This, it will he admitted, is very moderate and unapocalyptic.  Presently Monarchical Europe takes arms against the Revolution.  But there are two political observers at least who see that Monarchical Europe is making a mistake—­Kaunitz and Cowper.  “The French,” observes Cowper to Lady Hesketh in December, 1792, “are a vain and childish people, and conduct themselves on this grand occasion with a levity and extravagance nearly akin to madness; but it would have been better for Austria and Prussia to let them alone.  All nations have a right to choose their own form of government, and the sovereignty of the people is a doctrine that evinces itself; for whenever the people choose to be masters, they always are so, and none can hinder them.  God grant that we may have no revolution here, but unless we have reform, we certainly shall.  Depend upon it, my dear, the hour has come when power founded on patronage and corrupt majorities must govern this land no longer.  Concessions, too, must he made to Dissenters of every denomination.  They have a right to them—­a right to all the privileges of Englishmen, and sooner or later, by fair means or by foul, they will have them.”  Even in 1793, though he expresses, as he well might, a cordial abhorrence of the doings of the French, he calls them not fiends, but “madcaps.”  He expresses the strongest indignation against the Tory mob which sacked Priestley’s house at Birmingham, as he does, in justice be it said, against all manifestations of fanaticism.  We cannot help sometimes wishing, as we read these passages in the letters, that their calmness and reasonableness could have been communicated to another “Old Whig,” who was setting the world on fire with his anti-revolutionary rhetoric.

It is true, as has already been said, that Cowper was “extramundane,” and that his political reasonableness was in part the result of the fancy that he and his fellow-saints had nothing to do with the world but to keep themselves clear of it, and let it go its own way to destruction.  But it must also be admitted that while the wealth of Establishments, of which Burke was the ardent defender, is necessarily reactionary in the highest degree, the tendency of religion itself, where it is genuine and sincere, must be to repress any selfish feeling about class or position, and to make men, in temporal matters, more willing to sacrifice the present to the future, especially where the hope is held out of moral as well as of material improvement.  Thus it has come to pass that men who professed and imagined themselves to have no interest in this world, have practically been its great reformers and improvers in the political and material as well as in the moral sphere.

The last specimen shall be one in the more sententious style, and one which proves that Cowper was capable of writing in a judicious manner on a difficult and delicate question—­even a question so difficult and so delicate as that of the propriety of painting the face.