to have recourse to the rock which can never be shakenwhen this is our lot, we receive great and undeserved mercy 52"

To Mrs. Cowper he says, "this aweful dispensation has left an impression upon our spirits, which will not presently be worn off... May it be a lesson to us to watch, since we know not the day, nor the hour, when the Lord cometh. The effect of it upon my circumstances will only be a change of the place of my abode. For I shall still, by God's leave, continue with Mrs. Unwin, whose behaviour to me has always been that of a mother to a son. We know not yet where we shall settle; but we trust that the Lord, whom we seek, will go before us, and prepare a rest for us. We have employed our friend Haweis, Dr. Conyers of Helmsley, in Yorkshire, and Mr. Newton of Olney, to look out a place for us; but at present are entirely ignorant under which of the three we shall settle, or whether under either. I have written to my aunt Madan, to desire Martin to assist us with his inquiries."

CHAPTER VII.

COWPER'S REMOVAL TO OLNEY. HIS BROTHER'S DEATH. ALEXANDER KNOX, in his admirable letter on Divine Providence1, when he observes how extremely difficult it is to find genuine specimens of special superintendence, mentions Cowper as one of the extraordinary instances in which it is almost impossible for those who are capable of discerning moral qualities, and appreciating moral effects, not to recognise the marks of providential designation: "I grant," he says, "there was (in his case) something awefully obscure; but through that obscurity, such rays of providential light dart forth, as to make the special designation not less clear than the singular sufferings were mysterious." As another example he instances Mr. Newton, one of the three clergymen of whom Cowper and Mrs. Unwin thought so highly, that they were willing to settle under the ministry of either, and seemed to have no other choice in settling than that they might be under one of them, or some minister of the same description.

Mr. Newton's life is too remarkable in all its circumstances to be treated episodically and epitomized in this place. Suffice it here to say, that he had been captain of a Liverpool 52 To Mr. Hill, July 16. 1 Remains, vol. ii. 263-264.

slave ship; and that after much suffering, and many deliverances, which might well be deemed providential, wakening to a sense of God's mercy, had taken orders in the established church, and was then curate of Olney. They knew him only by report at the time of Mr. Unwin's death. About six

months before that dreadful event, Dr. Conyers had been taking his degree in divinity at Cambridge, and there became acquainted with the younger Unwin: what he heard from him of his mother's religious character, induced him to mention her to Mr. Newton, and request that when he should be passing through Huntingdon he would take the opportunity of making her a visit. "That visit, so important in its consequences to the destiny of Cowper, happened to take place within a few days after the calamitous death of Mr. Unwin." It was indeed a comfort to meet with such an adviser at such a time. He proposed that they should fix their abode at Olney, and offered to look out a house for them, and assist in their removal. Accordingly he engaged one so near the vicarage in which he lived, that by opening a doorway in the garden wall, they could communicate without going into the street. It was necessary that they should remove at Michaelmas, and as the house was not ready for their reception, Mr. Newton seems to have received them as his guests.

"I have no map to consult at present," says Cowper in his first letter from Olney, to his friend Sephus, "but by what remembrance I have of this place in the last I saw, it lies at the northernmost point of the county. We are just five miles beyond Newport Pagnell. I am willing to suspect that you make this enquiry with a view to an interview, when time shall serve. We may possibly be settled in our own house in about a month, where so good a friend of mine will be extremely welcome to Mrs. Unwin. We shall have a bed, and a warm fireside at your service, if you can come before next summer; and if not, a parlour that looks the north wind full in the face, where you may be as cool as in the groves of Valombrosa"."

The part of the country in which Cowper had now set up his rest, is called by Hayley pleasing and picturesque. In comparison with Huntingdon it is so; not with the north of England, not with the west, not with the Severn counties. But there are few countries which a man disposed to seek for plea2 Hayley. 3 Oct. 10, 1767.

sure in rural objects may not find pleasing, few which an artist will not render picturesque; and Cowper has made Olney and its neighbourhood poetical ground. The town, which is the most northerly in Buckinghamshire, consisted of one long street, the houses built of stone, but the far greater number thatched; the church large, and remarkable for its lofty spire.

Lace making was the business of the place, a sedentary and unwholesome employment; and a great proportion of the inhabitants were miserably poor. Lace-making and strawplatting, indeed, used to employ so many women, and so many children of all ages in this county, that the farmers even found it difficult to obtain hands for their ordinary work".

At Olney the Ouse changes its character, and its course becomes so winding that the distance from that place to St. Neot's, which is about twenty miles by land, is about seventy by the stream. This has not escaped Drayton in his description of this "far wandering" river, which he invokes Invention exactly to set down."

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Ouse having Oulney past, as she were waxed mad,
From her first stayder course immediately doth gad,
And in meandered gyres doth whirl herself about,

That, this way, here and there, back, forward, in and out;
And like a wanton girl, oft doubling in her gait,

In labyrinth like turns and twinings intricate,
Through those rich fields doth run.

But it was not for any attractions of the surrounding country, 4 Mr. Lysons observes, in his Magna Britannia, that "persons travelling through the counties where this manufacture prevails, have been struck with the sickly appearance of the women and children employed in it."

5 "When the Earl of Bridgewater came first to his estate at Ashridge (in this county) he found the boys unacquainted with any kind of husbandry, and unwilling to attend to any other employment but that which their mothers and sisters had taught them, viz. the platting of straw and making of lace. His lordship's first attention therefore was to root out this effeminacy, and instil into them manly principles, and make them serviceable in employments in the field." This he effected," and instead of seeing great lads, seventeen or eighteen years of age, sitting by their mother's side platting straw, or weaving lace, you saw at Ashridge many much younger occupied in the park, in the different employment of the seasons of the year; and much interest was made by boys to get into those employments."-St. John Priest's View of the Agriculture of Buckinghamshire, p. 319.

This Report noticed as a good custom which prevailed at Olney, and at no other place, that "farmers plough waste lands for the poor to plant potatoes, find half the seed, and take half the crop." P. 346.