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"Your sentiments with respect to me," said Cowper, exactly Mrs. Unwin's. She, like you, is perfectly sure of my deliverance, and often tells me so. I make but one answer, and sometimes none at all. That answer gives her no pleasure, and would give you as little; therefore, at this time, I suppress it. It is better, on every account, that they who interest themselves so deeply in that event, should believe the certainty of it, than that they should not. It is a comfort to them at least, if it is none to me; and as I could not if I would, so neither would I if I could deprive them of it1." Gloomy as this language is, a blacker melancholy sometimes was manifested in his letters,.. as when he said to Mr. Newton. "I would no more than you, wish to live such a life over again, but for one reason:-he that is carried to execution, though through the roughest road, when he arrives at the destined spot, would be glad, notwithstanding the many jolts he met with, to repeat his journey?" Again, "I do not at all doubt the truth of what you say, when you complain of that crowd of trifling thoughts that pesters you without ceasing; but then you always have a serious thought standing at the door of your imagination, like a justice of peace with the riot act in his hand, ready to read it and disperse the mob. Here lies the difference between you and me. My thoughts are clad in a sober livery, for the most part as grave as that of a bishop's servants; they turn, too, upon spiritual subjects; but the tallest fellow, and the loudest amongst them all, is he who is continually crying with a loud voice, Actum est de te; periisti! You wish for more attention, I for less. Dissipation itself would be welcome to me, so it were not a vicious one; but however earnestly invited, it is coy, and keeps at a distance3."

To reason with Cowper upon his own state of mind, perfectly reasonable as he was upon all other subjects, was too evidently hopeless. Mr. Newton thought it might be of some avail if he could induce him to contemplate something resembling it in another person; and with this view he called his attention to the remarkable case of Simon Browne. This person, who was born about the year 1680, at Shepton Mallet in Somersetshire, and in 1716 had been chosen minister of the Dissenters' Meeting in the Old Jewry ("one of the most 1 Dec. 21, 1780. 2 Feb. 18, 1781. 3 Aug, 21, 1781.

respectable among the Dissenters"), lost, in the year 1723, his wife and only son, and fell into a deep melancholy, which ended in a settled persuasion that "he had fallen under the sensible displeasure of God, who had caused his rational soul gradually to perish, and left him only an animal life, in common with brutes; so that, though he retained the faculty of speaking in a manner that appeared rational to others, he had all the while no more notion of what he said than a parrot,being utterly divested of consciousness. It was therefore," he said, "profane for him to pray, and incongruous to be present at the prayers of others." Resigning his ministry under this delusion, he retired to his native place, and there amused himself with translating portions of the Greek and Latin poets into English verse, and writing little pieces for the use of children. Then he undertook to compile a dictionary, which, he observed, was doing nothing that required a reasonable soul: but towards the close of his life, he engaged earnestly in theological subjects, and published "A sober and charitable Disquisition concerning the Importance of the Trinity;" "A fit Rebuke to a ludicrous Infidel, in Reply to one of Woolston's Discourses," and "A Defence of the Religion of Nature and of the Christian Revelation, in answer to Tindal's Christianity as old as the Creation." All these are said to be "well reasoned and clearly written pieces," and the latter" was allowed to be the best which that controversy produced." He had prepared a Dedication for this to Queen Caroline, as of all extraordinary things which had been tendered to her royal hands, the chief; not in itself, "but on account of the author, who, said he, is the first being of the kind, and yet without a name. He was once a man, and of some little name, but of no worth, as his present unparalleled case makes but too manifest; for by the immediate hand of an avenging God, his very thinking substance has for more than seven years been continually wasting away, till it is wholly perished out of him, if it be not utterly gone to nothing. None, no not the least remembrance of its very ruins remains; not the shadow of an idea is left; nor any sense that so much as any one single one, perfect or imperfect, whole or diminished, ever did appear to a mind within him, or was perceived by it.

"Such a present," he continued, "from such a thing, however worthless in itself, may not be wholly unacceptable to

your majesty, the author being such as history cannot parallel. And if the fact (which is real, and no fiction, nor wrong conceit) obtain credit, it must be recorded as the most memorable and, indeed, astonishing event in the reign of George II. that a tract composed by such a thing was presented to the illustrious Caroline,—his royal consort needs not be added; fame, if I am not misinformed, will tell that with pleasure to all succeeding times. Such a case will certainly strike your majesty with astonishment, and may raise that commiseration in your royal breast, which he has in vain endeavoured to excite in those of his friends, who, by the most unreasonable and ill founded conceit in the world, have imagined, that a thinking being could, for seven years together, live a stranger to its own powers, exercises, operations, and state; and to what the great God has been doing in it, and to it."

pos

The object of the Dedication was to request the queen's prayers in her " most retired address to the King of kings, that the reign of her beloved consort might be renowned to all terity by the recovery of a soul in the utmost ruin, and restoration of one utterly lost at present amongst men ;" and to express a hope that her majesty would recommend his case to the piety and prayers of all the truly devout who had the honour to be known to her : " 'many such," he says, "doubtless there are, though courts are not usually the places where the devout resort, or where devotion reigns. And it is not improbable that multitudes of the pious throughout the land may take a case to heart, that under your majesty's patronage comes thus recommended. Could such a favour as his restoration be obtained from Heaven by the prayers of your majesty, with what a transport of gratitude would the recovered being throw himself at your majesty's feet, and, adoring the divine power and grace, profess himself, madam, your majesty's most obliged and dutiful servant."

His friends found means to suppress this extraordinary epistle, "wisely considering," says Hawkesworth, "that a book to which it should be prefixed would certainly be condemned without examination; for who would have required stronger evidence of its inutility than that the author appeared by his dedication to be mad?" A copy however was made, and was transmitted more than twenty years afterwards to Dr. Hawkes

worth for insertion in the Adventurer 4, "as a literary curiosity, which was in danger of being lost for want of a repository wherein it might be preserved." "Of all the recorded delusions," says Dr. Aikin, "to which the human mind is subjected, none perhaps is more remarkable than this, which apparently could not be put into a form of words for description without demonstratively proving its fallacy." Mr. Newton seems to have hoped that Cowper could not fail to perceive this, and that in detecting a plain delusion in a case which in some respects strikingly resembled his own, he might be led to suspect himself of being in like manner self-deluded. Any such hope was destroyed by Cowper's reply.

TO THE REV. JOHN NEWTON.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

March 14, 1782.

I was not unacquainted with Mr. Browne's extraordinary case, before you favoured me with his letter and his intended dedication to the queen, though I am obliged to you for a sight of those two curiosities, which I do not recollect to have ever seen till you sent them. I could, however, were it not a subject that would make us all melancholy, point out to you some essential differences between his state of mind and my own, which would prove mine to be by far the most deplorable of the two. I suppose no man would despair, if he did not apprehend something singular in the circumstances of his own story, something that discriminates it from that of every other man, and that induces despair as an inevitable consequence. You may encounter his unhappy persuasion with as many instances as you please, of persons who, like him, having renounced all hope, were yet restored; and may thence infer that he, like them, shall meet with a season of restoration; but it is in vain. Every such individual accounts himself an exception to all rules, and therefore the blessed reverse, that others have experienced, affords no ground of comfortable expectation to him. But you will say, it is reasonable to conclude that as all your predecessors in this vale of misery and horror have found themselves delightfully disappointed at last, so will you :—I grant the reasonableness of it; it would be sinful, perhaps, because uncharitable, to reason otherwise; but an argument, hypothetical in its nature, however rationally conducted, may lead to a

4 No. 88.

false conclusion; and in this instance, so will yours. But I forbear. For the cause above mentioned, I will say no more, though it is a subject on which I could write more than the mail would carry. I must deal with you as I deal with poor Mrs. Unwin, in all our disputes about it, cutting all controversy short by an appeal to the event. W. C.

6

Simon Browne died under this delusion, soon after his dedication was written, in the fifty-second year of his age, in consequence of diseases brought upon him by his sedentary life, and deranged spirits. The case resembled Cowper's, in his refusing to join in any act of worship public or private, in his feeling at first strong temptations to suicide, and afterwards becoming calm and composed, "even cheerful when not thinking of his own condition," and in his retaining his intellectual faculties in full vigour. There was this difference, that Browne, while he fancied himself deprived of all mental power, engaged willingly in work which required close reasoning; and of this, Cowper was afraid. "I cannot," said he, "bear much thinking. The meshes of that fine net-work, the brain, are composed of such mere spinners' threads in me, that when a long thought finds its way into them, it buzzes, and twangs, and bustles about at such a rate as seems to threaten the whole

contexture "." A certain degree of occupation he found agreeable and salutary; but he understood his own condition well enough to avoid any thing which required laborious thought, or would produce in himself any strong and painful emotion. To Mr. Newton, (the correspondent to whom he wrote most gravely,) he says, "I can compare this mind of mine to nothing that resembles it more than to a board that is under the carpenter's plane, (I mean, while I am writing to you ;) the shavings are my uppermost thoughts; after a few strokes of the tool it acquires a new surface; this again, upon a repetition of his task, he takes off, and a new surface still succeeds. Whether the shavings of the present day will be worth your ac

5 1732. "Being once importuned to say grace at the table of a friend, he excused himself many times; but the request being still repeated, and the company kept standing, he discovered evident tokens of distress; and after some irresolute gestures and hesitation, expressed with great fervour this ejaculation: Most merciful and Almighty God, let thy Spirit which moved upon the face of the waters when there was no light descend upon me; that from this darkness there may rise up a man to praise Thee!'"-Adventurer, No. 88. To Mr. Newton, July 12, 1780.