"Oh, laugh or mourn with me the rueful jest,
A cassocked huntsman, and a fiddling priest."

Cowper's first volume, containing _Table-Talk_ and its companion
satires, appeared some months before Crabbe's _Village_. The
shortcomings of the clergy are a favourite topic with him, and a varied
gallery of the existing types of clerical inefficiency may be formed
from his pages. Many of Cowper's strictures were amply justified by the
condition of the English Church. But Cowper's method is not Crabbe's.
The note of the satirist is seldom absent, blended at times with just a
suspicion of that of the Pharisee. The humorist and the Puritan contend
for predominance in the breast of this polished gentleman and scholar.
Cowper's friend, Newton, in the Preface he wrote for his first volume,
claimed for the poet that his satire was "benevolent." But it was not
always discriminating or just. The satirist's keen love of antithesis
often weakens the moral virtue of Cowper's strictures. In this earliest
volume anger was more conspicuous than sorrow, and contempt perhaps more
obvious than either. The callousness of public opinion on many subjects
needed other medicine than this. Hence was it perhaps that Cowper's
volume, which appeared in May 1782, failed to awaken interest. Crabbe's
_Village_ appeared just a year later (it had been completed a year or
two earlier), and at once made its mark. "It was praised," writes his
son, "in the leading journals; the sale was rapid and extensive; and my
father's reputation was by universal consent greatly raised, and
permanently established, by this poem," The number of anonymous letters
it brought the author, some of gratitude, and some of resentment (for it
had laid its finger on many sores in the body-politic), showed how
deeply his touch had been felt. Further publicity for the poem was
obtained by Burke, who inserted the description of the Parish Workhouse
and the Village Apothecary in _The Annual Register,_ which he