praise,
Be most sublimely good, verbosely grand,
And with poetic trappings grace thy prose
Till it outmantle all the pride of verse;

where he was possibly, as Sainte-Beuve suggests, thinking of Rousseau,
though Shaftesbury was the more frequent butt of such denunciations. The
difference in the solution of the great problem of moral regeneration
was facilitated by the difference of the environment. Rousseau, though
he shows a sentimental tenderness for Christianity, could not be
orthodox without putting himself on the side of the oppressors. Wesley,
though feeling profoundly the social discords of the time, could take
the side of the poor without the need of breaking in pieces a rigid
system of class-privilege. The evil which he had to encounter did not
present itself as tyranny oppressing helplessness, but as a general
neglect of reciprocal duties verging upon license. On the whole,
therefore, he took the conservative side of political questions. When
the American war gave the first signal of coming troubles, the
combinations of opinion were significant of the general state of mind.
Wesley and Johnson denounced the rebels from the orthodox point of view
with curious coincidence of language. The only man of equal intellectual
calibre who took the same side unequivocally was the arch-infidel
Gibbon. The then sleepy Established Church was too tolerant or too
indifferent to trouble him: why should he ally himself with Puritans and
enthusiasts to attack the Government which at once supported and tied
its hands? On the other side, we find such lovers of the established
religious order as Burke associated with free-thinkers like Tom Paine
and Horne Tooke. Tooke might agree with Voltaire in private, but he
could not air his opinions to a party which relied in no small measure
on the political zeal of sound dissenters. Dissent, in fact, meant
something like atheism combined with radicalism in France; in England it
meant desire for the traditional liberties of Englishmen, combined with
an often fanatical theological creed.

Cowper, brought up amidst such surroundings, had no temptation to adopt
Rousseau's sweeping revolutionary fervour. His nominal whiggism was not
warmed into any subversive tendency. The labourers with whose sorrows he
sympathised might be ignorant, coarse, and drunken; he saw their faults
too clearly to believe in Rousseau's idyllic conventionalities, and
painted the truth as realistically as Cr