Immortal Memories | Page 8

Mystics are all welcome to bring water. At such
times nobody asks, "Pray, friend, whom do you hear?" or "What do you
think of the five points?"
Even my good friend Canon Benham, who has done so much to sustain

the honourable fame of Cowper, and who would have been here to-day
but for a long-standing engagement, is scarcely fair to Newton. {35} It
is not true, as has been suggested, that Cowper always changed his
manner into one of painful sobriety when he wrote to Newton. One of
his most humorous letters--a rhyming epistle--was addressed to that
divine.
I have writ (he says) in a rhyming fit, what will make you dance, and as
you advance, will keep you still, though against your will, dancing
away, alert and gay, till you come to an end of what I have penned;
which you may do ere Madam and you are quite worn out with jigging
about, I take my leave, and here you receive a bow profound, down to
the ground, from your humble me, W. C.
Now, I quote this very familiar passage from the correspondence to
remind you that Cowper could only have written it to a man possessed
of considerable healthy geniality.
At any rate, alike as a divine and as the author of the Olney Hymns,
Newton holds an important place in the history of theology, and Olney
has a right to be proud of him. An even more important place is held by
Thomas Scott, {36} and it seems to me quite a wonderful thing that
Olney should sometimes have held at one and the same moment three
such remarkable men as Cowper, Newton, and Scott.
In my boyhood Scott's name was a household word, and many a time
have I thumbed the volumes of his Commentaries, those Commentaries
which Sir James Stephen declared to be "the greatest theological
performance of our age and country." Of Scott Cardinal Newman in his
Apologia said, it will be remembered, that "to him, humanly speaking, I
almost owe my soul." Even here our literary associations with Olney
and its neighbourhood are not ended, for, it was within five miles of
this town--at Easton Maudit--that Bishop Percy {37} lived and
prepared those Reliques which have inspired a century of ballad
literature. Here the future Bishop of Dromore was visited by Dr.
Johnson and others. What a pity that with only five miles separating
them Cowper and Johnson should never have met! Would Cowper have
reconsidered the wish made when he read Johnson's biography of

Milton in the Lives of the Poets: "Oh! I could thresh his old jacket till I
made his pension jingle in his pocket!"?
But it is with Cowper only that we have here to do, and when we are
talking of Cowper the difficulty is solely one of compression. So much
has been written about him and his work. The Lives of him form of
themselves a most substantial library. He has been made the subject of
what is surely the very worst biography in the language and of one that
is among the very best. The well-meaning Hayley {38a} wrote the one,
in which the word "tenderness" appears at least twice on every page,
and Southey {38b} the other. Not less fortunate has the poet been in his
critics. Walter Bagehot, James Russell Lowell, Mrs. Oliphant, George
Eliot {38c}--these are but a few of the names that occur to me as
having said something wise and to the point concerning the Poet of
Olney.
I somehow feel that it is safer for me to refer to the Poet of Olney than
to speak of William Cowper, because I am not quite sure how you
would wish me to pronounce his name. Cooper, he himself pronounced
it, as his family are in the habit of doing. The present Lord Cowper is
known to all the world as Lord Cooper. The derivation of the name and
the family coat-of-arms justify that pronunciation, and it might be said
that a man was, and is, entitled to settle the question of the
pronunciation of his own name. And yet I plead for what I am quite
willing to allow is the incorrect pronunciation. All pronunciation, even
of the simplest words, is settled finally by a consensus of custom.
Throughout the English-speaking world the name is now constantly
pronounced Cowper, as if that most useful and ornamental animal the
cow had given it its origin. Well-read Scotland is peculiarly unanimous
in the custom, and well-read America follows suit. William Shakspere,
I doubt not, called himself Shaxspere, and we decline to imitate him,
and so probably many of us will with a light heart go on speaking of
William Cowper to the end of the chapter. At any rate Shakspere and
Cowper,