"He never knew but one,--and here he lies."
Our genial and home-loving Cowper has made his dog Beau classical. We must beg our readers to refresh their memories, by looking into the Olney bard's exquisite story,
"My spaniel, prettiest of his race, And high in pedigree,"
and they will find that _that_ story of "The Dog and the Water-lily" was "no fable," and that Beau really understood his master's wish when he fetched him a water-lily out of "Ouse's silent tide." How graceful are the last two stanzas of that sweet little poem--
"Charm'd with the sight, 'The world,' I cried, 'Shall hear of this thy deed; My dog shall mortify the pride Of man's superior breed.
'But chief myself I will enjoin, Awake at duty's call, To show a love as prompt as thine To Him who gives me all.'"[48]
That the world might know the very "mark and figure" of this spaniel, the late able illustrator of so many topographical works (Mr James Storer) published in his "Rural Walks of Cowper"[49] a figure of Beau, from the stuffed skin in the possession of Cowper's kinsman, the Rev. Dr Johnson.
Mr Montague, in a letter to the son and biographer of Sir James Mackintosh,[50] gives many reminiscences of that eminent man, who was much attached to the memory of Cowper. He says, "We reached Dereham about mid-day (it was in 1801), and wrote to Mr Johnson, the clergyman, who had protected Cowper in the last years of his life, and in whose house he died. He instantly called upon us, and we accompanied him to his house. In the hall, we were introduced to a little red and white spaniel, in a glass case--the little dog Beau, who, seeing the water-lily which Cowper could not reach, 'plunging, left the shore.'"
"I saw him with that lily cropp'd, Impatient swim to meet My quick approach, and soon he dropp'd The treasure at my feet."
We saw the room where Cowper died, and the bell which he last touched. We went to his grave, and to Mrs Unwin's, who is buried at some distance. I lamented this, "Do not live in the visible, but the invisible," said your father,--"his attainments, his tenderness, his affections, his sufferings, and his hardships, will live long after both their graves are no more."
We could linger over a prized octavo volume, published in Edinburgh in 1787; the first poem of this, "The Twa Dogs, a Tale," occupies some thirteen pages, written with that "rare felicity" so common to _the_ Bard of Scotland. We mention it, because of the peculiar happiness with which the collie, or Scottish shepherd-dog, is described in lines that Sir Edwin Landseer alone has equalled on canvas, or his brother Thomas with the graver--