Cowper is certainly the sweetest of our didactic poets. He is elevated in his ‘Table Talk;’ acute in detailing the ‘Progress of Error;’ and he chants the praises of ‘Truth’ in more dulcet notes than were ever sounded by the fairest swan in Cayster. His ‘Expostulation’ is made in the tones of a benevolent sage. His ‘Hope’ and his ‘Charity’ are proofs of his pure Christian-like feeling;—a feeling which also pervades his ‘Conversation’ and his ‘Retirement,’ and which barbs the shafts of his satire without taking away from their strength. The same praise is due to the six books of the ‘Task,’ of which perhaps the _Garden_ is the least successful portion. If however we be disposed to find fault at all with anything in his sentiment or expression, it would be in this,—that while he celebrates in warm praises the delights of his own peaceful and retired life—a life which, on the respectable authority of the old medical writer Celsus, I may call as hurtful to the body as it is profitable or necessary to the mind (“Literarum disciplina, ut animo præcipue omnium necessaria, sic corpori inimica est”), there is some illiberality in his declaring that the various occupations of other and more active men are either frivolous or criminal. Cowper patiently enjoys holding the ravelled thread for ladies to wind it on to their bobbins, but he sneers at the party who sits down to chess or stands up to billiards. He will praise air and exercise, if you will only take them in company with _him_, in covered walks where there is what he so well and quaintly calls “An obsolete prolixity of shade.” But if you enjoy your air and exercise in field sports, you are more ignoble than your groom, and a greater brute than the victim you pursue. Again: he acknowledges change of scene to be beneficial to the animal economy; but he intends thereby a change from one parish to another. You must not go to France for change, without being undeniably anything but a gentleman and a Christian. He is ready too to eat game and dine on venison, but he would not, for the world, be so guilty as to course a hare or shoot a buck. Finally, he would listen with all imaginable pleasure and rapture to the strains of Handel, were they only composed to the glory and praise of Damon and Dolly, rather than, as they are, to the eulogy of the Messiah and in illustration of His sacrifice. But why, it may be asked, this piece of patchwork with Cowper’s name thereon? Well, Cowper was something of a tailor in his way, and could sew a button on his sleeve as adroitly, if not as any tailor in town, at least as any sailor in the fleet. And in this he was something akin to Pope Pius VII. when prisoner at Fontainebleau.