DAWS IN THE WEST COUNTRY 85 



chatelaines of his lady admirers, and strive to 

 imitate that clear, penetrating sound of the 

 bird's voice, until he had mastered the rare and 

 beautiful arts of voice production and distinct 

 understandable speech. 



To go back to Cowper — the old poet who 

 has been much in men's thoughts of late, and 

 who appears to us as perhaps the most modern- 

 minded of those who ceased to live a century 

 ago. Undoubtedly he was as bad a naturalist 

 as any singer before or after him, and as any 

 true poet has a perfect right to be. As bad, 

 let us say, as Shakespeare and Wordsworth and 

 Tennyson. He does not, it is true, confound 

 the sparrow and hedge-sparrow like Wordsworth, 

 nor confound the white owl with the brown owl 

 like Tennyson, nor puzzle the ornithologist with 

 a "sea-blue bird of March." But we must not 

 forget that he addressed some verses to a night- 

 ingale heard on New Year's Day. It is clear that 

 he did not know the crows well, for in a letter of 

 May 10, 1780, to his friend Newton, he writes : 

 " A crow, rook, or raven, has built a nest in one of 

 the young elm-trees, at the side of Mrs. Aspray's 

 orchard." But when he wrote those words — 



