in 1803. In its complete form it appeared in 4 volumes in 1806 and was reprinted in 1809 and 1812. It was reprinted again by the Rev. T. S. Grimshawe with the Correspondence in 8 volumes in 1835. Robert Southey’s much more valuableLife and Lettersappeared also in 15 volumes in 1834-1837. ThePrivate Correspondence, edited by John Johnson, appeared in 2 volumes in 1824 and again in 1835. TheComplete Correspondence, edited by Thomas Wright, was published in 1904, but more correspondence appeared inNotes and Queries, July, August and September 1904, and inThe Poems of William Cowper, edited by J. C. Bailey (1905). Edward Dowden unearthed new correspondence with William Hayley inThe Atlantic Monthly(1907). Short lives of Cowper have appeared in many quarters, from Thomas Taylor’s (1833) to Goldwin Smith’s in the “English Men of Letters” series (1880). Another brief biography of great merit is attached to the Globe edition of Cowper’sWorks. Essays by Leslie Stephen, Stopford Brooke, Whitwell Elwin, George Eliot and Walter Bagehot deserve attention. See also St Beuve’sCauseries du Lundi(1868), vol. xi.;Letters of Lady Hesketh to John Johnson(1901);John Newton, by the Rev. Josiah Bull (1868);Cowper and Mary Unwin, by Caroline Gearey (1900); andA Concordance to the Poetic Works of William Cowper, by John Neave (1887).

(C. K. S.)

1Alderman Cooper thus spelt his name and all the family from that day to this, including the poet, have so pronounced it.

COWRY,the popular name of the shells of theCypraeida, a family of mollusks. Upwards of 100 species are recognized, and they are widely distributed over the world—their habitat being the shallow water along the sea-shore. The best known is the money cowry orCypraea moneta, a small shell about half an inch in length, white and straw-coloured without and blue within, which derives its distinctive name from the fact that in various countries it has been employed as a kind of currency. (SeeShell-money.) In Africa among those tribes, such as the Niam-Niam, who do not recognize their monetary value, the shells are in demand as fashionable decorations, just as in Germany they were in use as an ornament for horses’ harness, and were popular enough to acquire several native names, such asBrustharnischor breastplates, andOtterköpfchenor little adders’ heads. Besides theCypraea monetavarious species are employed in this decorative use. TheCypraea aurorais a mark of chieftainship among the natives of the Friendly Islands; theCypraea annulusis a favourite with the Asiatic islanders; and several of the larger kinds have been used in Europe for the carving of cameos. The tiger cowry,Cypraea tigris, so well known as a mantelpiece ornament in England and America, is commonly used by the natives of the Sandwich Islands to sink their nets; and they have also an ingenious plan of cementing portions of several shells into a smooth oval ball which they then employ as a bait to catch the cuttle-fish. While the species already mentioned occur in myriads in their respective habitats, theCypraea princepsand theCypraea umbilicataare extremely rare.

COW-TREE,orMilk-tree,Brosimum Galactodendron(natural order Moraceae), a native of Venezuela. As in other members of the order, the stem contains a milky latex, which flows out in considerable quantities when a notch is cut in it. The “milk” is sweet and pleasant tasting. Another species,B. Alicastrum, the bread-nut tree, a native of central America and Jamaica, bears a fruit which is cooked and eaten. The bread-fruit (Artocarpus) is an allied genus of the same natural order.

COX, DAVID(1783-1859), English painter, was born on the 29th of April 1783, in a small house attached to the forge of his father, a hardworking master smith, in a mean suburb of Birmingham. Turning his hand to what he could get to do, Joseph Cox, the father, was both blacksmith and whitesmith, and when the war with France began took to the making of bayonets and horse shoes, on wholesale commission, and immediately the boy David was thought able to assist he was taken from the poor elementary school in the neighbourhood, and set to the anvil. The attempt to turn the boy to this kind of labour had, however, been made too early; it was too heavy for his strength, and he was sent to what was called by the cyclops of Birmingham a “toy trade,” making lacquered buckles, painted lockets, tin snuff-boxes and other “fancy” articles. Here David very soon acquired some power of painting miniatures, and his talents might have been misdirected had his master, Fieldler by name, not released him from his apprenticeship by dying by his own hand; and David found an opening as colour-grinder and scene-painter’s fag in the theatre then leased, with several others, by the father of Macready, the tragedian.

This obscure step, not one of promotion at the time, was really the most important incident in the uneventful career of Cox. The boy, who had inherited a rather weakly body, and had been trained with care by a pious mother, while intellectually negative and unable to cope with any kind of learning whatever, had endless perseverance, great strength of application, and all through life remained genial, gentle, simple-minded and modest, his penetration and self-reliance being wholly professional, inspired by his love of nature and his knowledge of his subject. Not very quick, and with little versatility, he went step by step in one line of study from the time he began to get the smallest remuneration for his pictures to the age of seventy-five, when he painted large in oil very much the same class of subjects he had of old produced small in water-colours, with the same impressive and unaffectedly noble sentiment, only increased by the mastery of almost infinite practice. He was never led astray by fictitious splendour of any kind, except once indeed in 1825, when he imitated Turner, and produced a classic subject he called “Carthage, Aeneas, and Achates.” He never visited Venice or Egypt, or crossed the Channel except for a week or two in Belgium and Paris, and never even went to Scotland for painting purposes. Bettws-y-Coed and its neighbourhood was everything to him, and characteristics most truly English were beloved by him with a sort of filial instinct. So completely did he love the country, that even London, where it was his interest to live, had few attractions, and did not retain him long.

This residence in the metropolis which began in 1804 was, however, of the most essential educational advantage to him. The Water-Colour Society was established the year after he arrived, and was mainly supported by landscape-painters. He was not, of course, admitted at first into membership, not till 1813, before which time an attempt to establish a rival exhibition had been made. In this Cox joined, the result being very serious to him, an entire failure entailing the seizure and forced sale of all the pictures. At that time the tightest economy was the rule with him, and to save the trifling cost of new strainers or stretching boards, he covered up one picture by another. When these works were prepared for re-sale, fifty years afterwards, some of them yielded picture after picture, peeled off the boards like the waistcoats from the body of the gravedigger in Hamlet!

While lodging near Astley’s Circus he married his landlady’s daughter, and then took a modest cottage at Dulwich, where he gradually left off scene-painting and became teacher, giving lessons at ten shillings a lesson. This entailed walking to the pupils’ homes, and the gift of the paintings done before the pupils. These have since been frequently sold for large sums, but his own price, when lucky enough to sell his best works, was never over a few pounds, and more frequently about fifteen shillings. Sometimes, indeed, he sold them in quantities at two pounds a dozen to be resold to country teachers. By and by he resisted the leaving of the work done to the pupil, but with little advantage to himself, as he saw no end to the accumulation of his own productions, and actually tore them up, and threw them into areas, or pushed them into drains during his trudge homeward. A number of years after he pointed out a particular drain to a friend, and said, “Many a work of mine has gone down that way to the Thames!”

Shortly after he had turned thirty, his stay in London suddenlyended. He was offered the enormous sum of £100 per annum, by a ladies’ college in Hereford, and thither he went. This sum he supplemented by teaching in the Hereford grammar school for many years, at six guineas a year, and in other schools at better pay, but still, and up to his fortieth year, we find his prices for pictures from eight to twenty-five shillings. Cox has no history apart from his productions, and these particulars as to his remuneration possess an interest almost dramatic when we contrast them with the enormous sums realized by his later works, and with the “honours and observance, troops of friends,” that accompanied old age with him, when settled down in his own home at Harborne, near his native town, where he died on the 7th of June 1859.

Cox’s second short residence in London, dating from 1835 to 1840, marks the period of his highest powers. During those years, and for twelve years after, his productiveness kept pace with his mastery, and it would be difficult to overrate the impressiveness of effect, and high feeling, within the narrow range of subject displayed by many of these works. He was now surrounded by dealers, and wealth flowed in upon him. Still he remained the same, a man with few wants and scarcely any enjoyments except those furnished by his brush and his colours. The home at Harborne was a pleasant one, but the approach to the front was useless as the door was kept fastened up, the only entrance being through the garden at the back, and the principal room appropriated as his studio he was content to reach by a narrow stair from the kitchen. Neither in it nor elsewhere was there any luxury or even taste visible:—nobric-à-brac, no objects of interest, few or no books, no pictures except landscapes by his friends. When in winter, after his wife’s death, the fire went out, and the cold at last surprised him, he lifted his easel into the little dining-room and began again. A union of his friends was formed in 1855 to procure a portrait of him, which was painted by Sir J. Watson Gordon; and an exhibition of his works was opened in London in 1858 and again another in 1859. This was actually open when the news of his death arrived.

The number of David Cox’s works, great and small, is enormous. He produced hundreds annually for perhaps forty-five years. Before his death and for ten years thereafter, their prices were remarkable, as witness the following obtained at auction—“Going to the Mill,” £1575; “Old Mill at Bettws-y-Coed,” £1575; “Outskirts of a Wood, with Gipsies,” £2305; “Peace and War,” £3430.

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