We boast some rich ones whom the gospel sways, And one who wears a coronet and prays. Newton was nearly forty when he entered upon his first clerical employment. A few months after his coming to Olney, Cowper and Mrs. Unwin stayed with him at the vicarage for about six weeks, and from that time they were bound together by the ties of a deep affection. Newton recognized with his usual shrewdness how much he was inferior to his friend in intellectual capacity, but he was able to give to the sorely tried poet, in his fits of depression, much comfort and a very patient friendship. When in 1773 one of Cowper’s worst attacks came on, he went to the vicarage and remained there for more than twelve months. It was no light trial to Newton, but he said, ‘I think I can hardly do or suffer too much for such a friend,’ and ‘upon the whole’ he was not weary of his ‘cross.’ It has sometimes, most ungenerously, been charged against Newton that his influence tended to produce, or to aggravate, the religious melancholy of the poet, but Cowper’s malady had been very pronounced long before Newton met him. Richard Cecil, and more recently Canon Overton, have defended Newton against this accusation. Cowper’s morbid depression must have been much more trying to Newton than Newton’s humble, cheerful faith could have been to Cowper. Indeed, his playful poems addressed to John Newton and his wife and to their common friend, ‘the smoke-inhaling Bull’—the Independent minister of Newport Pagnell, whom Cowper calls ‘a man of letters and of genius.... but he smokes tobacco—nothing is perfect’—sufficiently show how genial and even jovial was their friendship. The fable that Nonconformist ministers and Evangelical clergymen are either rank hypocrites or intolerable dullards, though it had, and perhaps still has, the support of many great authorities, is only believed in circles profoundly ignorant of them. Yet Newton must have been greatly indebted, especially as a hymn-writer, to Cowper. His hymns were all written during his residence at Olney, and he had intended that his share in the volume should have been much less than Cowper’s. Indeed, when his friend’s ‘long and affecting indisposition’ occurred, he laid the project aside for some time. In the end the collection appeared with sixty-eight of Cowper’s and two hundred and eighty of Newton’s. Of Cowper’s hymns, some few had been written before he went to Olney, e.g. ‘The Happy Change’ and ‘Retirement.’