Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/137

 NOTES BY THE WAY.

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��The story of John Gilpin is the subject of the following p ro f. DC interesting note by Prof, de Morgan on the 14th of January, Morgan on I860 : _ Jobn Gil P in

" ' In a small volume containing a printed book dated 1587, and various manuscripts chiefly written by a clergyman, Christopher Parkes (Yorkshire), with dates from 1655 to 1664, and in another hand 1701, also on the fly-leaf amongst other directions, showing that the volume was in demand, is written, " To be left att Mr. John Gilpin' s House att the Golden Anchor in Cheapside att y e corner of Bread S: London." This was not written after 1701, and may have been written before that date. 1

" ' Cowper's ballad was first printed in 1782, but without the information that it was founded upon a story told him by Lady Austen, a widow, who heard it when she was a child. Mr. West writes in 1839, that Mr. Colet told him fifty years ago, say about 1789, or seven years after the publication of the ballad, that one Beyer, then in his dotage, and who did not live at the corner of Bread Street, was the true Gilpin. Mr. Colet did not get the true story from Mr. Beyer, which must have differed from the poet's amplified and excusably exaggerated tale. The fact is that Beyer knew nothing about Gilpin till he read Cowper's ballad : he was not a train-band captain. The reason why the true Gilpin was not discovered is because nobody looked for him amongst the earlier records of the city and its trade companies. His name was supposed to be fictitious, because he did not live in Cowper's time, and it was not generally known that Lady Austen had told him an old story.'

" The above has been handed to me by a learned friend, now aged eighty, who tells me that his mother told him the story of John Gilpin, eo nomine, in his childhood, and said she had heard it when a child."

The new " Aldine Cowper," with notes and a memoir by John J he " A ,! dl " t ? Bruce, is reviewed on the 9th of September, 1865. The following Memoir ^y are given as Mr. Brace's views on the subject of Cowper's mental John Bruce. alienation :

" That Cowper was in the first instance driven mad by over-much religion, which at one time was the prevalent belief, we consider to be certainly p. mistake. His madness, it will have been seen, was rather occasioned by want of religion than by excess of it, and the reception of definite views of Christianity, although it did not work his cure, exercised, on his first recovery, a very beneficial effect upon his health both of body and mind."

The work is beautifully printed by Messrs. Whittingham of the Chiswick Press.

��The tradition hi reference to the hymn " God moves in a mysterious way" is discussed hi the numbers for August 18th and 25th, 1866. The Editor, in reply to Cortex and Mr. C. D. Hardcastle, gives the statement made by Mr. Great head, in a sermon preached by him at Olney in May, 1800, " before a congregation, to the great majority of whom Cowper was known, and within a month of the poet's death, that, ' during a solitary walk in the

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��Origin of God moves

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