He had found out, as he tells us himself, that this was a mistake, that "the pulpit was for preaching; the garden, the parlour, and the walk abroad were for friendly and agreeable conversation." It may have been his consciousness of a certain change in himself that deterred him from taking Newton into his confidence when he was engaged upon _The Task_.

The worst passages are those which betray a fanatical antipathy to natural science, especially that in the third book (150--190).

The episode of the judgment of heaven on the young atheist Misagathus, in the sixth book, is also fanatical and repulsive.
Puritanism had come into violent collision with the temporal power, and had contracted a character fiercely political and revolutionary.
Methodism fought only against unbelief, vice, and the coldness of the establishment; it was in no way political, much less revolutionary; by the recoil from the atheism of the French Revolution its leaders, including Wesley himself, were drawn rather to the Tory side.

Cowper, we have said, always remained in principle what he had been born, a Whig, an unrevolutionary Whig, an "Old Whig" to adopt the phrase made canonical by Burke.
'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume, And we are weeds without it.

All constraint Except what wisdom lays on evil men Is evil.
The sentiment of these lines, which were familiar and dear to Cobden, is tempered by judicious professions of loyalty to a king who rules in accordance with the law.