by

The waggoner who bears
The pelting brunt of the tempestuous night,
With half-shut eyes and puckered cheeks and teeth
Presented bare against the storm;

and whose coarseness and callousness, as he whips his team, are the
consequences of the hard calling in which he ministers to the recluse's
pleasure and refinement. If town life has its evils, from the city
comes all that makes retirement comfortable and civilized. Retirement
without the city-would have been bookless and have fed on acorns.

Rousseau is conscious of the necessity of some such institution as
slavery, by way of basis for his beautiful life according to nature.
The celestial purity and felicity of St. Pierre's _Paul and Virginia_
are sustained by the labour of two faithful slaves. A weak point of
Cowper's philosophy, taken apart from his own saving activity as a
poet, betrays itself in a somewhat similar way.

Or if the garden with its many cares
All well repaid demand him, he attends
The welcome call, conscious how much the hand
Of lubbard labour, needs his watchful eye,
Oft loitering lazily if not o'er seen;
Or misapplying his unskilful strength
But much performs himself, _no works indeed
That ask robust tough sinews bred to toil,
Servile employ_, but such as may amuse
Not tire, demanding rather skill than force.

We are told in _The Task_ that there is no sin in allowing our own
happiness to be enhanced by contrast with the less happy condition of
others: if we are doing our best to increase the happiness of others,
there is none. Cowper, as we have said before, was doing this to the
utmost of his limited capacity.

Both in the Moral Satires and in _The Task_, there are sweeping
denunciations of amusements which we now justly deem innocent, and
without which or something equivalent to them, the wrinkles on the brow
of care could not be smoothed, nor life preserved from dulness and
moroseness. There is fanaticism in this no doubt: but in justice to
the Methodist as well as to the Puritan, let it be remembered that the
stage, card parties, and even dancing once had in them something from
which even the most liberal morality might recoil.

In his writings generally, but especially in _The Task_, Cowper,
besides being an apostle of virtuous retirement and evangelical piety,
is, by his general tone, an apostle of sensibility. _The Task_, is a
perpetual protest not only against the fashionable vices and the