Note 13 — REMONSTRANCE ADDRESSED TO WILLIAM COWPER, ESQ. IN 1788, ON THE SARCASMS LEVELLED AT NATIONAL GRATITUDE IN THE TASK.[4]

l. 2 Everlasting Light—When this Remonstrance to Cowper was written, its author only knew him in his publications. Mr Hayley’s Biography of that unfortunate man softens, by excited pity, the indignation which had arisen from the ungenerous passages reprobated here;—but the delineation of Cowper’s character, and the records of his life, compared with the illiberal censures which disgrace the interesting and beautiful pages of the Task, teach us, more than ever, to deplore the dire Calvinistic principles, which ruined his peace, and which could so freeze and narrow a heart, which Nature had made warm and expansive. They taught him to anathematize for departed genius, sublimer and more extensive than his own, Shakespear and Handel, that praise for the magnificent talents they had cultivated, which his published letters prove him to have been desirous to obtain for his own poetry. March 1806.