SOURCE: Hazlitt, William. “On Thomson and Cowper.” In Lectures on the English Poets, pp. 164-200. 1841. Reprint, New York: Russell & Russell, 1968.

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1841, Hazlitt disparages the excessive effeminacy and polish of Cowper's poetry, while praising the merits of elegance, satire, and pathos in his verse.

Cowper … lived at a considerable distance of time after [James] Thomson; and had some advantages over him, particularly in simplicity of style, in a certain precision and minuteness of graphical description, and in a more careful and leisurely choice of such topics only as his genius 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...