Immortal Memories | Page 7

Carlyle, "a strong and noble man,
one of our great English souls." I love him best in his book called
Prayers and Meditations, where we know him as we know scarcely any
other Englishman, for the good, upright fighter in this by no means
easy battle of life. It is as such a fighter that we think of him to-night.
Reading the account of his battles may help us to fight ours.

Gentlemen, I give you the toast of the evening. Let us drink in solemn
silence, upstanding, "The Immortal Memory of Dr. Samuel Johnson."

II. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF WILLIAM COWPER
An address entitled 'The Sanity of Cowper,' delivered at the Centenary
Celebration at Olney, Bucks, on the occasion of the Hundredth
Anniversary of the Death of the poet William Cowper, April 25, 1900.
I owe some apology for coming down to Olney to take part in what I
believe is a purely local celebration, in which no other Londoner, as far
as I know, has been asked to take part. I am here not because I profess
any special qualification to speak about Cowper, in the town with
which his name is so pleasantly associated, but because Mr. Mackay,
{31} the son-in-law of your Vicar, has written a book about the Brontes,
and I have done likewise, and he asked me to come. This common
interest has little, you will say, to do with the Poet of Olney. Between
Cowper and Charlotte Bronte there were, however, not a few points of
likeness or at least of contrast. Both were the children of country
clergymen; both lived lives of singular and, indeed, unusual
strenuousness; both were the very epitome of a strong Protestantism;
and yet both--such is the inevitable toleration of genius--were drawn in
an unusual manner to attachment to friends of the Roman Catholic
Church--Cowper to Lady Throckmorton, who copied out some of his
translations from Homer for him, assisted by her father-confessor, Dr.
Gregson, and Miss Bronte to her Professor, M. Heger, the man in the
whole world whom she most revered. Under circumstances of peculiar
depression both these great Protestant writers went further on occasion
than their Protestant friends would have approved, Cowper to
contemplate--so he assures us in one of his letters--the entering a
French monastery, and Miss Bronte actually to kneel in the
Confessional in a Brussels church. Further, let me remind you that
there were moments in the lives of Charlotte Bronte and her sisters,
when Cowper's poem, The Castaway, was their most soul-stirring
reading. Then, again, Mary Unwin's only daughter became the wife of a
Vicar of Dewsbury, and it was at Dewsbury and to the very next vicar,

that Mr. Bronte, the father of Charlotte, was curate when he first went
into Yorkshire. Finally, let it be recalled that Cowper and Charlotte
Bronte have attracted as much attention by the pathos of their lives as
by anything that they wrote. Thus far, and no further, can a strained
analogy carry us. The most enthusiastic admirers of the Brontes can
only claim for them that they permanently added certain artistic
treasures to our literature. Cowper did incomparably more than this.
His work marked an epoch.
But first let me say how interested we who are strangers naturally feel
in being in Olney. To every lover of literature Olney is made classic
ground by the fact that Cowper spent some twenty years of his life in
it--not always with too genial a contemplation of the place and its
inhabitants. "The genius of Cowper throws a halo of glory over all the
surroundings of Olney and Weston," says Dean Burgon. But Olney has
claims apart from Cowper. John Newton {34} presents himself to me
as an impressive personality. There was a time, indeed, of youthful
impetuosity when I positively hated him, for Southey, whose biography
I read very early in life, certainly endeavours to assist the view that
Newton was largely responsible for the poet's periodical attacks of
insanity.
But a careful survey of the facts modifies any such impression. Newton
was narrow at times, he was over-concerned as to the letter, often
ignoring the spirit of true piety, but the student of the two volumes of
his Life and Correspondence that we owe to Josiah Bull, will be
compelled to look at "the old African blasphemer" as he called himself,
with much of sympathy. That he had a note of tolerance, with which he
is not usually credited, we learn from one of his letters, where he says:
I am willing to be a debtor to the wise and to the unwise, to doctors and
shoemakers, if I can get a hint from any one without respect of parties.
When a house is on fire Churchmen and Dissenters, Methodists and
Papists, Moravians and