When he asked her for a subject, she was happier in her choice than the lady who had suggested the _Progress of Error_.
8he bade him take the sofa on which she was reclining, and which, sofas being then uncommon, was a more striking and suggestive object than it would be now.

The right chord was struck; the subject was accepted; and _The Sofa_ grew into _The Task_; the title of the song reminding us that it was "commanded by the fair." As _Paradise Lost_ is to militant Puritanism, so is _The Task_ to the religious movement of its author's time.

To its character as the poem of a sect it no doubt owed and still owes much of its popularity.

Not only did it give beautiful and effective expression to the sentiments of a large religious party, but it was about the only poetry that a strict Methodist or Evangelical could read; while to those whose worship was unritualistic and who were debarred by their principles from the theatre and the concert, anything in the way of art that was not illicit must have been eminently welcome.

But _The Task_ has merits of a more universal and enduring kind.