Wolverton. There was the same display of glancing lights in the windows, and the same wild hubbub of sound. On I went. A decent mechanic, with a white apron before him, whom I found in the street, assured me there was no chance of getting a bed in Newport Pagnell, but that I might possibly get one at Skirvington, a village on the Olney road, about three miles further on. And so, leaving Newport Pagnell behind me, I set out for Skirvington. It was now wearing late, and I met no more travellers: the little bit of a moon had been down the hill for more than an hour, the fog rime had thickened, and the trees by the wayside loomed through the clouds like giants in dominos. In passing through Skirvington, I had to stoop down and look between me and the sky for sign posts. There were no lights in houses, save here and there in an upper casement; and all was quiet as in a churchyard. By dint of sky-gazing, I discovered an inn, and rapped hard at the door. It was opened by the landlord sans coat and waiscoat. There was no bed to be had there, he said; the beds were all occupied by travellers who could get no accommodation in Newport Pagnell; but there was another inn in the place further on, though it wasn't unlikely, as it didn't much business, the family had gone to bed. This was small comfort. I had, however, made up my mind that if I failed in finding entertainment at inn the second, I should address myself to hay-rick the first; but better fortune awaited me. I sighted my way to the other sign-post of the village : the lights within had gone up stairs to the attics; but as I tapped and tapped, one of them came trippingly down; it stood pondering behind the door for half a second, as if in deliberation, and then bolt and bar were withdrawn, and a very pretty young Englishwoman stood in the door-way. "Could I get accommodation there for a night-supper and bed?" There was a hesitating glance at my person, followed by a very welcome "yes;" and thus closed the adventures of the evening.

On the following morning I walked on to Olney. It was with some little degree of solicitude that, in a quiet corner by the way, remote from cottages, I tried my pistols to ascertain what sort of a defence I would have made had the worst come to the worst in the encounter of the previous evening. Pop, pop!they went off beautifully, and sent their bullets through an inch board; and so in all probability I should have succeeded in astonishing the "fancy-men.”

CHAPTER XV.

Cowper; his singular magnanimity of character; argument furnished by his latter religious history against the selfish philosophy-Valley of the Ouse-Approach to Olney-Appearance of the town-Cowper's house; parlour; garden-Pippin tree planted by the poet-Summer-house written within and without-John TawellDelightful old woman-Weston-Underwood-Thomas Scott's house-The park of the Throckmortons-Walk described in "The Task"-Wilderness-Ancient AvenueAlcove; prospect which it commands, as drawn by Cowper-Colonnade-Rustic Bridge-Scene of the "Needless Alarm"-The milk thistle.

OLNEY! Weston-Underwood! Yardley-Chase! the banks of the Ouse, and the park of the Throckmortons ! Classic ground once more-the home and much-loved haunts of a sweet and gentle, yet sublimely heroic nature, that had to struggle on in great unhappiness with the most terrible of all enemies-the obstinate unreasoning despair of a broken mind. Poor Cowper! There are few things more affecting in the history of the species than the heaven-inspired magnanimity of this man. Believing himself doomed to perish everlastingly-for such was the leading delusion of his unhappy malady-he yet made it the grand aim of his enduring labours to show forth the mercy and goodness of a God who, he believed, had no mercy for him, and to indicate to others the true way of salvation-deeming it all the while a way closed against himself. Such, surely, is not the character or disposition of the men destined to perish. We are told by his biographers, that the well-known hymn, in which he celebrates the "mysterious way" in which "God works" to "perform his wonders," was written at the close of the happy period which intervened between the first and second attacks of his cruel malady; and that what suggested its com

position were the too truly interpreted indications of a relapse. His mind had been wholly restored to him; he had been singularly happy in his religion; and he had striven earnestly, as in the case of his dying brother, to bring others under its influence. And now, too surely feeling that his intellect was again on the eve of being darkened, he deemed the providence a frowning one, but believed in faith that there was a smiling face" behind it. In his second recovery, though his intellectual stature was found to have greatly increased—as in some racking maladies the person of the patient becomes taller-he never enjoyed his whole mind. There was a missing faculty, if faculty I may term it: his well-grounded hope of salvation never returned. It were presumptuous to attempt interpreting the real scope and object of the afflictive dispensation which Cowper could contemplate with such awe; and yet there does seem a key to it. There is surely a wondrous sublimity in the lesson which it reads. The assertors of the selfish theory have dared to regard Christianity itself, in its relation to the human mind, as but one of the higher modifications of the self-aggrandizing sentiment. May we not venture to refer them to the griefworn hero of Olney-the sweet poet who first poured the stream of Divine truth into the channels of our literature, after they had been shut against it for more than a hundred yearsand ask them whether it be in the power of sophistry to square his motives with the ignoble conclusions of their philosophy?

Olney stands upon the Oolite, on the northern side of the valley of the Ouse, and I approached it this morning from the south, across the valley. Let the reader imagine a long green ribbon of flat meadow, laid down in the middle of the landscape like a web on a bleaching green, only not quite so straightly drawn out. It is a ribbon about half a mile in breadth, and it stretches away lengthwise above and below, far as the eye can reach. There rises over it on each side a gentle line of acclivity, that here advances upon it in flat promontories, there re

cedes into shallow bays, and very much resembles the line of a low-lying but exceedingly rich coast; for on both sides, field and wood, cottage and hedge-row, lie thick as the variously tinted worsteds in a piece of German needlework; the flat ribbon in the midst is bare and open, and through it there winds, from side to side, in many a convolution, as its appropriate pattern, a blue sluggish stream, deeply fringed on both banks by an edging of tall bulrushes. The pleasantly grouped village directly opposite, with the long narrow bridge in front, and the old handsome church and tall spire rising in the midst, is Olney; and that other village on the same side, about two miles further up the stream, with the exceedingly lofty trees rising over ittrees so lofty that they overhang the square tower of its church, as a churchyard cypress overhangs a sepulchral monument-is Weston-Underwood. In the one village Cowper produced "The Task;" in the other he translated "Homer."

I crossed the bridge, destined, like the "Brigs of Ayr" and the "Bridge of Sighs," long to outlive its stone-and-lime existence; passed the church-John Newton's; saw John Newton's house, a snug building, much garnished with greenery ; and then entered Olney proper-the village that was Olney a hundred years ago. Unlike most of the villages of central England, it is built, not of brick, but chiefly at least of a calcareous yellow stone from the Oolite, which, as it gathers scarce any lichen or moss, looks clean and fresh after the lapse of centuries; and it is not until the eye catches the dates on the peaked gable points, 1682, 1611, 1590, that one can regard the place as no hastily run up town of yesterday, but as a place that had a living in other times. The main street, which is also the Bedford road, broadens towards the middle of the village into a roomy angle, in shape not very unlike the capacious pocket of a Scotch housewife of the old school; one large elm-tree rises in the centre; and just opposite the elm, among the houses which skirt the base of the angle-i.e., the bottom of the pocket