is like a child's rattle--very entertaining to the trifler that uses it,
and very disagreeable to all beside." "Alas," he wrote in another letter,
"what can I do with my wit? I have not enough to do great things with, and
these little things are so fugitive that, while a man catches at the
subject, he is only filling his hand with smoke. I must do with it as I do
with my linnet; I keep him for the most part in a cage, but now and then
set open the door, that he may whisk about the room a little, and then
shut him up again." It may be doubted whether, if subjects had not been
imposed on him from without, he would have written much save in the vein
of "dear Mat Prior's easy jingle" or the Latin trifles of Vincent Bourne,
of whom Cowper said: "He can speak of a magpie or a cat in terms so
exquisitely appropriated to the character he draws that one would suppose
him animated by the spirit of the creature he describes."

Cowper was not to be allowed to write, except occasionally, on magpies and
cats. Mrs. Unwin, who took a serious view of the poet's art, gave him as a
subject _The Progress of Error_, and is thus mainly responsible for the
now little-read volume of moral satires, with which he began his career as
a poet at the age of fifty in 1782. It is not a book that can be read with
unmixed, or even with much, delight. It seldom rises above a good man's
rhetoric. Cowper, instead of writing about himself and his pets, and his
cucumber-frames, wrote of the wicked world from which he had retired, and
the vices of which he could not attack with that particularity that makes
satire interesting. The satires are not exactly dull, but they are lacking
in force, either of wit or of passion. They are hardly more than an
expression of sentiment and opinion. The sentiments are usually sound--for
Cowper was an honest lover of liberty and goodness--but even the cause of
liberty is not likely to gain much from such a couplet as:

Man made for kings! those optics are but dim
That tell you so--say, rather, they for him.

Nor will the manners of the clergy benefit much as the result of such an
attack on the "pleasant-Sunday-afternoon" kind of pastor as is contained
in the lines:

If apostolic gravity be free
To play the fool on Sundays, why not we?
If he the tinkling harpsichord regards
As inoffensive, what offence in cards?

These, it must in fairness be said, are not examples of the best in the
moral satires; but the la