tter and read well, it is said that they were not well delivered; and,
perhaps, they are in themselves a little heavy, and deficient in the
lighter graces of oratory. But as an adviser and personal director of
those who had been heinous sinners, and had learnt to cry in the agony
of their souls, 'What must I do to be saved?' Newton was
unrivalled.[812] Nor was it only to the profligate that Newton's advice
was seasonable and effective. Many who were living outwardly decorous
lives derived inestimable benefit from it. Thomas Scott, Joseph Milner,
William Cowper, William Wilberforce, and Hannah More were all more or
less influenced by him. Newton was in every way adapted to be a
spiritual adviser. In spite of his rough exterior he was a man of a very
affectionate nature. This at his worst he never lost. In his darkest
hours there was still one bright spot. His love for Mary Catlett, first
conceived when she was a child of thirteen, continued unabated to the
day of her death and beyond her death. This plain, downright, homely man
not only professed, but felt, an ardour of attachment which no hero of
romance ever exceeded. His conscience reproached him for making an idol
of his 'dear Mary.' Oddly enough, he took the public into his
confidence. The publication of his 'Letters to a Wife,' breathing as
they do the very spirit of devoted love, in his own life-time, may have
been in questionable taste; but they indicate a simplicity very
characteristic of the man. His letters upon her death to Hannah More and
others are singularly plaintive and beautiful; and the verses which he
wrote year by year on each anniversary of that sad event are more
touching than better poetry.[813]

His name is specially connected with that of the poet Cowper. At first
sight it would seem difficult to conceive a greater contrast than that
which existed between the two men. Cowper was a highly nervous, shy,
delicate man, who was most at home in the company of ladies in their
drawing-room, who had had no experience whatever of external hardships,
who had always lived a simple, retired life, and had shrunk with
instinctive horror from the grosser vices. He was from his youth a
refined and cultured scholar, and had associated with scarcely any but
the pure and gentle. Newton was a plain, downright sailor, with nerves
of iron, and a mind and spirit as robust as his frame. He had little
inclination for the minor elegancies of life. He was almost entirely
s