pe of a preface which took
Johnson the publisher aback by its gravity. Newton would not have
sanctioned any poetry which had not a distinctly religious object, and
he received an assurance from the poet that the lively passages were
introduced only as honey on the rim of the medicinal cup, to commend
its healing contents to the lips of a giddy world. The Rev. John
Newton must have been exceedingly austere if he thought that the
quantity of honey used was excessive.

A genuine desire to make society better is always present in these
poems, and its presence lends them the only interest which they possess
except as historical monuments of a religious movement. Of satirical
vigour they have scarcely a semblance. There are three kinds of
satire, corresponding to as many different views of humanity and life,
the Stoical, the Cynical, and the Epicurean. Of Stoical satire, with
its strenuous hatred of vice and wrong, the type is Juvenal. Of
Cynical satire, springing from bitter contempt of humanity, the type is
Swift's Gulliver, while its quintessence is embodied in his lines on
the Day of Judgment. Of Epicurean satire, flowing from a contempt of
humanity which is not bitter, and lightly playing with the weakness and
vanities of mankind, Horace is the classical example. To the first two
kinds, Cowper's nature was totally alien, and when he attempts anything
in either of those lines, the only result is a querulous and censorious
acerbity, in which his real feelings had no part, and which on mature
reflection offended his own better taste. In the Horatian kind he
might have excelled, as the episode of the _Retired Statesman_ in one
of these poems shows. He might have excelled, that is, if like Horace
he had known the world. But he did not know the world. He saw the
"great Babel" only "through the loopholes of retreat," and in the
columns of his weekly newspaper. Even during the years, long past,
which he spent in the world, his experience had been confined to a
small literary circle. Society was to him an abstraction on which he
discoursed like a pulpiteer. His satiric whip not only has no lash, it
is brandished in the air.

No man was ever less qualified for the office of a censor; his judgment
is at once disarmed, and a breach in his principles is at once made by
the slightest personal influence. Bishops are bad, they are like the
Cretans, evil beasts and slow bellies; but the bishop whose brother
Cowper knows