If, however, the number as well as the quality of good hymns available for general use is to be regarded, the authors of the _Olney Hymns_ are entitled to be placed at the head of all the writers of this Calvinistic school. The greater number of the _Olney Hymns_ are, no doubt, homely and didactic; but to the best of them, and they are no inconsiderable proportion, the tenderness of Cowper and the manliness of John Newton (1725-1807) give the interest of contrast, as well as that of sustained reality. If Newton carried to some excess the sound principle laid down by him, that "perspicuity, simplicity and ease should be chiefly attended to, and the imagery and colouring of poetry, if admitted at all, should be indulged very sparingly and with great judgment," if he is often dry and colloquial, he rises at other times into "soul-animating strains," such as "Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion, city of our God"; and sometimes (as in "Approach, my soul, the mercy seat") rivals Cowper himself in depth of feeling. Cowper's hymns in this book are, almost without exception, worthy of his name. Among them are "Hark, my soul, it is the Lord," "There is a fountain filled with blood," "Far from the world, O Lord, I flee," "God moves in a mysterious way" and "Sometimes a light surprises." Some, perhaps, even of these, and others of equal excellence (such as "O for a closer walk with God"), speak the language of a special experience, which, in Cowper's case, was only too real, but which could not, without a degree of unreality not desirable in exercises of public worship, be applied to themselves by all ordinary Christians. 19th-century hymns. R. Grant. Bowdler. During the first quarter of the 19th century there were not many indications of the tendency, which afterwards became manifest, to enlarge the boundaries of British hymnody. _The Remains of Henry Kirke White_, published by Southey in 1807, contained a series of hymns, some of which are still in use; and a few of Bishop Heber's hymns and those of Sir Robert Grant, which, though offending rather too much against John Newton's canon, are well known and popular, appeared between 1811 and 1816, in the _Christian Observer_. In John Bowdler's Remains, published soon after his death in 1815, there are a few more of the same, perhaps too scholarlike, character. But the chief hymn-writers of that period were two clergymen of the Established Church--one in Ireland, Thomas Kelly, and the other in England, William Hurn--who both became Nonconformists, and the Moravian poet, James Montgomery (1771-1854), a native of Scotland. Kelly.