is a blessing to the Church. Deans and Canons are lazy
sinecurists, but there is a bright exception in the case of the Cowper
who held a golden stall at Durham. Grinding India is criminal, but
Warren Hastings is acquitted, because he was with Cowper at
Westminster. Discipline was deplorably relaxed in all colleges except
that of which Cowper's brother was a fellow. Pluralities and
resignation bonds, the grossest abuses of the Church, were perfectly
defensible in the case of any friend or acquaintance of this Church
Reformer. Bitter lines against Popery inserted in _The Task_ were
struck out, because the writer had made the acquaintance of Mr. and
Mrs. Throckmorton, who were Roman Catholics. Smoking was detestable,
except when practised by dear Mr. Bull. Even gambling, the blackest
sin of fashionable society, is not to prevent Fox, the great Whig, from
being a ruler in Israel. Besides, in all his social judgments, Cowper
is at a wrong point of view. He is always deluded by the idol of his
cave. He writes perpetually on the twofold assumption that a life of
retirement is more favourable to virtue than a life of action, and that
"God made the country, while man made the town." Both parts of the
assumption are untrue. A life of action is more favourable to virtue,
as a rule, than a life of retirement, and the development of humanity
is higher and richer, as a rule, in the town than in the country. If
Cowper's retirement was virtuous, it was so because he was actively
employed in the exercise of his highest faculties: had he been a mere
idler, secluded from his kind, his retirement would not have been
virtuous at all. His flight from the world was rendered necessary by
his malady, and respectable by his literary work; but it was a flight
and not a victory. His misconception was fostered and partly produced
by a religion which was essentially ascetic, and which, while it gave
birth to characters of the highest and most energetic beneficence,
represented salvation too little as the reward of effort, too much as
the reward of passive belief and of spiritual emotion.

The most readable of the Moral Satires is _Retirement_, in which the
writer is on his own ground expressing his genuine feelings, and which
is, in fact, a foretaste of _The Task_. _Expostulation_, a warning to
England from the example of the Jews, is the best constructed: the rest
are totally wanting in unity, and even in connexion. In all there ar