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.