Among his schoolfellows was Warren Hastings, in whose guilt
as proconsul he afterwards, for the sake of Auld Lang Syne, refused to
believe, and Impey, whose character has had the ill-fortune to be
required as the shade in Macaulay's fancy picture of Hastings.
On leaving Westminster, Cowper, at eighteen, went to live with Mr.
Chapman, an attorney, to whom he was articled, being destined for the
Law. He chose that profession, he says, not of his own accord, but to
gratify an indulgent father, who may have been led into the error by a
recollection of the legal honours of the family, as well as by the
"silver pence" which his promising son had won by his Latin verses at
Westminster School. The youth duly slept at the attorney's house in
Ely Place. His days were spent in "giggling and making giggle" with
his cousins, Theodora and Harriet, the daughters of Ashley Cowper, in
the neighbouring Southampton Row. Ashley Cowper was a very little man
in a white hat lined with yellow, and his nephew used to say that he
would one day he picked by mistake for a mushroom.
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