James'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.
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