of bondage, flowed forth the sweetest spiritual songs in the English language. Newton's house is now occupied as a vicarage, as it was formerly. The present young vicar of Olney showed us Newton's study, an attic-room, ornamented with Scripture texts painted in large letters on the walls. I crossed over also to the church. The yard and the church itself appeared neglected. It looked like an earthly rather than a spiritual sheep-fold. Newton's pulpit still stands. With what feelings must he have given out some touching tender words from the "Olney Hymns," with that almost ever-vacant seat before him!

I called upon a very venerable lady of the name o Mason, living near Cowper's house, who remembers to have seen the poet when she was a little girl, and was frequently at his residence. She said "he was a good man, but quite, quite reserved." She showed me a poker which he invented for his friend Sir John Throckmorton. She said very simply, that "if we were good enough to go to heaven we would meet William Cowper there."

I drove over to another well-known home of Cowper, about two miles distant, "Weston Underwood." He removed from Olney to this place on account of its greater healthiness, and to be nearer the Throckmortons. The house called "The Lodge" is a superior house to the one at Olney. It was wreathed over with a luxuriant vine, and seemed to be a comfortable mansion. On account

of the illness of the lady of the house, I did not see the chamber where the poet has left some desponding lines, written in pencil on the inside of the window-shutter, dated July 22d, 1795. I carried away a branch of the yew-tree standing in the garden. A walk in "The Wilderness," near by, brought to mind the poet more vividly than any spot I had seen. It was the most of genuine Nature that he enjoyed. It is a thick luxuriant copse-wood left apparently just as when Cowper was living. At the end of a shadowy walk stands the bust of Homer with the Greek inscription. Here are the monuments to the " pointer," and the spaniel "Fop." An old white decaying acacia in front of the arbor seemed like his own leafless spirit, seared by mental disease, but kept from dying by the invisible stream of a divine faith, so that it now stands transplanted, putting forth leaves and blossoms on the border of the River of Life. Here also is the favorite lime-tree walk, and beyond this, in the depths of the Park, is the famous "Yardley Oak." So thick is the shade in "the Wilderness," and so perfect the quiet, that no words would better fit the place than those of his own simple hymn :

"The calm retreat, the silent shade,
With prayer and praise agree,
And seem by thy sweet bounty made,
For those who follow thee.

"There, if thy spirit touch the soul,
And grace her mean abode,

Oh with what peace, and joy, and love, She communes with her God.

"There, like a nightingale, she pours Her solitary lays,

Nor asks a witness of her song,

Nor thirsts for human praise."

CHAPTER VI.

WESTON UNDERWOOD TO CHELTENHAM.

I MADE (to myself) an unexpected discovery in Weston Underwood, of the house where Dr. Thomas Scott once lived. Taking in Turvey, a little way from Olney, where was Leigh Richmond's home after he left the Isle of Wight, and much of interest, in the history of English faith, is comprised within this circle of ten miles. Newton, Richmond, Cowper, Scott, do you call them the representatives of a type of religion that in some respects was narrow, and is now undergoing changes? But they were the faithful of their daya day in which scholarship in the illustra

tion of divine truth was at a low ebb. Dr. Scott's house stands at the head of the principal street of the village. An intelligent and cultivated family now occupy it. It is not the large thatched-roofed cottage diagonally opposite, which Hugh Miller supposed it was. It is strange that so accurate an observer should have made this mistake. probably from hearing it said that the cottage was formerly the parsonage. But Scott clearly defines the situation of his house in his Autobiography. In a front chamber of this house he wrote his "Com

It arose

mentaries." In the garden stands the same peartree (a wall-tree covering nearly all of one end of the house) to which he refers in his Autobiography. "In fact Mr. H." (his landlord) "took no rent of me but a hamper of pears, annually, from a fine tree in the garden, for which he regularly sent me a receipt." Cowper, in a letter to John Newton, speaks of "Mr. Scott" as an admirable preacher, but one who was apt to spoil his sermons by "scolding" too much. The stone church where Dr. Scott preached is not far from the house, a solid structure containing monuments of the Throckmorton family. This was a Catholic family, and strange to say, in the village where Scott and Cowper lived, most of the inhabitants at this day are Catholics.

That genial though thorough Englishman, “Arthur Helps," has made the remark that temperament is but the atmosphere of character, while its groundwork in nature may be fixed and unchangeable. This remark might explain the difference between the Englishman and the American, looking at both in their broad national traits. It has been pleasant to me to think that deep down under all the changes of history and circumstance, there was a common root to the two nations, and that this still is to be found. The temperament of the American, since his ancestors landed in New England and Virginia, has been affected by a thousand new influences. More oxygen has flowed into his soul as well as his lungs. His nature has been in