him.  The newspaper through which he looks out so complacently into the great “Babel,” has been printed in the great Babel itself, and brought by the poor postman, with his “spattered boots, strapped waist, and frozen locks,” to the recluse sitting comfortably by his fireside.  The “fragrant lymph” poured by “the fair” for their companion in his cosy seclusion, has been brought over the sea by the trader, who must encounter the moral dangers of a trader’s life, as well as the perils of the stormy wave.  It is delivered at the door by

    The waggoner who bears
  The pelting brunt of the tempestuous night,
  With half-shut eyes and puckered cheeks and teeth
  Presented bare against the storm;

and whose coarseness and callousness, as he whips his team, are the consequences of the hard calling in which he ministers to the recluse’s pleasure and refinement.  If town life has its evils, from the city comes all that makes retirement comfortable and civilized.  Retirement without the city-would have been bookless and have fed on acorns.

Rousseau is conscious of the necessity of some such institution as slavery, by way of basis for his beautiful life according to nature.  The celestial purity and felicity of St. Pierre’s Paul and Virginia are sustained by the labour of two faithful slaves.  A weak point of Cowper’s philosophy, taken apart from his own saving activity as a poet, betrays itself in a somewhat similar way.

  Or if the garden with its many cares
  All well repaid demand him, he attends
  The welcome call, conscious how much the hand
  Of lubbard labour, needs his watchful eye,
  Oft loitering lazily if not o’er seen;
  Or misapplying his unskilful strength
  But much performs himself, no works indeed
  That ask robust tough sinews bred to toil,
  Servile employ, but such as may amuse
  Not tire, demanding rather skill than force.

We are told in The Task that there is no sin in allowing our own happiness to be enhanced by contrast with the less happy condition of others:  if we are doing our best to increase the happiness of others, there is none.  Cowper, as we have said before, was doing this to the utmost of his limited capacity.

Both in the Moral Satires and in The Task, there are sweeping denunciations of amusements which we now justly deem innocent, and without which or something equivalent to them, the wrinkles on the brow of care could not be smoothed, nor life preserved from dulness and moroseness.  There is fanaticism in this no doubt:  but in justice to the Methodist as well as to the Puritan, let it be remembered that the stage, card parties, and even dancing once had in them something from which even the most liberal morality might recoil.