Featured on PDR in the collection The Diverting History of John Gilpin: Shewing how he Went Further than he Intended, and Came Safe Home Again (1782)

The Diverting History of John Gilpin is a humorous ballad written by the English poet and hymnist William Cowper (1731–1800). It owes its existence to Lady Austen. One autumn afternoon in 1782 she noticed her friend William sinking into a depression. To raise his spirits she told him a story she had loved as a child, about the hilarious misadventures of a linen draper called John Gilpin. Cowper was cheered to the point that he turned the tale into a ballad, which became the most popular poem of the 1780s (to the point where pirate copies were being sold across England, together with biographies and toys of Gilpin).