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 are flashes of epigrammatic smartness.

  How shall I speak thee, or thy power address,
  Thou God of our idolatry, the press? 
  By thee, religion, liberty, and laws
  Exert their influence, and advance their cause;
  By thee, worse plagues than Pharaoh’s land befel,
  Diffused, make earth the vestibule of hell: 
  Thou fountain, at which drink the good and wise,
  Thou ever-bubbling spring of endless lies,
  Like Eden’s dread probationary tree,
  Knowledge of good and evil is from thee.

Occasionally there are passages of higher merit.  The episode of statesmen in Retirement has been already mentioned.  The lines on the two disciples going to Emmaus in Conversation, though little more than a paraphrase of the Gospel narrative, convey pleasantly the Evangelical idea of the Divine Friend.  Cowper says in one of his letters that he had been intimate with a man of fine taste who had confessed to him that though he could not subscribe to the truth of Christianity itself, he could never read this passage of St. Luke without being deeply affected by it, and feeling that if the stamp of divinity was impressed upon anything in the Scriptures, it was upon that passage.