Nicholl, an extensive landowner in Olney and the district. In his youth the Earl came under the influence of the famous Countess of Huntingdon, and was, like her, a leader in the Evangelical world, in the world of Whitefield and Wesley. He does not appear to have resided in his wife's house at Olney, but he was much interested in the spiritual welfare of the little place; by his recommendation the Reverend John Newton was appointed curate at Olney, nor did he withhold his countenance from Sutcliffe, the great Baptist preacher, from whose seminary at Olney went Carey, the missionary and orientalist. Five miles off, at Newport Pagnell, was one of the earliest Congregational churches; on the hill at Clifton Reynes the rector was a noted Evangelical, Mr. Jones, the brother-in-law of Lady Austen. In those days the line between Nonconformist Evangelicals and Church of England Evangelicals was not rigidly drawn; what they had in common was more than that in which they differed; clergymen of the Church of England, who were at all earnest, had more sympathy with the Baptist Sutcliffe and the Congregational Bull than with foxhunting country parsons or the prelates of the court. Thus the Methodist movement was stronger then in country districts than it is now; it was supported by the wealthy and refined, as well as by small tradesmen and artizans. Not only Lord Dartmouth, but other country gentlemen and ladies in the Olney neighborhood favored the Methodists. The result was the society to which Mrs. Unwin brought Cowper.

The virtues of Mrs. Unwin have become an article of faith with many lovers of Cowper. The poet's exquisite expression of his attachment to her; the high value which he set upon her literary judgment; the tenderness with which he waited on her decline; the

beautiful pictures which he has drawn of their domestic life; her own long patience under the anxieties of his weak mental health,-all these combine to form a picture of human relations so full of charm, that those who have once realized it resent any change in the arrangement of its lights and shadows. If, however, we are to do justice to our poet, it is due to him to pursue some inquiry into the features in his intellectual history, in his artistic life, which were introduced or, at any rate developed, by the influence of Mrs. Unwin. We may grant as a defect in the poet's organization that he was one of those men who cannot walk of themselves, who are by the law of their nature dependent upon the judgment of some other person, whose affection imposes upon them a loss of liberty. It was necessary that Cowper should rely upon somebody; but it was not necessary that he should rely upon Mrs. Unwin. Many a woman has laid upon the object of her devotion a yoke which was never felt, and never consciously attached. The truest affection, result ing in mutual self-sacrifice, may exist between husband and wife, and yet the partner who is apparently the gainer, may really be the loser in the partnership; this is particularly apt to be the case when one of the partners is an artist, and the other a very loving, but only an ordinarily well-informed human being.

Cowper was by birth and education a member of the English aristocracy; he was a classical scholar of considerable attainments; he was exceptionally well read in English literature; he was no milksop; as a schoolboy he was distinguished in athletics; he was humorous, witty, merry and affectionate, with an unusual power of attracting friendship, especially the friendship of women and young men, and this power he retained to the last years of his life. It is exceptional for a man of

sixty to love or be loved by a new acquaintance; but Cowper won the heart of his distant cousin, John Johnson, a Cambridge undergraduate, who called on him at Weston, when he was nearly sixty; this new acquaintance afterwards cared for and tended him with no less assiduity than Mrs. Unwin, and in circumstances no less, if not more, painful. Among Cowper's many bright, affectionate letters few are more bright and affectionate than those to his young relative.

Mrs. Unwin was the daughter of a linen-draper at Ely. There is no crime in being the daughter of a linen-draper, but distinctions of rank and distinctions of training were much sharper in the middle of the eighteenth century than they are now. She was by birth and association far removed from the world in which Cowper had been brought up. She is said to have been pretty and witty. Her husband was a clergyman, very much older than herself, who lived the life of an absentee rector at Huntingdon, where he took private pupils, and held the post of reader in the church. The immorality of absenteeism was not regarded in those days with the same rigor that it is now; but the Unwins lived the life of Methodists. A day with them was divided between public and private prayers, pious conversation and pious reading, enlivened by the singing of hymns to the accompaniment of Mrs. Unwin's harpsichord. It seems strange that such good people should not have thought of their parishioners at Grimston, and should not have seen some incongruity in the comfortable profession of religion at Huntingdon, while they were drawing a stipend from their neglected country parish.

Two years before Mr. Unwin's sudden death, Cowper arrived at Huntingdon. He had just recovered from his first severe attack of mania and wished to live in the country near his brother,

who was a fellow of Benet College, Cambridge; suitable lodgings could not be found within a shorter distance. At first he lived alone, except for the attendance of a man-servant, whom he brought with him from the private asylum in which he had been cured; then he was attracted by young William Unwin, who was just finishing his course at Cambridge and was shortly to take orders. He was introduced to the family; the liking was mutual, and eventually Cowper begged to be allowed to take the place of a pupil in the house. A year later Mr. Unwin was killed by a fall from his horse. Не seems to have expressed some wish that in the event of his death, Cowper might continue to live with his widow, and the arrangement was acceptable to both parties. Cowper speaks of the maternal affection of Mrs. Unwin for him, and his filial tenderness towards her.

Just at this moment John Newton, who had recently been appointed curate at Olney, happened to come to Huntingdon. His preaching attracted Mrs. Unwin, who made his acquaintance, and asked him to find a house for herself and Cowper in Olney or its immediate neighborhood. This was done, and in 1767 began Cowper's long life at Olney.

There could have been no more unfortunate arrangement. Cowper's malady was that terrible mania of morbid fear impelling the sufferer to self-destruction; before and after an attack he was given to religious questionings, not of a particularly gloomy character, being indeed such as are often indulged in by those in good health. Occupation was good for him, was indeed necessary alike for his bodily and mental health; but excitement was deadly. His first attack was brought on by a dread of having to appear in the House of Lords and prove himself qualified to be a clerk of that

august assembly, for he had a horror

of publicity in any form.

This being the case, and Mrs. Unwin knowing that it was the case, he was taken by her and handed over bodily to the care of a revivalist preacher of an energetic and noisy type. John Newton had been a sailor before the mast; having been a profane swearer like Bunyan, he had been converted by a special interposition of Providence on his behalf in a rescue from shipwreck; he had then been captain of a slaver, and eventually a tide-surveyor at Liverpool. This post he gave up to take orders, impelled by a sense of duty and fitness. He believed in special interpositions of Providence, even in trivial matters, in sudden conversions; he was in many respects a Calvinist, but not a gloomy one. His preaching was such that the people of Olney attributed cases of insanity to its effects. It was to this Boanerges of a man that Mrs. Unwin brought Cowper, the tender, shrinking, refined, delicate scholar, suffering from a definite nervous malady.

Newton, a thoroughly good-hearted and affectionate man, took possession of Cowper; for thirteen years they were hardly separated for more than twelve hours out of the twenty-four, except when a recurrence of Cowper's insanity rendered his seclusion necessary. Newton rode about to the different villages in the neighborhood, holding open-air meetings, preaching in cottages, praying by death-beds. In all these Cowper accompanied him; long prayer-meetings were held in Lord Dartmouth's empty house at Olney, and Cowper, to whom "publicity was poison," was encouraged to take a leading part in them. The result was very soon a recurrence of his malady, which lasted in all for eighteen months, in an acute form for six; and the pair of well-intentioned blunderers allowed their friend's illness to grow on him for more than a year before they thought of consulting Dr.

Cotton, who had cured him at St. Albans.

This was not the whole of the injury which Mrs. Unwin did to Cowper. She estranged him from his relations, or, rather, allowed an estrangement to continue which had begun at the period of his first illness. What Cowper lost by this we may gather from his first letter written to his cousin, Lady Hesketh, in reply to one of hers after a silence of nineteen years. The delight with which Cowper recurs to the innocent pleasures of his youth, to the days that were spent in "giggling and making giggle," his almost painfully eager anticipations. of the joy of seeing his old friend again, are expressed as though by a man starving for sympathy, who has suddenly realized all that he had foregone,. and is impatient of any delay in returning to happier scenes. Newton left Olney, fortunately for Cowper, in 1780, and the succeeding ten years were the happiest of Cowper's life after his first breakdown. There was another gleam of light, a break in the clouds of Unwinism in which Cowper had allowed himself to be enveloped. This was the intercourse with Lady Austen, which began almost immediately after Newton's departure; it is to this that we owe "The Diverting History of John Gilpin" and "The Task."

There can be no possible doubt that Mrs. Unwin was jealous of Lady Austen; and there can be no less doubt that she had reason to be jealous. She had been engaged to marry Cowper, but the contract was broken off at the time of his madness at Olney. She saw that "brother William and sister Ann" could not continue to live on those terms, though Cowper might choose to please himself with the simile of a three-fold cord of which she was herself one of the strands. But the moment Cowper realized that he had entered upon more than friendly relations with Lady Austen he broke the connection. Could &

woman desire more than this? Apparently Mrs. Unwin was not satisfied, for she allowed Cowper to write as follows to her son after Lady Austen had left Olney:

You are going to Bristol. A lady, not long since our nearest neighbor, is probably there, she was there very lately. If you should chance to fall into her company, remember, if you please, that we found the connection in some respects an inconvenient one; that we do not wish to renew it; and conduct yourself accordingly. A character with which we spend all our time should be made on purpose for us; too much or too little of any ingredient spoils all. In the instance in question the dissimilitude was too great not to be felt continually, and consequently made our intercourse unpleasant. We have reason, however, to believe that she has given up all thoughts of a return to Olney.

It took Cowper three years to find out the unpleasantness of this painful dissimilitude. He writes in his own name and Mrs. Unwin's, who might surely have written to her son herself, and spared Cowper the humiliation of this disingenuous and ungenerous epistle. Cowper had satisfied all that Mrs. Unwin could possibly demand; he had sent Lady Austen away; he had practically, if not actually, said that he felt himself so bound to Mrs. Unwin that he could marry no one else; could she not have let the matter be? Cowper could have had no fear that Lady Austen would attempt to renew the intercourse by the mediation of young Unwin; he was a gentleman, and Lady Austen was a lady; in fact, Mrs. Unwin, like many other beneficent men and women, was over-tenacious of her power, over-apprehensive of its loss. She had made Cowper quarrel with Lady Austen once before, and there had been a reconciliation; this time she was determined not to risk the fruits of vic

tory by any possible oversight. She was not, however, permanently cured of her jealousy; a little postscript to a letter of Cowper, addressed to Lady Hesketh, written and signed by Mrs. Unwin at a later time, shows that there were still occasional quarrels with Cowper's friends.

In fact, Mrs. Unwin was not of Cowper's world; she was not of his intellectual world any more than she was of his social world. Under Newton's influence Cowper could only write hymns; under Mrs. Unwin's, rather commonplace satire or mild preaching; it was Lady Austen who showed him what he could do with the incidents of everyday life, and who elicited from him the matchless descriptions in "The Task." Mrs. Unwin restricted his reading to the Bible, the newspaper and devotional works; under Mrs. Unwin's influence he pours contempt on geology and astronomy, and gives advice about the reading of the Bible which would inevitably lead us to the abysmal ignorance of the Boers. Mrs. Unwin tolerated his humorous side, his powers of dramatic description; Lady Austen and Lady Hesketh enjoyed them. It is to Mrs. Unwin that we owe the popular conception of Cowper as a mild, mad man, who kept tame hares and wore a white cap. But the real Cowper was a finished gentleman, running over with fun and laughter, particular about his personal appearance, able to be accepted on his own terms by the Wrights of Gayhurst, the Chesters of Chicheley and, above all, by his delightful "Mr. and Mrs. Frog," the Throgmortons of Weston Underwood.

The excitements of society were too much for Cowper's delicate nerves, nor had he any sympathy with sport; he preferred taming hares to chasing them, watching birds to shooting them; but he also loved the intimate companionship of a few chosen friends, and he could always find them. Such inter

course was good for him, better for him even than visiting the sick in their homes, and other active charities in which he was engaged. Cowper was no respecter of persons; he made friends in all classes of society; he is as proud of the affection of his man Sam as of that of Mrs. Courtenay, "my lady of the ink-bottle," and when living at Olney he would run across the road with his last copy of verses to Mr. Wilson, the barber, a genial tonsor, who is still remembered by old residents in Olney, and whose shop was the informal club of the little town.

We may give Mrs. Unwin her due; devoting herself to Cowper as few would have done, she nursed and cared for him in every way; we may respect her devotion, and yet we must regret her limitations. She went the wrong way to work to effect the restoration of his health, and who knows what he might have done had he been in the habit of reading with a woman of more profound literary accomplishments?

In spite of Mrs. Unwin's restrictions, Cowper remains one of the few consummate masters of the English language. His letters are generally admitted to be incomparable, the highwater mark of pure, light, easy English prose; the words and the ideas fit like a glove; both are alike graceful and delicate. Not that Cowper could not be stern upon occasion; he is, perhaps, the only one of Dr. Johnson's contemporaries who could pass an unfavorable criticism upon him with no sense of temerity. There are strong bits of satire in his poetry, as well as those that are weak, and even when his religiosity offends us we would do well to remember that what he says is frequently worth saying, though the form in which it is said has gone out of fashion; nor is he deficient in shrewdness and strong common sense. As a descriptive poet

he has never been surpassed; he is minute in his observation and yet has the gift of selection; he loved the scenes in which his innocent life was spent, perhaps more than Dr. Johnson loved Fleet Street.

It is a misfortune that the best-known portraits of Cowper, those which have been most frequently reproduced, represent him in a strange white cap, and have thus contributed to make us think of him solely or chiefly as eccentric. The children of Weston Underwood, during the last years of the poet's residence on the Ouse, when his suicidal mania was talked about in the locality, were much terrified by this cap; but we are not children, and even though Cowper was sometimes insane, have no right to despise his teaching on that account. Dr. Johnson was subject to melancholy, though in a less degree than Cowper, but we do not consider him effeminate; both were devoutly pious. The cap in question was worn by all gentlemen in the time of perukes, who did not wish to spend the whole of their day magnificently bewigged. Cowper's was a particularly smart affair, made for him by Lady Hesketh, and adorned with a ribbon and a bow. Hogarth has represented himself in a similar cap; but we do not suspect him of too much mildness.

The best picture of Cowper is probably that in the National Portrait Gallery; it was painted by Romney at the same time as the better-known one, in which a stagey effect is produced by the position of the eyes, as of one listening for inspiration. The less-known portrait represents the poet with a silk handkerchief thrown over the back of his head, which is inclined forward; full justice is done to the delicate lips and the earnest eyes. Romney seems to have kept this more natural study, and it was sold with the rest of his effects.

At Weston Underwood, Cowper was well above the Ouse, and could look