his thoughts more and more frequently to writing as a means of forgetting himself.  “The necessity of amusement,” he wrote to Mrs. Unwin’s clergyman son, “makes me sometimes write verses; it made me a carpenter, a birdcage maker, a gardener; and has lately taught me to draw, and to draw too with ... surprising proficiency in the art, considering my total ignorance of it two months ago.”  His impulse towards writing verses, however, was an impulse of a playful fancy rather than of a burning imagination.  “I have no more right to the name of poet,” he once said, “than a maker of mouse-traps has to that of an engineer....  Such a talent in verse as mine is like a child’s rattle—­very entertaining to the trifler that uses it, and very disagreeable to all beside.”  “Alas,” he wrote in another letter, “what can I do with my wit?  I have not enough to do great things with, and these little things are so fugitive that, while a man catches at the subject, he is only filling his hand with smoke.  I must do with it as I do with my linnet; I keep him for the most part in a cage, but now and then set open the door, that he may whisk about the room a little, and then shut him up again.”  It may be doubted whether, if subjects had not been imposed on him from without, he would have written much save in the vein of “dear Mat Prior’s easy jingle” or the Latin trifles of Vincent Bourne, of whom Cowper said:  “He can speak of a magpie or a cat in terms so exquisitely appropriated to the character he draws that one would suppose him animated by the spirit of the creature he describes.”

Cowper was not to be allowed to write, except occasionally, on magpies and cats.  Mrs. Unwin, who took a serious view of the poet’s art, gave him as a subject The Progress of Error, and is thus mainly responsible for the now little-read volume of moral satires, with which he began his career as a poet at the age of fifty in 1782.  It is not a book that can be read with unmixed, or even with much, delight.  It seldom rises above a good man’s rhetoric.  Cowper, instead of writing about himself and his pets, and his cucumber-frames, wrote of the wicked world from which he had retired, and the vices of which he could not attack with that particularity that makes satire interesting.  The satires are not exactly dull, but they are lacking in force, either of wit or of passion.  They are hardly more than an expression of sentiment and opinion.  The sentiments are usually sound—­for Cowper was an honest lover of liberty and goodness—­but even the cause of liberty is not likely to gain much from such a couplet as: 

  Man made for kings! those optics are but dim
  That tell you so—­say, rather, they for him.

Nor will the manners of the clergy benefit much as the result of such an attack on the “pleasant-Sunday-afternoon” kind of pastor as is contained in the lines: 

  If apostolic gravity be free
  To play the fool on Sundays, why not we? 
  If he the tinkling harpsichord regards
  As inoffensive, what offence in cards?