Chapter 2

Bell’s Laureates II:... So Goes

the World

Frederick Reynolds in his 1826 autobiography insists that Merry

believed that Anna Matilda would turn out to be the woman of his

dreams and that he was dismayed to find Cowley instead. Topham

and Este, on Merry’s insistence, arranged a meeting in March of 1789

where Merry, according to W. N. Hargreaves- Mawdsley, “found him-

self in the presence not of a goddess, but of a stout, plain, respect-

able matron in her later forties!” The “fantasy was destroyed” (194).

Hargreaves- Mawdsley’s account, however, is merely a paraphrase of

Reynolds’: “when he stood in the presence of the ideal goddess of his

idolatry, and saw a plain respectable matronly lady—simply poetical

and platonic, he walked away in sad dudgeon... ” (2: 187–8). James

Boaden gives a more favorable account, reporting that “Merry was

an enthusiast in beauty as well as verse; and the proportion of the

former to the latter in the lady was less than might be desired: with

a rhapsodical farewell, the correspondence closed” (217). This story

has become part of Della Cruscan lore: it makes Merry foolish and

Cowley pathetic, and perpetuates the fiction of the poetic romance

as founded on genuine passion that was dismantled by the revelation

of Anna Matilda’s attachment to another. Cowley was already the

wife of a government functionary who had bolted to India. Hester

Piozzi, who knew Merry’s secret all along, discovered as early as 1

April 1789—April Fool’s Day—that Cowley was Anna Matilda and

expressed her relief to learn that Merry was not writing love poems

to himself (Thraliana 2: 740). Later that month, Merry publicly

revealed himself as “Author of the Della Crusca Poems” when his

9780230100251_04_ch02.indd 639780230100251_04_ch02.indd 63 12/28/2010 11:08:25 AM12/28/2010 11:08:25 AM

10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel Robinson

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