nt of religion
and good manners." His life was in keeping with his writings. Evelyn
calls him that "incomparable poet, and virtuous man;" and Pepys heard
Dr. Ward, the bishop of Winchester, and Dr. Bates, the well-known
puritan, "mightily lamenting his death, as the best poet of our nation
and as good a man."[31] The king was pleased to add his testimony,
worthless if it had stood alone, and declared "that Mr. Cowley had not
left a better man behind him in England."[32]

"In Windsor Forest," says Bowles, "there is description, incident, and
history." A few remarks may still be made on it under each of these
heads. Wordsworth assigned to it the distinction, in conjunction with
Lady Winchelsea's Nocturnal Reverie, of containing the only "new images
of external nature" to be found "in the poetry of the period intervening
between Paradise Lost and the Seasons."[33] He limited the praise to "a
passage or two," and does not particularise the passages to which he
alluded. He must chiefly have referred to the lines from ver. 111 to
ver. 146; for the other happy "images of external nature" are borrowed.
Pope had but a faint perception of latent and subtle beauties, and he
usually kept to those general appearances which are obvious to all the
world. His trees cast a shade, his streams murmur, his heath is purple,
his harvests are yellow, and his skies blue. Living in the midst of
English peasants he shows less familiarity with rural character than
with rural scenes. Neither in his verse, nor his letters, is there
anything to indicate that he had mixed, like Thomson, Cowper, and
Wordsworth, with the cottagers around him, or had divined the noble
qualities which are masked by a rustic exterior. His sympathies were
contracted, and strange to say there is not one word in his voluminous
writings on human kind which denotes that he had felt in the smallest
degree the loveliness of children. His main interest was in men and
women, whose names, for good or evil, were before the world, and in
speaking of them he dwelt principally upon their foibles and misdeeds.

The censure of Warton is valid when he complains that Pope's account of
field sports is deficient in characteristic details. He found a
stag-chase in Cooper's Hill, which determined him to extend, while ho
imitated, the plan of his original, and introduce hunting, fishing,
shooting, and netting into Windsor Forest, though he was not a
sportsman. The objection that his stag-chase