nius and peculiar habits
of mind prompted him to treat of. The Task has fewer blemishes than the
Seasons; but it has not the same capital excellence, the "unbought
grace" of poetry, the power of moving and infusing the warmth of the
author's mind into that of the reader. If Cowper had a more polished
taste, Thomson had, beyond comparison, a more fertile genius, more
impulsive force, a more entire forgetfulness of himself in his subject.
If in Thomson you are sometimes offended with the slovenliness of the
author by profession, determined to get through his task at all events;
in Cowper you are no less dissatisfied with the finicalness of the
private gentleman, who does not care whether he completes his work or
not; and in whatever he does, is evidently more solicitous to please
himself than the public. There is an effeminacy about him, which shrinks
from and repels common and hearty sympathy. With all his boasted
simplicity and love of the country, he seldom launches out into general
descriptions of nature: he looks at her over his clipped hedges, and
from his well-swept garden-walks; or if he makes a bolder experiment now
and then, it is with an air of precaution, as if he were afraid of being
caught in a shower of rain, or of not being able, in case of any
untoward accident, to make good his retreat home. He shakes hands with
nature with a pair of fashionable gloves on, and leads "his Vashti"
forth to public view with a look of consciousness and attention to
etiquette, as a fine gentleman hands a lady out to dance a minuet. He is
delicate to fastidiousness, and glad to get back, after a romantic
adventure with crazy Kate, a party of gypsies or a little child on a
common, to the drawing room and the ladies again, to the sofa and the
tea-kettle--No, I beg his pardon, not to the singing, well-scoured
tea-kettle, but to the polished and loud-hissing urn. His walks and
arbours are kept clear of worms and snails, with as much an appearance
of _petit-maitreship_ as of humanity. He has some of the sickly
sensibility and pampered refinements of Pope; but then Pope prided
himself in them: whereas, Cowper affects to be all simplicity and
plainness. He had neither Thomson's love of the unadorned beauties of
nature, nor Pope's exquisite sense of the elegances of art. He was, in
fact, a nervous man, afraid of trusting himself to the seductions of the
one, and ashamed of putting forward his pretensions to an intimacy with
t