in a physician.  Of this again their religion must bear the reproach.  In other respects they behaved admirably.  Mrs. Unwin, shut up for sixteen months with her unhappy partner, tended him with unfailing love; alone she did it, for he could bear no one else about him; though to make her part more trying he had conceived the insane idea that she hated him.  Seldom has a stronger proof been given of the sustaining power of affection.  Assuredly of whatever Cowper may have afterwards done for his kind, a great part must be set down to the credit of Mrs. Unwin.

  Mary!  I want a lyre with other strings,
  Such aid from heaven as some have feigned they drew,
    An eloquence scarce given to mortals, new
  And undebased by praise of meaner things,
  That, ere through age or woe I shed my wings,
    I may record thy worth with honour due,
    In verse as musical as thou art true,
  And that immortalizes whom it sings. 
  But thou hast little need.  There is a book
    By seraphs writ with beams of heavenly light,
  On which the eyes of God not rarely look,
    A chronicle of actions just and bright;
  There all thy deeds, my faithful Mary shine,
  And, since thou own’st that praise, I spare thee mine.

Newton’s friendship too was sorely tried.  In the midst of the malady the lunatic took it into his head to transfer himself from his own house to the Vicarage, which, he obstinately refused to leave; and Newton bore this infliction for several months without repining, though, he might well pray earnestly for his friend’s deliverance.  “The Lord has numbered the days in which I am appointed to wait on him in this dark valley, and he has given us such a love to him, both as a believer and a friend, that I am not weary; but to be sure his deliverance would be to me one of the greatest blessings my thoughts can conceive.”  Dr. Cotton was at last called in, and under his treatment, evidently directed against a bodily disease, Cowper was at length restored to sanity.

Newton once compared his own walk in the world to that of a physician going through Bedlam.  But he was not skilful in his treatment of the literally insane.  He thought to cajole Cowper out of his cherished horrors by calling his attention to a case resembling his own.  The case was that of Simon Browne, a Dissenter, who had conceived the idea that, being under the displeasure of Heaven, he had been entirely deprived of his rational being and left with merely his animal nature.  He had accordingly resigned his ministry, and employed, himself in compiling a dictionary, which, he said, was doing nothing that could require a reasonable soul.  He seems to have thought that theology fell under the same category, for he proceeded to write some theological treatises, which he dedicated to Queen Caroline, calling her Majesty’s attention to the singularity of the authorship as the most remarkable phenomenon of her reign.  Cowper, however, instead of falling into the desired train of reasoning, and being led to suspect the existence of a similar illusion in himself, merely rejected the claim of the pretended rival in spiritual affliction, declaring his own case to be far the more deplorable of the two.