Lady Austen’s presence evidently wrought on Cowper like an elixir:  “From a scene of the most uninterrupted retirement,” he writes to Mrs. Unwin, “we have passed at once into a state of constant engagement.  Not that our society is much multiplied; the addition of an individual has made all this difference.  Lady Austen and we pass our days alternately at each other’s Chateau.  In the morning I walk with one or other of the ladies, and in the evening wind thread.  Thus did Hercules, and thus probably did Samson, and thus do I; and were both those heroes living, I should not fear to challenge them to a trial of skill in that business, or doubt to beat them both.”  It was perhaps while he was winding thread that Lady Austen told him the story of John Gilpin.  He lay awake at night laughing over it, and next morning produced the ballad.  It soon became famous, and was recited by Henderson, a popular actor, on the stage, though, as its gentility was doubtful, its author withheld his name.  He afterwards fancied that this wonderful piece of humour had been written in a mood of the deepest depression.  Probably he had written it in an interval of high spirits between two such moods.  Moreover he sometimes exaggerated his own misery.  He will begin a letter with a de profundis, and towards the end forget his sorrows, glide into commonplace topics, and write about them in the ordinary strain.  Lady Austen inspired John Gilpin.  She inspired, it seems, the lines on the loss of the Royal George.  She did more:  she invited Cowper to try his hand at something considerable in blank verse.  When he asked her for a subject, she was happier in her choice than the lady who had suggested the Progress of Error. 8he bade him take the sofa on which she was reclining, and which, sofas being then uncommon, was a more striking and suggestive object than it would be now.  The right chord was struck; the subject was accepted; and The Sofa grew into The Task; the title of the song reminding us that it was “commanded by the fair.”  As Paradise Lost is to militant Puritanism, so is The Task to the religious movement of its author’s time.  To its character as the poem of a sect it no doubt owed and still owes much of its popularity.  Not only did it give beautiful and effective expression to the sentiments of a large religious party, but it was about the only poetry that a strict Methodist or Evangelical could read; while to those whose worship was unritualistic and who were debarred by their principles from the theatre and the concert, anything in the way of art that was not illicit must have been eminently welcome.  But The Task has merits of a more universal and enduring kind.  Its author himself says of it:—­“If the work cannot boast a regular plan (in which respect, however, I do not think it altogether indefensible), it may yet boast, that the reflections are naturally suggested always by the