hat he claimed to be
translations from the poems of Ossian, the son of Fingal.
Whether genuine or not, these poems indicated the tendency of the time.
In Scotland, the old ballad spirit, which had continued to exist
with a vigor but little abated by the influence of the artificial,
mechanical school of poetry, was gathered up and intensified
in the songs of him "who walked in glory and in joy,
following his plow, along the mountain-side", and who is entitled to
a high rank among the poetical reformers of the age.

It is not surprising that the great literary dictator in Percy's day,
Dr. Samuel Johnson, should treat the old ballads with ridicule.
The good man had been trained in a different school of poetry,
and could not in his old age yield to the reactionary movement.
Bishop Warburton, who ranked next to Johnson in literary authority,
had nothing but sneering contempt to bestow upon upon the old ballads,
and this feeling was shared by many others in the foremost ranks
of literature and criticism. But in the face of all opposition,
and aided by the yearning for literary liberty that was abroad,
the old ballads grew more and more into favor. The influence of
this folklore was not confined to England. It extended across the sea,
and swayed the genius of such poets as Buerger and Goethe
and Schiller.

Along with the poetical revival in the eighteenth century,
came the great religious revival inaugurated by the Wesleys
and Whitefield; and of this revival, the poetry of William Cowper
was a direct product. But the two revivals were co-radical,--
one was not derived from the other. The long-suppressed
spiritual elements of the nation began to reassert themselves
in religion and in poetry. The Church had been as sound asleep
as the Muses.

Cowper belongs to the Whitefield side of the religious revival,
the Evangelicals, as they were called (those that remained within
the Establishment). In his poem entitled `Hope', he vindicates
the memory of Whitefield under the name Leuconomus, a translation
into Greek, of White field. It was his conversion to Evangelicism
which gave him his inspiration and his themes. `The Task' has been
as justly called the poem of Methodism as the `Paradise Lost'
has been called the epic of Puritanism. In it we are presented with
a number of pictures of the utterly fossilized condition of the clergy
of the day in the Established Church (see especially book II.,
vv. 326-832, in which he sa