Cowper has drawn a capital picture of the ease and perfection with which the clownish chrysalis may be metamorphosed into the scarlet moth of war. Catch the animal young, and you may turn him into any shape you please. He will learn to wear silk stockings, scarlet plush breeches, collarless coats, with silver buttons; and swing open a gate with a grace, or stand behind my lady's carriage with his wand, as smoothly impudent as any of the tribe. He will clerk it with a pen behind his ear; or mount a pulpit, as Stephen Duck, the thresher, did, if you will only give him the chance. The fault is not in him, it is in fortune. He has rich fallows in his soul, if any body thought them worth turning. But keep him down, and don't press him too hard; feed him pretty well, and give him plenty of work; and, like one of his companions, the cart-horse, he will drudge on till the day of his death. So in the north of England, where they give him a cottage and his food, and keep no more of his species than will just do the work, letting all the rest march off to the Tyne collieries; he is a very patient creature; and if they did not show him books, would not wince at all. So in the fens of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdon, and on many a fat and clayey level of England, where there are no resident gentry, and but here and there a farm-house, you may meet, the English peasant in his most sluggish and benumbed condition. He is then a long-legged, staring creature, considerably "lower than the angels," who, if you ask him a question, gapes like an Indian frog, which, when its mouth is open, has its head half off; and neither understands your language, nor, if he did, could grasp your ideas. He is there a walking lump, a thing with members, but very little membership with the intellectual world; but with a soul as stagnant as one of his own dykes. All that has been wanted in him has been cultivated, and is there--good sturdy limbs, to plow and sow, reap and mow, and feed bullocks; and even in those operations, his sinews have been half-superseded by machinery. There never was any need of his mind; and, therefore, it never has been minded. This is the English peasant, where there is nobody to breathe a soul into the clod. But what is he where there are thousands of the wealthy and the wise? What is he round London--the great, the noble, and the enlightened? Pretty much the same, and from pretty much the same causes. Few trouble themselves about him. He feels that he is a mere serf, among the great and free; a mere machine in the hands of the mighty, who use him as such. He sees the sunshine of grandeur, but he does not feel its warmth. He hears that the great folks are wise; but all he knows is, that their wisdom does not trouble itself about his ignorance. He asks, with "The Farmer's Boy,"