's Chronicle_,
contributors both of them to the _Connoisseur_, and translators, Colman
of Terence, Bonnell Thornton of Plautus, Colman being a dramatist
besides. In the set was Lloyd, another wit and essayist and a poet,
with a character not of the best. On the edge of the set, but
apparently not in it, was Churchill, who was then running a course
which to many seemed meteoric, and of whose verse, sometimes strong but
always turbid, Cowper conceived and retained an extravagant admiration.
Churchill was a link to Wilkes; Hogarth too was an ally of Colman, and
helped him in his exhibition of Signs. The set was strictly confined
to Westminsters. Gray and Mason, being Etonians, were objects of its
literary hostility and butts of its satire. It is needless to say much
about these literary companions of Cowper's youth: his intercourse with
them was totally broken off, and before he himself became a poet its
effects had been obliterated by madness, entire change of mind, and the
lapse of twenty years. If a trace remained, it was in his admiration
of Churchill's verses, and in the general results of literary society,
and of early practice in composition. Cowper contributed to the
_Connoiseur_ and the _St. James's Chronicle_. His papers in the
_Connoisseur_ have been preserved; they are mainly imitations of the
lighter papers of the _Spectator_ by a student who affects the man of
the world. He also dallied with poetry, writing verses to "Delia," and
an epistle to Lloyd. He had translated an elegy of Tibullus when he
was fourteen, and at Westminster he had written an imitation of
Phillips's _Splendid Shilling_, which, Southey says, shows his manner
formed. He helped his Cambridge brother, John Cowper, in a translation
of the _Henriade_. He kept up his classics, especially his Homer. In
his letters there are proofs of his familiarity with Rousseau. Two or
three ballads which he wrote are lost, but he says they were popular,
and we may believe him. Probably they were patriotic. "When poor Bob
White," he says, "brought in the news of Boscawen's success off the
coast of Portugal, how did I leap for joy! When Hawke demolished
Conflans, I was still more transported. But nothing could express my
rapture when Wolfe made the conquest of Quebec."

The "Delia" to whom Cowper wrote verses was his cousin Theodora, with
whom he had an unfortunate love affair. Her father, Ashley Cowper,
forbade their marriage, nominally on