for the sake of their advantage and instruction than their praise.  They are children; if we give them physic we must sweeten the rim of the cup with honey,’ &c.  To this principle he faithfully adhered in all his original poems.  He felt the difficulty of the task which he had proposed to himself.  He knew that he would have to break through a thick, hard crust of prejudice before he could reach his readers’ hearts.  He saw the necessity of peculiar delicacy of treatment, lest he should repel those whom he desired to attract.  And nothing marks more strongly the high estimate which Cowper formed of Newton’s tact and good judgment than the fact that the poet asked his friend to write the preface to his first volume.  When he made this request he was fully aware that any injudiciousness, any want of tact, would be fatal to his object.  But he applied to Newton expressly because he thought him the only friend who would not betray him by any such mistakes.

It is from the nature of the case difficult to estimate the services which Cowper’s poetry rendered to the cause which lay nearest to the poet’s heart.  Poems do not make converts in the sense that sermons do; nevertheless, it is doing no injustice to the preaching power of the Evangelical school to assert that Cowper’s poetry left a deeper mark upon the Church than any sermons did.  Through this means Evangelical theology in its most attractive form gained access into quarters into which no Evangelical preachers could ever have penetrated.  The bitterest enemy of Evangelicalism who read Cowper’s poems could not deny that here was at least one man, a scholar and a gentleman, with a refined and cultured mind and a brilliant wit, who was not only favourably disposed to the obnoxious doctrines, but held them to be the very life and soul of Christianity.  Of course, to those who wished to find it, there was the ready answer that the man was a madman.  But the mind which produced ‘The Task’ was certainly not unsound, at least at the time when it conceived and executed that fine poem.  Every reader of discernment, though he might not agree with the religious views expressed in it, was obliged to confess that the author’s powers were of the first order; and if William Cowper did no other service to the Evangelical cause, this alone was an inestimable one—­that he convinced the world that the Evangelical system was not incompatible with true genius, ripe scholarship, sparkling wit, and a refined and cultivated taste.

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If pilgrimages formed part of the Evangelical course, the little town or large village of Olney should have attracted as many pilgrims as S. Thomas’s shrine at Canterbury did five centuries before.  For with this dull, uninteresting spot are connected the names not only of Newton, and Cowper, and Mrs. Unwin, but also those of two successive vicars, Mr. Moses Brown and Mr. Bean, both worthy specimens of Evangelicals, and last, but by no means least, the name of Scott, the commentator.