No spring nor summer beauty has such grace
As I have seen on an autumnal face.

And he gratefully writes to her in his quaint prose, "Your favors to
me are everywhere. I use them and have them. I enjoy them at London
and leave them there, and yet find them at Mitcham. Such riddles as
these become things inexpressible; and such is your goodness." There
was a choice, ever-comforting, and sacred friendship between the
great John Locke and the excellent Lady Damaris Masham, the only
daughter of that ornament of the English Church, the learned and
benignant Cudworth.

She was one of the most gifted, cultivated, and elegant women of her
time. The genius and moral worth of Locke are well known to all.
Domesticated in the family of Lady Masham for many years before his
death, giving her all the advantage of his talents, acquirements, and
sympathy, "she returned the obligation with singular benevolence and
gratitude, always treating him with the utmost generosity and
respect; for she had an inviolable friendship for him." She watched
by him in his last illness. He asked her to read a psalm to him. As
death approached, he desired her to break off reading, and in a few
minutes breathed his closing breath. She wrote the fine sketch of his
character published in the "Historical Dictionary." She says his
manners made him very agreeable to all sorts of people, and nobody
was better received than he among those of the highest rank. "His
greatest amusement was to talk with sensible people, and he courted
their conversation." The amiable, unfortunate Cowper, the most
shrinking and melancholy of men, too gentle and too unworldly for
common companionship, was especially fitted for the soothing
ministrations and the healing sympathy of women. He was dependent on
these friendships, and found his chief happiness in them. But for
them, his career would have been as brief as it was wretched; and his
name, now haloed with such sadly pleasing attractions, would have had
no place in English literature, except in the dark list of madmen and
suicides. Who that has read his matchless lines on his mother's
picture will not bless the good women who shed so many rays of peace
and bliss on his unhappy lot. His cousin, the angelic Lady Hesketh,
whose disinterested tenderness lavished grateful attentions on him,
with a sweet skill that failed neither in his youth nor in his age,
was as a light from heaven on his path through the whole journey.
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