His poem on Liberty is not equally good:  his Muse was too easy and good-natured for the subject, which required as much indignation against unjust and arbitrary power, as complacency in the constitutional monarchy, under which, just after the expulsion of the Stuarts and the establishment of the House of Hanover, in contempt of the claims of hereditary pretenders to the throne, Thomson lived.  Thomson was but an indifferent hater; and the most indispensable part of the love of liberty has unfortunately hitherto been the hatred of tyranny.  Spleen is the soul of patriotism, and of public good:  but you would not expect a man who has been seen eating peaches off a tree with both hands in his waistcoat pockets, to be “overrun with the spleen,” or to heat himself needlessly about an abstract proposition.

His plays are liable to the same objection.  They are never acted, and seldom read.  The author could not, or would not, put himself out of his way, to enter into the situations and passions of others, particularly of a tragic kind.  The subject of Tancred and Sigismunda, which is taken from a serious episode in Gil Blas, is an admirable one, but poorly handled:  the ground may be considered as still unoccupied.

Cowper, whom I shall speak of in this connection, lived at a considerable distance of time after Thomson; and had some advantages over him, particularly in simplicity of style, in a certain precision and minuteness of graphical description, and in a more careful and leisurely choice of such topics only as his genius and peculiar habits of mind prompted him to treat of.  The Task has fewer blemishes than the Seasons; but it has not the same capital excellence, the “unbought grace” of poetry, the power of moving and infusing the warmth of the author’s mind into that of the reader.  If Cowper had a more polished taste, Thomson had, beyond comparison, a more fertile genius, more impulsive force, a more entire forgetfulness of himself in his subject.  If in Thomson you are sometimes offended with the slovenliness of the author by profession, determined to get through his task at all events; in Cowper you are no less dissatisfied with the finicalness of the private gentleman, who does not care whether he completes his work or not; and in whatever he does, is evidently more solicitous to please himself than the public.  There is an effeminacy about him, which shrinks from and repels common and hearty sympathy.  With all his boasted simplicity and love of the country, he seldom launches out into general descriptions of nature:  he looks at her over his clipped hedges, and from his well-swept garden-walks; or if he makes a bolder experiment now and then, it is with an air of precaution, as if he were afraid of being caught in a shower of rain, or of not being able, in case of any untoward accident, to make good his retreat home.  He shakes hands with nature with a pair of fashionable gloves on, and leads “his Vashti” forth to public