were he not presented to us as a man of
many weaknesses and faults akin to our own, not a saint by any means, and
therefore not so far removed from us as some more ethereal characters of
whom we may read. Johnson striving to methodize his life, to fight
against sloth and all the minor vices to which he was prone, is the
Johnson whom some of us prefer to keep ever in mind. "Here was," I quote
Carlyle, "a strong and noble man, one of our great English souls." I
love him best in his book called _Prayers and Meditations_, where we know
him as we know scarcely any other Englishman, for the good, upright
fighter in this by no means easy battle of life. It is as such a fighter
that we think of him to-night. Reading the account of _his_ battles may
help us to fight ours.

Gentlemen, I give you the toast of the evening. Let us drink in solemn
silence, upstanding, "The Immortal Memory of Dr. Samuel Johnson."

II. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF WILLIAM COWPER

An address entitled 'The Sanity of Cowper,' delivered at the Centenary
Celebration at Olney, Bucks, on the occasion of the Hundredth Anniversary
of the Death of the poet William Cowper, April 25, 1900.

I owe some apology for coming down to Olney to take part in what I
believe is a purely local celebration, in which no other Londoner, as far
as I know, has been asked to take part. I am here not because I profess
any special qualification to speak about Cowper, in the town with which
his name is so pleasantly associated, but because Mr. Mackay, {31} the
son-in-law of your Vicar, has written a book about the Brontes, and I
have done likewise, and he asked me to come. This common interest has
little, you will say, to do with the Poet of Olney. Between Cowper and
Charlotte Bronte there were, however, not a few points of likeness or at
least of contrast. Both were the children of country clergymen; both
lived lives of singular and, indeed, unusual strenuousness; both were the
very epitome of a strong Protestantism; and yet both--such is the
inevitable toleration of genius--were drawn in an unusual manner to
attachment to friends of the Roman Catholic Church--Cowper to Lady
Throckmorton, who copied out some of his translations from Homer for him,
assisted by her father-confessor, Dr. Gregson, and Miss Bronte to her
Professor, M. Heger, the man in the whole world whom she most revered.
Under circumstances of peculiar depression both these great Protestant
writers w