ent further on occasion than their Protestant friends would have
approved, Cowper to contemplate--so he assures us in one of his
letters--the entering a French monastery, and Miss Bronte actually to
kneel in the Confessional in a Brussels church. Further, let me remind
you that there were moments in the lives of Charlotte Bronte and her
sisters, when Cowper's poem, _The Castaway_, was their most soul-stirring
reading. Then, again, Mary Unwin's only daughter became the wife of a
Vicar of Dewsbury, and it was at Dewsbury and to the very next vicar,
that Mr. Bronte, the father of Charlotte, was curate when he first went
into Yorkshire. Finally, let it be recalled that Cowper and Charlotte
Bronte have attracted as much attention by the pathos of their lives as
by anything that they wrote. Thus far, and no further, can a strained
analogy carry us. The most enthusiastic admirers of the Brontes can only
claim for them that they permanently added certain artistic treasures to
our literature. Cowper did incomparably more than this. His work marked
an epoch.

But first let me say how interested we who are strangers naturally feel
in being in Olney. To every lover of literature Olney is made classic
ground by the fact that Cowper spent some twenty years of his life in
it--not always with too genial a contemplation of the place and its
inhabitants. "The genius of Cowper throws a halo of glory over all the
surroundings of Olney and Weston," says Dean Burgon. But Olney has
claims apart from Cowper. John Newton {34} presents himself to me as an
impressive personality. There was a time, indeed, of youthful
impetuosity when I positively hated him, for Southey, whose biography I
read very early in life, certainly endeavours to assist the view that
Newton was largely responsible for the poet's periodical attacks of
insanity.

But a careful survey of the facts modifies any such impression. Newton
was narrow at times, he was over-concerned as to the letter, often
ignoring the spirit of true piety, but the student of the two volumes of
his _Life and Correspondence_ that we owe to Josiah Bull, will be
compelled to look at "the old African blasphemer" as he called himself,
with much of sympathy. That he had a note of tolerance, with which he is
not usually credited, we learn from one of his letters, where he says:

I am willing to be a debtor to the wise and to the unwise, to doctors
and shoemakers, if I can get a hint fr