Petronius! all the muses weep for thee,
  But every tear shall scald thy memory. 
  The graces too, while virtue at their shrine
  Lay bleeding under that soft hand of thine,
  Felt each a mortal stab in her own breast,
  Abhorr’d the sacrifice, and cursed the priest. 
  Thou polish’d and high-finish’d foe to truth,
  Gray-beard corruptor of our listening youth,
  To purge and skim away the filth of vice,
  That so refined it might the more entice,
  Then pour it on the morals of thy son
  To taint his heart, was worthy of thine own.

This is about the nearest approach to Juvenal that the Evangelical satirist ever makes.  In Hope there is a vehement vindication of the memory of Whitefield.  It is rather remarkable that there is no mention of Wesley.  But Cowper belonged to the Evangelical rather than to the Methodist section.  It may be doubted whether the living Whitefield would have been much to his taste.

In the versification of the moral satires there are frequent faults, especially in the earlier poems of the series, though Cowper’s power of writing musical verse is attested both by the occasional poems and by The Task.

With the Moral Satires may be coupled, though written later, Tirocinium, or a Review of Schools.  Here Cowper has the advantage of treating a subject which he understood, about which he felt strongly, and desired for a practical purpose to stir the feelings of his readers.  He set to work in bitter earnest.  “There is a sting,” he says, “in verse that prose neither has nor can have; and I do not know that schools in the gross, and especially public schools, have ever been so pointedly condemned before.  But they are become a nuisance, a pest, an abomination, and it is fit that the eyes and noses of mankind should be opened if possible to perceive it.”  His descriptions of the miseries which children in his day endured, and, in spite of all our improvements, must still to some extent endure in boarding schools, and of the effects of the system in estranging boys from their parents and deadening home affections, are vivid and true.  Of course the Public School system was not to be overturned by rhyming, but the author of Tirocinium awakened attention to its faults, and probably did something towards amending them.  The best lines, perhaps, have been already quoted in connexion with the history of the writer’s boyhood.  There are, however, other telling passages such as that on the indiscriminate use of emulation as a stimulus:—­

  Our public hives of puerile resort
  That are of chief and most approved report,
  To such base hopes in many a sordid soul
  Owe their repute in part, but not the whole. 
  A principle, whose proud pretensions pass
  Unquestion’d, though the jewel be but glass,
  That with a world not often over-nice
  Ranks as a virtue, and is yet a vice,