merits—­great though these were—­could have commanded, owing to the fact that Cowper was the first who gave expression to the reaction which had set in against the artificial school of Pope.  Men were becoming weary of the smooth rhymes, the brilliant antitheses, the flash and the glitter, the constant straining after effect, carrying with it a certain air of unreality, which had long been in vogue.  They welcomed with delight a poet who wrote in a more easy and natural, if a rougher and less correct, style.  Cowper was, in fact, the father of a new school of poetry—­a school of which Southey, and Coleridge, and Wordsworth were in the next generation distinguished representatives.  But almost all that Cowper wrote (at least of original composition) was subservient to one great end.  He was essentially a Christian poet, and in a different sense from that in which Milton, and George Herbert, and Young were Christian poets.  As Socrates brought philosophy, so Cowper brought religious poetry down from the clouds to dwell among men.  Not only does a vein of piety run through all his poetry, but the attentive reader cannot fail to perceive that his main object in writing was to recommend practical, experimental religion of the Evangelical type.  He himself gives us the keynote to all his writings in a beautiful passage,[815] in which he describes the want which he strove to supply.

    Pity, religion has so seldom found
    A skilful guide into poetic ground! 
    The flowers would spring where’er she deigned to stray,
    And every muse attend her in her way. 
    Virtue, indeed, meets many a rhyming friend,
    And many a compliment politely penned;
    But unattired in that becoming vest
    Religion weaves for her, and half undressed. 
    Stands in the desert, shivering and forlorn,
    A wintry figure, like a withered thorn.

But while he never loses sight of his grand object, Cowper’s poems are not mere sermons in verse.  He not only passes without an effort ’from grave to gay, from lively to severe,’ but he blends them together with most happy effect.  Gifted with a rare sense of humour, with exquisite taste, and with a true appreciation of the beautiful both in nature and art, he enlists all these in the service of religion.  While the reader is amused with his wit and charmed with his descriptions, he is instructed, proselytised, won over to Evangelicalism almost without knowing it.  ‘My sole drift,’ wrote Cowper in 1781, a little before the publication of his first volume,[816] ’is to be useful; a point at which, however, I know I should in vain aim, unless I could be likewise entertaining.  I have, therefore, fixed these two strings to my bow; and by the help of both have done my best to send my arrow to the mark.  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.  I cast a sidelong glance at the good-liking of the world at large, more