Cowper | Page 2

would not change conditions with any saint,
in Christendom." Folly produces nothing good, and if Cowper had been
an absolute fool, he would not have written good poetry. But he does
not exaggerate his own weakness, and that he should have become a
power among men is a remarkable triumph of the influences which
have given birth to Christian civilization.
The world into which the child came was one very adverse to him, and
at the same time very much in need of him. It was a world from which
the spirit of poetry seemed to have fled. There could be no stronger
proof of this than the occupation of the throne of Spenser, Shakespeare,
and Milton by the arch-versifier Pope. The Revolution of 1688 was
glorious, but unlike the Puritan Revolution which it followed, and in
the political sphere partly ratified, it was profoundly prosaic. Spiritual
religion, the source of Puritan grandeur and of the poetry of Milton,
was almost extinct; there was not much more of it among the
Nonconformists, who had now become to a great extent mere Whigs,
with a decided Unitarian tendency. The Church was little better than a
political force, cultivated and manipulated by political leaders for their
own purposes. The Bishops were either politicians or theological
polemics collecting trophies of victory over free-thinkers as titles to
higher preferment. The inferior clergy as a body were far nearer in
character to Trulliber than to Dr. Primrose; coarse, sordid, neglectful of
their duties, shamelessly addicted to sinecurism and pluralities, fanatics
in their Toryism and in attachment to their corporate privileges, cold,
rationalistic and almost heathen in their preachings, if they preached at

all. The society of the day is mirrored in the pictures of Hogarth, in the
works of Fielding and Smollett; hard and heartless polish was the best
of it; and not a little of it was Marriage a la Mode. Chesterfield, with
his soulless culture, his court graces, and his fashionable immoralities,
was about the highest type of an English gentleman; but the Wilkeses,
Potters, and Sandwiches, whose mania for vice culminated in the
Hell-fire Club, were more numerous than the Chesterfields. Among the
country squires, for one Allworthy or Sir Roger de Coverley there were
many Westerns. Among the common people religion was almost
extinct, and assuredly no new morality or sentiment, such as Positivists
now promise, had taken its place. Sometimes the rustic thought for
himself, and scepticism took formal possession of his mind; but, as we
see from one of Cowper's letters, it was a coarse scepticism which
desired to be buried with its hounds. Ignorance and brutality reigned in
the cottage. Drunkenness reigned in palace and cottage alike. Gambling,
cockfighting, and bullfighting were the amusements of the people.
Political life, which, if it had been pure and vigorous, might have made
up for the absence of spiritual influences, was corrupt from the top of
the scale to the bottom: its effect on national character is pourtrayed in
Hogarth's Election. That property had its duties as well as its rights,
nobody had yet ventured to say or think. The duty of a gentleman
towards his own class was to pay his debts of honour and to fight a duel
whenever he was challenged by one of his own order; towards the
lower class his duty was none. Though the forms of government were
elective, and Cowper gives us a description of the candidate at election
time obsequiously soliciting votes, society was intensely aristocratic,
and each rank was divided from that below it by a sharp line which
precluded brotherhood or sympathy. Says the Duchess of Buckingham
to Lady Huntingdon, who had asked her to come and hear Whitefield,
"I thank your ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist
preachers; their doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured
with disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually endeavouring to
level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be
told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on
the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting; and I cannot but
wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at
variance with high rank and good breeding. I shall be most happy to

come and hear your favourite preacher." Her Grace's sentiments
towards the common wretches that crawl on the earth were shared, we
may be sure, by her Grace's waiting-maid. Of humanity there was as
little as there was of religion. It was the age of the criminal law which
hanged men for petty thefts, of life-long imprisonment for debt, of the
stocks and the pillory, of a Temple Bar garnished with the heads of
traitors, of the unreformed prison system, of the press-gang, of
unrestrained tyranny and savagery at public schools. That the