Included in the collection was an adaptation of Winter Evening Thoughts, retitled ‘Winter-night Meditations’, and five poems extolling the virtues of a poor and simple life when coloured by religion. The highly sanitized descriptions of cottage life with its cheerful but welcoming cottagers who, though poor, are contented with their lot because they look to a better future in heaven, obviously bore little relation to the misery, poverty and disease of the labouring poor in Patrick’s parish which was about to explode in the violence of the Luddite riots. Patrick’s aim was not to paint a
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