After the _Deserted Village_ (1770) no striking work appeared till Crabbe published his first volume (1781), and was followed by his senior Cowper in 1782. Both of them employed the metre of Pope, though Cowper took to blank verse; and Crabbe, though he had read and admired Spenser, was to the end of his career a thorough disciple of Pope. Johnson read and revised his _Village_, which was thoroughly in harmony with the old gentleman's poetic creed. Yet both Cowper and Crabbe stimulate what may be called in some sense 'a return to nature'; though not in such a way as to announce a literary revolution. Each was restrained by personal conditions. Cowper's poetical aims were profoundly affected by his religious views. The movement which we call Methodist was essentially moral and philanthropic. It agreed so far with Rousseau's sentimentalism that it denounced the corruptions of the existing order; but instead of attributing the evils to the departure from the ideal state of nature, expressed them by the theological doctrine of the corruption of the human heart. That implied in some senses a fundamental difference. But there was a close coincidence in the judgment of actual motives. Cowper fully agreed with Rousseau that our rulers had become selfish and luxurious; that war was kept up to satisfy the ambition of kings and courtiers; that vice flourished because the aims of our rulers and teachers were low and selfish, and that slavery was a monstrous evil supported by the greed of traders. Brown's _Estimate_, he said, was thoroughly right as to our degeneracy, though Brown had not perceived the deepest root of the evil. Cowper's satire has lost its salt because he had retired too completely from the world to make a telling portrait. But he succeeds most admirably when he finds relief from the tortures of insanity by giving play to the exquisite playfulness and tenderness which was never destroyed by his melancholy. He delights us by an unconscious illustration of the simple domestic life in the quiet Olney fields, which we see in another form in the charming White of Selborne. He escapes from the ghastly images of religious insanity when he has indulged in the innocent play of tender and affectionate emotions, which finds itself revealed in tranquillising scenery. The literary result is a fresh appreciation of 'Nature.' Pope's Nature has become for him artificial and conventional. From a religious point of view it represents 'cold morality,' and the substitution of logical argumentation for the language of the heart. It suggests the cynicism of the heartless fine gentleman who sneers at Wesley and Bunyan, and covers his want of feeling by a stilted deism. Cowper tried unsuccessfully to supersede Pope's _Homer_; in trying to be simple he became bald; but he also tried most successfully to express with absolute sincerity the simple and deep emotions of an exquisitely tender character.