'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 everyday life are unknown? Indeed, though Cowper, as an orthodox Protestant, held that ascetic practices ministered simply to spiritual conceit, was he not bound to a sufficiently galling form of asceticism? His friends habitually looked askance upon all those pleasures of the intellect and the imagination which are not directly subservient to the religious emotions. They had grave doubts of the expediency of his studies of the pagan Homer. They looked with suspicion upon the slightest indulgence in social amusements. And Cowper fully shared their sentiments. A taste for music, for example, generally suggests to him a parson fiddling when he ought to be praying; and following once more the lead of Newton, he remarks upon the Handel celebration as a piece of grotesque profanity. The name of science calls up to him a pert geologist, declaring after an examination of the earth That He who made it, and revealed its date To Moses, was mistaken in its age.