Augustus Toplady

What is one to make of a man described as ‘strangely compounded, peculiarly constituted, and oddly framed’? It conjures up in the mind an image of Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde, or Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Hugo’s Quasimodo. But such is J. C. Ryle’s (1816–1900) description of Augustus Montague Toplady (1740–1778), author of what has been called the best-loved English hymn.

One wonders why someone would bother writing a biography—or reading one—about a strange, peculiar, odd person. Nevertheless, Ryle declared that no account of Christianity in England in the eighteenth century would be complete without featuring remarkable Toplady.