Thus begins William Hayley’s three-volume biography of his friend, William Cowper. The tenderness and affection that Hayley expressed towards Cowper may come as something of a surprise to those who know only of his relation to William Blake, the engraver of the six illustrations included in the biography, the best-known of which is the frontispiece of Cowper after the 1792 painting of the poet by George Romney. While Hayley’s Life of Cowper was to become his best-known—and most successful—book in the nineteenth century, his appeal to those readers and admirers he did not wish to disappoint was most clearly directed to one reader, Cowper’s cousin, Lady Harriet Hesketh, who possessed the letters that were to form the bulk of Hayley’s biography. Indeed, so important was her opinion that Blake’s commission for the Life of Cowper was at one point jeopardised when she saw a miniature he created based on Romney’s painting and which, she felt, emphasised the “calamitous eclipses” of Cowper’s “effulgent mind”. Eventually she was reconciled, declaring that “the print softens it [Romney’s portrait] extremely & it has not that distracted and distracting look which prevails in the miniature”.