tter is worth quoting as evidence of the way in
which Cowper tried to use verse as the pulpit of a rather narrow creed.
The satires are hardly more than denominational in their interest. They
belong to the religious fashion of their time, and are interesting to us
now only as the old clothes of eighteenth-century evangelicalism. The
subject-matter is secular as well as religious, but the atmosphere almost
always remains evangelical. The Rev. John Newton wrote a preface for the
volume, suggesting this and claiming that the author "aims to communicate
his own perceptions of the truth, beauty and influence of the religion of
the Bible." The publisher became so alarmed at this advertisement of the
piety of the book that he succeeded in suppressing it in the first
edition. Cowper himself had enough worldly wisdom to wish to conceal his
pious intentions from the first glance of the reader, and for this reason
opened the book, not with _The Progress of Error_, but with the more
attractively-named _Table Talk_. "My sole drift is to be useful," he told
a relation, however. "... 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." He informed Newton at the same time: "Thinking myself
in a measure obliged to tickle, if I meant to please, I therefore affected
a jocularity I did not feel." He also told Newton: "I am merry that I may
decoy people into my company." On the other hand, Cowper did not write
_John Gilpin_ which is certainly his masterpiece, in the mood of a man
using wit as a decoy. He wrote it because it irresistibly demanded to be
written. "I wonder," he once wrote to Newton, "that a sportive thought
should ever knock at the door of my intellects, and still more that it
should gain admittance. It is as if harlequin should intrude himself into
the gloomy chamber where a corpse is deposited in state." Harlequin,
luckily for us, took hold of his pen in _John Gilpin_ and in many of the
letters. In the moral satires, harlequin is dressed in a sober suit and
sent to a theological seminary. One cannot but feel that there is
something incongruous in the boast of a wit and a poet that he had "found
occasion towards the close of my last poem, called _Retirement_, to take
some notice of the modern passion for seaside entertainments, and to
direct the means by which they might be made useful as well as agreeable."
This might serve well enough as a th