If
Cowper's retirement was virtuous, it was so because he was actively
employed in the exercise of his highest faculties: had he been a mere
idler, secluded from his kind, his retirement would not have been
virtuous at all. His flight from the world was rendered necessary by
his malady, and respectable by his literary work; but it was a flight
and not a victory. His misconception was fostered and partly produced
by a religion which was essentially ascetic, and which, while it gave
birth to characters of the highest and most energetic beneficence,
represented salvation too little as the reward of effort, too much as
the reward of passive belief and of spiritual emotion.
The most readable of the Moral Satires is _Retirement_, in which the
writer is on his own ground expressing his genuine feelings, and which
is, in fact, a foretaste of _The Task_. _Expostulation_, a warning to
England from the example of the Jews, is the best constructed: the rest
are totally wanting in unity, and even in connexion.
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