C OWPER was born in 1731, his mother having been a Miss Donne, probably of the same Welsh family as the poet Donne. She died in 1737. Fifty-two years later, in 1790, his long-absent cousin, Mrs. Bodham, formerly Anne or "Rose" Donne, sent him his mother's picture. He wrote to his familiar cousin, Lady Hesketh, telling her that he had rather possess this picture than the richest jewel in the British crown. He remembered his mother well enough to know that the portrait bore a very exact resemblance: he loved her "with an affection that her death, fifty-two years since, has not in the least abated." To Mrs. Bodham he wrote on the following day, February 27, 1790: Every creature that bears any affinity to my mother is dear to me, and you, the daughter of her brother, are but one remove distant from her: I love you, therefore, and love you much, both for her sake and for your own. The world could not have furnished you with a present so acceptable to me, as the picture which you have so kindly sent me. I received it the night before last, and viewed it with a trepidation of nerves and spirits somewhat akin to what I should have felt had the dear original presented herself to my embraces. I kissed it, and hung it where it is the last object that I see at night, and, of course, the first on which I open my eyes in the morning. There is in me, I believe, more of the Donne than of the Cowper; and though I love all of both names, and have a thousand reasons to love those of my own name, yet I feel the bond of nature draw me to your side. I was thought in the days of my childhood much to resemble my mother; and in my natural temper, of which at the age of fiftyeight I must be supposed to be a competent judge, can trace both her and my late uncle, your father. Somewhat of his irritability; and a little, I would hope, both of his and her I know not what to call it, without seeming to praise myself, which is not my intention, but speaking to you, I will even speak out, and say good nature. (Cowper was fond of remembering that he was a Donne, how that he was of the same family as John Donne, and how that he was Welsh in his touchiness.) Upon this occasion he wrote his finest and almost his best known lines, "On the receipt of my mother's picture out of Norfolk." He recalls how his servants tried to quiet his sorrow at her death by telling him she would return . . . recalls The nightly visits to my chamber made, The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestowed All this, and more endearing still than all, and how When playing with thy vesture's tissued flowers, The violet, the pink, and jessamine, I pricked them into paper with a pin (And thou wast happier than myself the while, Wouldst softly speak, and stroke my head and smile). It was of her that he thought when he replied in "The Task" to the imaginary question: "What's the world to you?" Much. I was born of woman, and drew milk, How then should I and any man that lives To state the influence of such a relationship is impossible. The explicit evidence is very little concerning Cowper's mother or the mothers of most other English poets. Who was Chaucer's? We know that she was probably named Agnes, and that she married again after her husband's death, Geoffrey Chaucer being then a man and in the service of the King, Edward III. He was not eminently a mother's son" as some poets are. Spenser, perhaps, was, but we only know that his mother's name was Elizabeth. Not 66 more is to be learned of Mary Arden, Shakespeare's mother, though Mr. Frank Harris concludes from "Coriolanus" that the poet “held her in extraordinary esteem and affection, and mourned her after her death as 'the noblest mother in the world.'" Sidney's mother, being a Dudley, a daughter of the great Duke of Northumberland, we know better. She had a masculine firmness of character and weight of mind, and a woman's endurance and submission. She was in every way the equal of her husband, Sir Henry Sidney, Elizabeth's Lord-Deputy of Ireland, and Sir Philip rightly held it to be his chief honour that he was a Dudley. She was a woman of equal courage, intelligence and fortitude, and it was her fortune to display them always at the side of her husband in his difficult task of serving the Queen and governing Ireland and Wales. She died in the same year as Sir Henry and Sir Philip, following her husband, followed by her son. Not even the name is remembered of Drayton's mother, through whom he may have had the Welsh blood of the not improbable report. Marston had an "Italian and probably Catholic mother," but what mothers had Marlowe and Nashe? Lodge wrote an epitaph on his mother in 1579, but it has disappeared. Donne's mother is more clear to us if we may believe Walton. She was a Heywood of the blood of Sir Thomas More, and like her husband a Catholic, and as he died when the child was three her influence was single. She did not allow the nurse to whip him for faults, but had them reported to herself. She and her friends were careful of his education, and gave him tutors in "the mathematics and in all the other liberal sciences," and in "the principles of the Romish church ; of which these tutors professed, though secretly, themselves to be members." But he was at Oxford in his eleventh year, and removed to Cambridge in his fourteenth. He says himself that study diverted his tendency to the Roman faith before he was twenty. Mr. Gosse holds the opinion that after he went to London, about 1590, at the age of seventeen, he "found himself free from his mother's tutelage," and his attachment to that faith declined. But in 1616 he wrote that whatever he could do for her was a debt to her "from whom I had that education which must make my fortune." She survived him, a second time a widow, until 1632, and he left her provided for. Magdalen Newport, the mother of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury and of George Herbert, is distinct both as the mother and |