Cowper describes Hayley's estate as one of the most delightful pleasure grounds in the world.

"I had no conception that a poet could be the owner of such a paradise, and his house is as elegant as his scenes are charming." The poet, apart from his rapid treatment of _Adamo_, did not succeed independently in attaining to Hayley's fluency among these surroundings.

"I am in truth so unaccountably local in the use of my pen," he wrote to Lady Hesketh, "that, like the man in the fable, who could leap well nowhere but at Rhodes, I seem incapable of writing at all except at Weston." Hence the only piece that he composed in our county was the epitaph on Fop, a dog belonging to Lady Throckmorton.

But while he was at Eartham Romney drew his portrait in crayons.
[Illustration: _Boxgrove from the South._] Cowper always looked back upon his visit with pleasure, but, as he remarked, the genius of Weston Underwood suited him better--"It has an air of snug concealment in which a disposition like mine feels itself peculiarly gratified; whereas now I see from every window woods like forests and hills like mountains--a wilderness, in short, that rather increases my natural melancholy....

Accordingly, I have not looked out for a house in Sussex, nor shall." The simplest road from Chichester to the Downs is the railway.