I knew but little of his distinguished son, only having met him a few times at Dean Stanley’s, and at Baldwin Brown’s. I used sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, to hear Mr. Maurice preach at Lincoln’s Inn, and was much struck with the earnestness with which he repeated the Lord’s Prayer. The difficulty he felt in making himself understood is amusing. Some of the principles, he said, which his friends attacked, were those he strongly objected to himself, and those which they held as against him, were just those on which he rested his own faith and hope. “I could not make them the least understand what I meant,” he went on to say; “and if I did they would only dislike me for it.” It was not obscurity of style, as many thought, which made him unintelligible; but obscurity or confusion of thought arising from complexity of perception. He saw so much that it puzzled him how to express it. I respected him greatly as an honest thinker, more anxious to commend himself to the Searcher of hearts than to his fellow-men.
It must have been, I think, in 1846 or 1847 that I received an invitation to preach the annual sermon on behalf of Newport Pagnell College, and thither I went in the month of June. The Rev. Thos. Palmer Bull, president, and his son, the Rev. Josiah Bull, were living under the same roof, their house and garden full of comfort and convenience, beauty and fragrance. The old gentleman had a good library, and in nooks and corners were MSS. and relics of Cowper and Newton, friends of his father, the Rev. William Bull. The father was the “Taurus,” and his son the “Tommy,” immortalised in Newton and Cowper’s letters. When I had fulfilled my public duty I intensely enjoyed conversation with my elder host, as he showed me letters written, and relics possessed by the two celebrities so closely connected with his father’s name. He told me how he used, when a boy, to accompany his father to Olney, where he dined with the poet; that when grace was said, Cowper would play with his knife and fork, to indicate he had no share in acts of worship; that he would cheerfully converse on a variety of topics, but shunned all reference to religion. Notwithstanding, he would sometimes join in an Olney hymn; and then check himself as one who had neither part nor lot in the matter. He would kindly talk with little Tom, who accompanied his father on those visits, and they, on their way to and from the now world-known town, would join in singing a psalm or hymn, to a familiar tune. The old gentleman, I was informed, sometimes indulged in the use of a pipe, as he drove along the accustomed road. Full of such memories, I made an excursion to Olney, stopped at the house near the park of the Throgmortons, saw the room in which the poet slept, traced his writing on a pane of glass, and thought of the despair to which, in that chamber, he was so pitiable a victim. Then I was taken to the unpretentious abode in the main street of Olney, where he cultivated a close intimacy with John Newton, and kept rabbits in his little garden,—which garden, at the time I think of, remained much in its former state. The summer-house, described by the bard, was still in existence. Here, pausing for a moment to gather up another memento of Cowper, I may mention, that a relative of mine pointed out a house in East Dereham, which was Cowper’s residence; and told me that he remembered when a boy peeping through the keyhole of a door, and seeing him sitting in his chair. Cowper died at the residence of his kinsman, the Rev. Mr. Johnson. A friend of his gave me a leaf, in the poet’s handwriting, from the translation of Homer.