wever, so characteristic of the two countries, is
reflected by the national representatives. Nobody could be less of a
revolutionist than Cowper. His whiggism was little more than a
tradition. Though he felt bound to denounce kings, to talk about Hampden
and Sidney, and to sympathise with Mrs. Macaulay's old-fashioned
republicanism, there was not a more loyal subject of George III., or one
more disposed, when he could turn his mind from his pet hares to the
concerns of the empire, to lament the revolt of the American colonies.
The awakening of England from the pleasant slumbers of the eighteenth
century--for it seems pleasant in these more restless times--took place
in a curiously sporadic and heterogeneous fashion. In France the
spiritual and temporal were so intricately welded together, the
interests of the State were so deeply involved in maintaining the faith
of the Church, that conservatism and orthodoxy naturally went together.
Philosophers rejected with equal fervour the established religious and
the political creed. The new volume of passionate feeling, no longer
satisfied with the ancient barriers, poured itself in both cases into
the revolutionary channel. In England no such plain and simple issue
existed. We had our usual system of compromises in practice, and hybrid
combinations of theory. There were infidel conservatives and radical
believers. The man who more than any other influenced English history
during that century was John Wesley. Wesley was to the full as deeply
impressed as Rousseau with the moral and social evils of the time. We
may doubt whether Cowper's denunciations of luxury owed most to
Rousseau's sentimental eloquence or to the matter-of-fact vigour of
Wesley's 'Appeals.' Cowper's portrait of Whitefield--'Leuconomus,' as he
calls him, to evade the sneers of the cultivated--and his frequent
references to the despised sect of Methodists reveal the immediate
source of much of his indignation. So far as those evils were caused by
the intellectual and moral conditions common to Europe at large, Wesley
and Rousseau might be called allies. Both of them gave satisfaction to
the need for a free play of unsatisfied emotions. Their solutions of the
problem were of course radically different; and Cowper only speaks the
familiar language of his sect when he taunts the philosopher with his
incapacity to free man from his bondage:

Spend all the powers
Of rant and rhapsody in virtue's