Yet parts of it were likely to incur his displeasure as a Tory, as a Churchman, and as one who greatly preferred Fleet Street to the beauties of nature; while with the sentimental misery of the writer, he could have had no sympathy whatever.

Of the incompleteness of Johnson's view of character there could be no better instance than the charming weakness of Cowper.

Thurlow and Colman did not even acknowledge their copies, and were lashed for their breach of friendship with rather more vigour than the Moral Satires display, in _The Valedictory_, which unluckily survived for posthumous publication, when the culprits had made their peace.
Cowper certainly misread himself if he believed that ambition, even literary ambition, was a large element in his character.

But having published, he felt a keen interest in the success of his publication.
Yet he took its failure and the adverse criticism very calmly.

With all his sensitiveness, from irritable and suspicious egotism, such as is the most common cause of moral madness, he was singularly free.