Lady Hesketh now returned from a lengthened residence on the Continent, her husband was dead, and the intercourse of old days was renewed, in all its happy freedom, between the cousins. A few more words respecting poor Lady Austen, and then her name shall be heard no more. Cowper writes to Lady Hesketh a long letter on the subject, in which he describes the rise, decline, and fall of the friendship, and goes on in this strain: ‘At first I used to pay my _devoirs_ to her ladyship every morning at eleven. Custom soon became law. When I began “The Task,” I felt the inconvenience of this daily attendance; long usage had made that which was at first optional, a point of good manners. I was compelled to neglect “The Task,” for the Muse that had inspired it.’
Hayley speaks in most flattering terms of Lady Austen, in his Life of Cowper, and wrote one of the long-winded epitaphs of the day on her death, which took place before he had completed the poet’s biography, in the compilation of which she had given him much assistance. After her estrangement from the Olney household, Lady Austen married a Frenchman, one Monsieur de Tardif, who wrote verses to her in his own language; she accompanied her husband to Paris in 1802, where she died.
As regards Cowper, one thing is certain: he did not subscribe to the common error, that ‘two is company, and three none,’ but rather to the German proverb, ‘Alle gute ding, sind drey;’ for he now summons Lady Hesketh to his side. He entreats her to come and reside under his roof, painting, in the most glowing colours, the happiness that her society will afford them. He addresses her in the most tender, the most affectionate terms—‘Dearly beloved cousin,’ ‘Dearest, dearest,’—and often in the middle of his epistles he breaks forth again into similar endearing epithets. Southey assures us that Mrs. Unwin never felt a shade of jealousy for Lady Hesketh; but no one tells us if such letters as these were read aloud to Mary, or ‘honoured by her warmest approbation. Among the anonymous presents which Cowper was now in the habit of receiving, was one more acceptable than all others, and that not only because it enclosed a cheque for fifty pounds, with a promise that the donation should be annual, as he writes to Lady Hesketh (whom he appoints his ‘Thanks Receiver-General,’ ‘seeing it is so painful to have no one to thank’), but because the letter was accompanied by ‘the most elegant gift, and the most elegant compliment, that ever poet was honoured with,’—a beautiful tortoise-shell snuff-box, with a miniature on the lid, representing a landscape, with the three hares frolicking in the foreground; above and below two inscriptions, ‘Bess, Puss, Tiny,’ and ‘The Peasant’s Nest.’ Southey had no doubt (neither would it appear had Cowper himself, though he thinks it dishonourable to pry into the incognito) that ‘Anonymous’ and Theodora were synonymous. He was now hard at work translating Homer, and he longed to read what he had done to Lady Hesketh, as well as to Mrs. Unwin. ‘The latter,’ he says, ‘has hitherto been my touchstone, and I have never printed a line without reference to her. With one of you at each elbow, I shall be the happiest of poets.’