with a pair of Puritans for
her only society, seems to show that one of the Puritans at least must
have possessed great powers of attraction. Better quarters were found
for her in the Vicarage; and the private way between the gardens, which
apparently had been closed since Newton's departure, was opened again.

Lady Austen's presence evidently wrought on Cowper like an elixir:
"From a scene of the most uninterrupted retirement," he writes to Mrs.
Unwin, "we have passed at once into a state of constant engagement.
Not that our society is much multiplied; the addition of an individual
has made all this difference. Lady Austen and we pass our days
alternately at each other's Chateau. In the morning I walk with one or
other of the ladies, and in the evening wind thread. Thus did
Hercules, and thus probably did Samson, and thus do I; and were both
those heroes living, I should not fear to challenge them to a trial of
skill in that business, or doubt to beat them both." It was perhaps
while he was winding thread that Lady Austen told him the story of John
Gilpin. He lay awake at night laughing over it, and next morning
produced the ballad. It soon became famous, and was recited by
Henderson, a popular actor, on the stage, though, as its gentility was
doubtful, its author withheld his name. He afterwards fancied that
this wonderful piece of humour had been written in a mood of the
deepest depression. Probably he had written it in an interval of high
spirits between two such moods. Moreover he sometimes exaggerated his
own misery. He will begin a letter with a _de profundis_, and towards
the end forget his sorrows, glide into commonplace topics, and write
about them in the ordinary strain. Lady Austen inspired _John Gilpin_.
She inspired, it seems, the lines on the loss of the Royal George. She
did more: she invited Cowper to try his hand at something considerable
in blank verse. When he asked her for a subject, she was happier in
her choice than the lady who had suggested the _Progress of Error_.
8he bade him take the sofa on which she was reclining, and which, sofas
being then uncommon, was a more striking and suggestive object than it
would be now. The right chord was struck; the subject was accepted;
and _The Sofa_ grew into _The Task_; the title of the song reminding us
that it was "commanded by the fair." As _Paradise Lost_ is to militant
Puritanism, so is _The Task_ to the religious movement of its author'