ABSTRACT
Immediately he finished Antithelyphthora Cowper began, at Mary Unwin's suggestion, a second extended satire in heroic couplets, entitled 'The Progress of Error', in which Madan's tract was to be exposed as only one of many current erroneous uses of pulpit and press. Before the end of January he completed a complementary poem called 'Truth', in which he expounds Calvinist doctrine and, by the way, satirizes error and hypocrisy (see p. 253 below), Next he wrote a satirical verse dialogue, 'Table Talk', intended to stand as an introduction to the two poems already written and, it soon became apparent, a longer series of moral satires. The two speakers in 'Table Talk', who perhaps represent Cowper as a young man and Cowper at fifty, discuss the place and function of poetry in a corrupt society. The older, more serious voice has the longer speeches by a ratio of more than seven lines to one; he affirms the mature Cowper's aesthetic as well as moral standards; he denounces contemporary irreligion and political corruption. This is the voice that speaks even more sternly in the fourth moral satire,
'Expostulation' (see pp. 254-60 below), which Cowper began before the end of February. This speaker weeps like a latter-day Jeremiah over the sins of his nation, fearing that as, like Israel, it was once favoured of God, so it is destined to lose God's favour and share Israel's unhappy fate.
