" It was perhaps
while he was winding thread that Lady Austen told him the story of John
Gilpin. He lay awake at night laughing over it, and next morning
produced the ballad. It soon became famous, and was recited by
Henderson, a popular actor, on the stage, though, as its gentility was
doubtful, its author withheld his name. He afterwards fancied that
this wonderful piece of humour had been written in a mood of the
deepest depression. Probably he had written it in an interval of high
spirits between two such moods. Moreover he sometimes exaggerated his
own misery. He will begin a letter with a _de profundis_, and towards
the end forget his sorrows, glide into commonplace topics, and write
about them in the ordinary strain. Lady Austen inspired _John Gilpin_.
She inspired, it seems, the lines on the loss of the Royal George. She
did more: she invited Cowper to try his hand at something considerable
in blank verse. When he asked her for a subject, she was happier in
her choice than the lady who had suggested the _Progress of Error_.
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