tion "), seems to have been never so delighted as when he could get Bull and his pipe into the summer-house

“The smoke-inhaling Bull,
Always filling, never full."

Cowper thus describes his new friend to Unwin: "A Dissenter, but a liberal one; a man of letters and of genius; a master of a fine imagination, or rather not master of it; an imagination which, when he finds himself in the company he loves and can confide in, runs away with him into such fields of speculation as amuse and enliven every other imagination that has the happiness to be of the party; at other times he has a tender and delicate sort of melancholy in his disposition, not less agreeable in its way. No men are better qualified for companions in such a world as this than men of such a temperament. Every scene of life has two sides, a dark and a bright one; and the mind that has an equal mixture of melancholy and vivacity is best of all qualified for the contemplation of either: it can be lively without levity, and pensive without dejection. Such a man is Mr. Bull.

"But he smokes tobacco-nothing is perfect

'Nihil est ab omni

Parte beatum.'"

By and by it became the custom for Mr. Bull to dine with Cowper regularly once a fortnight "the year round." Moreover, though it was a great undertaking, Cowper now and again made a visit to Mr. Bull. of these visits suggested the poem called "The Doves,"

One

which he sent to Newton on June 2, 1780. It com

mences

"Reasoning at every step he treads,
Man yet mistakes his way."

"The male dove," adds Cowper,

was smoking a pipe, and the female dove sewing, while she delivered herself as above. This little circumstance may lead you perhaps to guess what pair I had in my eye."

70. The Poet draws Mountains and
Dabchicks.

In the February of 1780 Cowper added drawing to his other amusements. That he ever did anything of value in this department is not to be expected; but it served to amuse him, and he made "such surprising proficiency in the art" in the short space of two months, that when he showed his productions to Mrs. Unwin she was "all admiration and applause." He put his heart and soul into it, as he did into everything else that pleased him. He tells Newton that his application to it was unwearied. "I never," he says, "received a little pleasure from anything in my life; if I am delighted it is in the extreme. The unhappy consequence of this temperature is, that my attachment to any occupation seldom outlives the novelty of it." The origin of Cowper's taking up with the particular art of drawing is not far to seek. There was living in Olney at this time a worthy local artist and sculptor, named James Andrews, whose productions, considering

that he was entirely self-taught, are remarkably good. Though he excelled in painting, it was in sculpture that he exhibited most talent, and it is much to be regretted that his carved gravestones in Olney churchyard and other places were not preserved from the weather. The rains and frosts of a hundred years have had the effect that might be expected, and ere long but little of his work will be discernible. The best stone is that near the porch, to the memory of William Lambry, a pasture-keeper of Weston Underwood, who died in 1779. It represents a farmyard scene in winter-cut hayrick, sheep, fowls, trough, crook, ladder, shears. Of his other stones, one represents death-a skeleton-drawing aside the curtains of a sick man's bed, and with a pair of scissors cutting the thread of life; in another a child is holding an extinguisher over a flame on a tripod; a third, now let into the churchyard wall, is engraved with cherubs' heads, and contains a triangle and a circle, in the midst of which is the name in Hebrew of the Deity.

Thinking that he too might derive pleasure from the art of drawing, Cowper had secured Andrews' services. Most of his letters in the spring of this year contain allusions to his new pastime. "I draw mountains," says he, "valleys, woods, and streams, and ducks and dabchicks. I admire them myself, and Mrs. Unwin admires them, and her praise and my praise put together are fame enough for me." In a letter to Newton he writes: "James Andrews "-his "Michael Angelo," as he dubs him" pays me many compliments on my success in the art of drawing; but I have not yet the vanity to think myself qualified to furnish your apartment." Spite of the praises of Mrs. Unwin and