These, it must in fairness be said, are not examples of the best in the moral satires; but the latter is worth quoting as evidence of the way in which Cowper tried to use verse as the pulpit of a rather narrow creed.  The satires are hardly more than denominational in their interest.  They belong to the religious fashion of their time, and are interesting to us now only as the old clothes of eighteenth-century evangelicalism.  The subject-matter is secular as well as religious, but the atmosphere almost always remains evangelical.  The Rev. John Newton wrote a preface for the volume, suggesting this and claiming that the author “aims to communicate his own perceptions of the truth, beauty and influence of the religion of the Bible.”  The publisher became so alarmed at this advertisement of the piety of the book that he succeeded in suppressing it in the first edition.  Cowper himself had enough worldly wisdom to wish to conceal his pious intentions from the first glance of the reader, and for this reason opened the book, not with The Progress of Error, but with the more attractively-named Table Talk.  “My sole drift is to be useful,” he told a relation, however. “...  My readers will hardly have begun to laugh before they will be called upon to correct that levity, and peruse me with a more serious air.”  He informed Newton at the same time:  “Thinking myself in a measure obliged to tickle, if I meant to please, I therefore affected a jocularity I did not feel.”  He also told Newton:  “I am merry that I may decoy people into my company.”  On the other hand, Cowper did not write John Gilpin which is certainly his masterpiece, in the mood of a man using wit as a decoy.  He wrote it because it irresistibly demanded to be written.  “I wonder,” he once wrote to Newton, “that a sportive thought should ever knock at the door of my intellects, and still more that it should gain admittance.  It is as if harlequin should intrude himself into the gloomy chamber where a corpse is deposited in state.”  Harlequin, luckily for us, took hold of his pen in John Gilpin and in many of the letters.  In the moral satires, harlequin is dressed in a sober suit and sent to a theological seminary.  One cannot but feel that there is something incongruous in the boast of a wit and a poet that he had “found occasion towards the close of my last poem, called Retirement, to take some notice of the modern passion for seaside entertainments, and to direct the means by which they might be made useful as well as agreeable.”  This might serve well enough as a theme for a “letter to the editor” of The Baptist Eye-opener.  One cannot imagine, however, its causing a flutter in the breast of even the meekest of the nine muses.