Journal Author: W. B. Hutchings

To rise at noon, sit slipshod and undressed, To read the news or fiddle as seems best, Till half the world comes rattling at his door, To fill the dull vacuity till four, And just when evening turns the blue vault grey, To spend two hours in dressing for the day, 80 To make the

The night was winter in its roughest mood, The morning sharp and clear. But now at noon Upon the southern side of the slant hills, And where the woods fence off the northern blast, The season smiles, resigning all its rage, And has the warmth of May. The vault is blue Without a cloud, and

‘To my taste, the most fruitful and most natural exercise of our minds is conversation’, said Montaigne (‘Le plus fructueux et naturel exercice de notre esprit, c’est à mon gré la conference’).1 Many an eighteenth-century writer would have agreed, including, I would hazard, Cowper. Soon after he met Lady Austen in July 1781 when he

Milton’s Elegy on the Death of Lancelot Andrewes: Cowper’s Translation B. Hutchings John Milton’s Latin poems are largely the product of his earlier years. The most substantial of them, ‘Epitaphium Damonis’, is a lament for his school-friend, Charles Diodati, of whose death Milton heard while in Italy in 1639. Milton here employs pastoral elegy, a

William Cowper, ‘The Poplar-Field’ B. Hutchings New: watch this short film taken at the location of ‘The Poplar-Field’ by the Cowper & Newton Museum The Poplars are fell’d, farewell to the shade And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade, The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves, Nor Ouse on his bosom their image

Cowper and Newton Journal Book Review Neil Curry, William Cowper:  A Revaluation.  London:  Greenwich Exchange, 2015.  278 pp.  ISBN:  978-1-906075-86-6. £16.99 (pbk) B. Hutchings A new critical biography of William Cowper is an event to be welcomed.  Neil Curry is very well qualified to be its author.  In 2011 Greenwich Exchange published his Six Eighteenth-Century

William Cowper, ‘On the Loss of the Royal George’ W. B. Hutchings Toll for the brave – the Brave that are no more – All sunk beneath the wave, fast by their native shore – Eight hundred of the brave, whose courage well was tried, Had made the Vessel heel and laid her on her