A genuine desire to make society better is always present in these poems, and its presence lends them the only interest which they possess except as historical monuments of a religious movement.  Of satirical vigour they have scarcely a semblance.  There are three kinds of satire, corresponding to as many different views of humanity and life, the Stoical, the Cynical, and the Epicurean.  Of Stoical satire, with its strenuous hatred of vice and wrong, the type is Juvenal.  Of Cynical satire, springing from bitter contempt of humanity, the type is Swift’s Gulliver, while its quintessence is embodied in his lines on the Day of Judgment.  Of Epicurean satire, flowing from a contempt of humanity which is not bitter, and lightly playing with the weakness and vanities of mankind, Horace is the classical example.  To the first two kinds, Cowper’s nature was totally alien, and when he attempts anything in either of those lines, the only result is a querulous and censorious acerbity, in which his real feelings had no part, and which on mature reflection offended his own better taste.  In the Horatian kind he might have excelled, as the episode of the Retired Statesman in one of these poems shows.  He might have excelled, that is, if like Horace he had known the world.  But he did not know the world.  He saw the “great Babel” only “through the loopholes of retreat,” and in the columns of his weekly newspaper.  Even during the years, long past, which he spent in the world, his experience had been confined to a small literary circle.  Society was to him an abstraction on which he discoursed like a pulpiteer.  His satiric whip not only has no lash, it is brandished in the air.

No man was ever less qualified for the office of a censor; his judgment is at once disarmed, and a breach in his principles is at once made by the slightest personal influence.  Bishops are bad, they are like the Cretans, evil beasts and slow bellies; but the bishop whose brother Cowper knows 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