consistent with the utmost cheerfulness.”  He unquestionably found it so, and, when the Rev. Morley Unwin was killed as the result of a fall from his horse, Cowper and Mrs. Unwin moved to Olney in order to enjoy further evangelical companionship in the neighbourhood of the Rev. John Newton, the converted slave-trader, who was curate in that town.  At Olney Cowper added at once to his terrors of Hell and to his amusements.  For the terrors, Newton, who seems to have wielded the Gospel as fiercely as a slaver’s whip, was largely responsible.  He had earned a reputation for “preaching people mad,” and Cowper, tortured with shyness, was even subjected to the ordeal of leading in prayer at gatherings of the faithful.  Newton, however, was a man of tenderness, humour, and literary tastes, as well as of a somewhat savage piety.  He was not only Cowper’s tyrant, but Cowper’s nurse, and, in setting Cowper to write the Olney Hymns, he gave a powerful impulse to a talent hitherto all but hidden.  At the same time, when, as a result of the too merciless flagellation of his parishioners on the occasion of some Fifth of November revels, Newton was attacked by a mob and driven out of Olney, Cowper undoubtedly began to breathe more freely.  Even under the eye of Newton, however, Cowper could enjoy his small pleasures, and we have an attractive picture of him feeding his eight pair of tame pigeons every morning on the gravel walk in the garden.  He shared with Newton his amusements as well as his miseries.  We find him in 1780 writing to the departed Newton to tell him of his recreations as an artist and gardener.  “I draw,” he said, “mountains, valleys, woods, and streams, and ducks, and dab-chicks.”  He represents himself in this lively letter as a Christian lover of baubles, rather to the disadvantage of lovers of baubles who are not Christians: 

I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and viewed without a reference to their author, what is the earth—­what are the planets—­what is the sun itself but a bauble?  Better for a man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be able to say, “The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!” Their eyes have never been opened to see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they are closed for ever.  They think a fine estate, a large conservatory, a hothouse rich as a West Indian garden, things of consequence; visit them with pleasure, and muse upon them with ten times more.  I am pleased with a frame of four lights, doubtful whether the few pines it contains will ever be worth a farthing; amuse myself with a greenhouse which Lord Bute’s gardener could take upon his back, and walk away with; and when I have paid it the accustomed visit, and watered it, and given it air, I say to myself:  “This is not mine, it is a plaything lent me for the present; I must leave it soon.”

In this and the following year we find him turning