We cannot help sometimes wishing, as we read these passages in the letters, that their calmness and reasonableness could have been communicated to another "Old Whig," who was setting the world on fire with his anti-revolutionary rhetoric.
It is true, as has already been said, that Cowper was "extramundane," and that his political reasonableness was in part the result of the fancy that he and his fellow-saints had nothing to do with the world but to keep themselves clear of it, and let it go its own way to destruction.

But it must also be admitted that while the wealth of Establishments, of which Burke was the ardent defender, is necessarily reactionary in the highest degree, the tendency of religion itself, where it is genuine and sincere, must be to repress any selfish feeling about class or position, and to make men, in temporal matters, more willing to sacrifice the present to the future, especially where the hope is held out of moral as well as of material improvement.

Thus it has come to pass that men who professed and imagined themselves to have no interest in this world, have practically been its great reformers and improvers in the political and material as well as in the moral sphere.
The last specimen shall be one in the more sententious style, and one which proves that Cowper was capable of writing in a judicious manner on a difficult and delicate question--even a question so difficult and so delicate as that of the propriety of painting the face.
TO THE REV.

WILLIAM UNWIN.
"May 3rd, 1784.
"MY DEAR FRIEND,--The subject of face painting may be considered, I think, in two points of view.

First, there is room for dispute with respect to the consistency of the practice with good morals; and secondly, whether it be on the whole convenient or not, may be a matter worthy of agitation.