I am scarcely warm in my place in London before I have to thank you
for your present to me; you hardly give me time, in the short
intervals of these marks of your kindness to me, to frame my thanks to
you for each. I have exhausted all my common-place forms and am
forced to rack my invention (so very often have you come forward with
these welcome claims on me) to give anything like a turn to the
expression in which to convey my thanks. Mr. Pope (in those rhymes
for the nursery which he has entitled the Universal Prayer) calls
enjoyment obedience: now if enjoyment be thankfulness, too, then never
was a being more completely thanked than yourself; for the ducks were
devoured with the most devout gust and appetite; they were the most
superb fowls that ever suffered martyrdom of their lives to delight
the palate and appease the hunger of the Lords of the creation. You
should have sent them to some imitator of the Dutch school, who could
have painted them before he ate them; the hare, too, is as good as it
can be, and you are agreeably thanked for it by an equal portion of
enjoyment.
I must beg you to excuse a very short, dull, and hasty letter, from
me. If I were not impatient at the thought of letting any longer time
elapse without expressing my lively sense of your frequent mark of
kind consideration of me, I should not write at all to day. I have
something to do at my chambers, and in ten minutes I must run down to
Westminster Hall; and whilst I am thus engaged, I am as much
disqualified for writing, by a dark fit of low spirits, as prevented
by want of leisure. I resist as much as I can these attacks of the
night-mare by day, but I cannot wholly succeed against them; my
circumstances may possibly change, and, if not, such gloominess is
unreasonable; if Fortune is never weary of persecuting me, I shall at
last be past the sense of her persecutions. In the meantime, whatever
is the colour of my life, I shall, if I can, continue to hope the
future cannot be the worse, and the present will be the more tolerable
for it. I shall, therefore, cling to her while I live, and to apply a
beautiful thought of Tibullus--
'Dying, clasp her with my failing hand.'
In endeavouring to recollect me of the many fine things that have been
said of hope to crown my declaration of attachment to that first place
of our lives, I remember Cowley has observed 'that it is as much
destroyed by the possession of its object as by exclusion from it.'
This is very ingenious and very true, and though not to the purpose
for which I was seeking it yet will very well serve another. I wish
my dear Madam, very sincerely, that the former mode of destruction may
speedily befall all your present hopes, and that in future you will be
surrounded by so many blessings as will leave you no room for the
exercise of any hope but their continuance, My duty to my father, and
my love to William, I trust that he improves in Latin; pray tell him
that I was vexed not to find him so good a scholar in that language as
I expected; when I next see him I hope my expectations will be
exceeded.
I am, my dear Madam,
Yours very truly,
HENRY COOPER."
The following letter I have previously made reference to. It is written,
evidently, in despondency, and heartfelt sorrow, under the shock of the
frightful calamity. It relates to the disastrous death of poor Alfred,
his youngest brother. It is dated from, and bears date
2, _Elm Court_, _Temple_,
25_th_ _June_, 1822.