Religion: 18th Century

While London was reveling in the adventures of Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, was enjoying dalliance with Tom Jones, was boasting its two-bottle men, was attending the School for Scandal—while, in short, fashionable England was doing all the things which Queen Victoria soon put a stop to— there blossomed in the Parish of Olney a more godly literature.

John Newton, after 20 years at sea, had taken Holy Orders, had become curate of the parish.

William Cowper*, poet, after a few years of insanity, had come to Olney with a Mrs. Unwin, whose sweet influence calmed his troubled spirit. Curate Newton and Poet Cowper were as David and Jonathan.

Curate Newton acquired facility in hymn-writing, decided to publish. Poet Cowper agreed to help. So, in the glorious year 1779, appeared the Olney Hymns, containing dozens of hymns which English-singing people were destined to sing ever after. Some of them: Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken, How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds, Jesus, Where ‘er Thy People Meet, There is a Fountain Filled with Blood.

Poet Cowper, intermittently insane, lived to translate Homer. Curate Newton was advanced to a better “living.”

Now, Mrs. Fannie Barrett Browning, daughter-in-law of Poet Robert Browning and Poet Elizabeth Barrett, is collecting from all English-singing peoples a fund to place a memorial in the Olney parish church.

So is the union of Religion and Poetry apostrophized by the Catholic Poet Thompson:

“Ah, let the sweet birds of the Lord With earth’s waters make accord: The Muses’ sacred grove be wet With the red dew of Olivet, And Sappho lay her burning brows In white Cecilia’s lap of snows!”

* His most famous work is the story of John Gilpin’s ride:

“John Gilpin at his horse’s side Seized fast the flowing mane, And up he got in haste to ride But soon came down again. . . .

“Now let us sing ‘Long live the King’ And Gilpin, long live he; And when he next doth ride abroad May I be there to see.”