so clean a breast before men who, like the majority of the Evangelical leaders, had always lived at least outwardly respectable lives; and if they had ventured to do so, these good men could hardly have appreciated their difficulties.  But Newton had been one of them; scarcely a sin could they mention but he had either committed it himself, or been brought into close contact with those who had committed it.  It was not so much as a preacher that Newton’s forte lay; for though his sermons were full of matter 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 self-taught.  What could there be in common between two such men?