Who is the 'Immortal Hale' in William Cowper's The Task? I was reading Book III of William Cowper's _The Task_ today. Lines 252-260: > Such was thy wisdom, Newton, childlike sage, > Sagacious reader of the works of God, > And in his word sagacious. Such too thine, > Milton, whose genius had angelic wings, > And fed on manna. And such thine, in whom > Our British Themis gloried with just cause, > Immortal Hale, for deep discernment praised, > And sound integrity not more, than famed > For sanctity of manners undefiled. Newton and Milton are easy of course. But who on earth is Hale? I've searched through Wikipedia for everyone with the surname Hale that Cowper would have known about, and the best match I can find is Sir Matthew Hale - a seventeenth century judge best known today for declaring the impossiblity of marital rape - which is still quite a jump from the first two!

James Sambrook appears to agree that you have the correct Hale, in the annotations to his William Cowper: The Task and Selected Other Poems

> _258\. Hale: Sir Matthew Hale (1609-76), Chief Justice of the King's Bench, devout Puritan, and able philosophical defender of the Mosaic Account of the creation._

_The Mosaic Account of the Creation_ is the order of creation as laid out in Genesis, 'Mosaic' denoting the tradition that the first five books of the Bible were written by Moses.

On Hale's view of the non-retractability of a wife's consent, we can only hope that Cowper's unmarried state left him in ignorance of the consequences of Hale's doctrine.