abbe: they required to be kept
out of the public-house, not to be liberated from obsolete feudal
disqualifications; a poacher, such as he described, was not the victim
of a brutal aristocracy, but simply a commonplace variety of thief. And,
on the other hand, when he denounces the laziness and selfishness of the
Establishment, the luxurious bishops, the sycophantic curates, the
sporting and the fiddling and the card-playing parson, he has no thought
of the enmity to Christianity which such satire would have suggested to
a French reformer, but is mentally contrasting the sleepiness of the
bishops with the virtues of Newton or Whitefield.

'Where dwell these matchless saints?' old Curio cries.
'Even at your side, sir, and before your eyes,
The favour'd few, the enthusiasts you despise.'

And whatever be thought of Cowper's general estimate of the needs of his
race, it must be granted that in one respect his philosophy was more
consequent than Rousseau's. Rousseau, though a deist in theory, rejected
the deist conclusion, that whatever is, is right; and consequently the
problem of how it can be that men, who are naturally so good, are in
fact so vile, remained a difficulty, only slurred over by his fluent
metaphysics about freewill. Cowper's belief in the profound corruption
of human nature supplied him with a doctrine less at variance with his
view of facts. He has no illusions about the man of nature. The savage,
he tells us, was a drunken beast till rescued from his bondage by the
zeal of the Moravian missionaries; and the poor are to be envied, not
because their lives are actually much better, but because they escape
the temptations and sophistries of the rich and learned.

But how should this sentiment fit in with Cowper's love of nature? In
the language of his sect, nature is generally opposed to grace. It is
applied to a world in which not only the human inhabitants, but the
whole creation, is tainted with a mysterious evil. Why should Cowper
find relief in contemplating a system in which waste and carnage play so
conspicuous a part? Why, when he rescued his pet hares from the general
fate of their race, did he not think of the innumerable hares who
suffered not only from guns and greyhounds, but from the general
annoyances incident to the struggle for existence? Would it not have
been more logical if he had placed his happiness altogether in another
world, where the struggles and torments of our everyd