Among his schoolfellows was Warren Hastings, in whose guilt as proconsul he afterwards, for the sake of Auld Lang Syne, refused to believe, and Impey, whose character has had the ill-fortune to be required as the shade in Macaulay's fancy picture of Hastings.
On leaving Westminster, Cowper, at eighteen, went to live with Mr.
Chapman, an attorney, to whom he was articled, being destined for the Law.

He chose that profession, he says, not of his own accord, but to gratify an indulgent father, who may have been led into the error by a recollection of the legal honours of the family, as well as by the "silver pence" which his promising son had won by his Latin verses at Westminster School.

The youth duly slept at the attorney's house in Ely Place.

His days were spent in "giggling and making giggle" with his cousins, Theodora and Harriet, the daughters of Ashley Cowper, in the neighbouring Southampton Row.

Ashley Cowper was a very little man in a white hat lined with yellow, and his nephew used to say that he would one day he picked by mistake for a mushroom.