hionable friend, Lady Austen,
would have felt their respectable prejudices shocked by contact with the
new Heloise; and the views of life taken by their teacher, the converted
slaveholder, John Newton, were as opposite as possible to those of
Rousseau's imaginary vicar. Indeed, Rousseau's ideal families have that
stain of affectation from which Cowper is so conspicuously free. The
rose-colour is laid on too thickly. They are too fond of taking credit
for universal admiration of the fine feelings which invariably animate
their breasts; their charitable sentiments are apt to take the form of
very easy condonation of vice; and if they repudiate the world, we
cannot believe that they are really unconscious of its existence.
Perhaps this dash of self-consciousness was useful in recommending them
to the taste of the jaded and weary society, sickening of a strange
disease which it could not interpret to itself, and finding for the
moment a new excitement in the charms of ancient simplicity. The real
thing might have palled upon it. But Rousseau's artificial and
self-conscious simplicity expressed that vague yearning and spirit of
unrest which could generate a half-sensual sentimentalism, but could be
repelled by genuine sentiment. Perhaps it not uncommonly happens that
those who are more or less tainted with a morbid tendency can denounce
it most effectually. The most effective satirist is the man who has
escaped with labour and pains, and not without some grievous stains,
from the slough in which others are still mired. The perfectly pure has
sometimes too little sympathy with his weaker brethren to place himself
at their point of view. Indeed, as we shall have occasion to remark,
Cowper is an instance of a thinker too far apart from the great world to
apply the lash effectually.

Rousseau's view of the world and its evils was thus coherent enough,
however unsatisfactory in its basis, and was a development of, not a
reaction against, the previously dominant philosophy; and, though using
a different dialect and confined by different conditions, Cowper's
attack upon the existing order harmonises with much of Rousseau's
language. The first volume of poems, in which he had not yet discovered
the secret of his own strength, is in form a continuation of the satires
of the Pope school, and in substance a religious version of Rousseau's
denunciations of luxury. Amongst the first symptoms of the growing
feeling of uneasy discontent ha