Note 3 — THE CORRESPONDENCE OF WILLIAM COWPER

How refreshing is that whiff of good honest smoke in the abstemious lives of Cowper and John Newton! I have just seen, in W. Tuckwell's Reminiscences of a Radical Parson, a happy allusion to William Bull's pipes: "To Olney, under the auspices of a benevolent Quaker.... I saw all the relics: the parlour where bewitching Lady Austen's shuttlecock flew to and fro; the hole made in the wall for the entrance and exit of the hares; the poet's bedroom; Mrs. Unwin's room, where, as she knelt by the bed in prayer, her clothes caught fire. The garden was in other hands, but I obtained leave to enter it. Of course, I went straight to the summer-house, small, and with not much glass, the wall and ceiling covered with names, Cowper's wig-block on the table, a hole in the floor where that mellow divine, the Reverend Mr. Bull, kept his pipes; outside, the bed of pinks celebrated affectionately in one of his letters to Joseph Hill, pipings from which are still growing in my garden."—The date of the Rev. Mr. Tuckwell's visit to Olney is not indicated, but his Reminiscences were published in the present year, 1905.