ing in their chambers, for they feed only at evening and in the night; during the winter, when vegetables were not to be got, I mingled this mess of bread with shreds of carrot, adding to it the rind of apples cut extremely thin; for though they are fond of the paring, the apple itself disgusts them. These, however, not being a sufficient substitute for the juice of summer herbs, they must at this time be supplied with water; but so placed that they cannot overset it into their beds. I must not omit that occasionally they are much pleased with twigs of hawthorn, and of the common brier, eating even the very wood when it is of considerable thickness.

Bess, I have said, died young; Tiney lived to be nine years old, and died at last, I have reason to think, of some hurt in his loins by a fall; Puss is still living, and has just completed his tenth year, discovering no signs of decay, nor even of age, except that he is grown more discreet and less frolicsome than he was. I cannot conclude without observing that I have lately introduced a dog to his acquaintance, a spaniel that had never seen a hare to a hare that had never seen a spaniel. I did it with great caution, but there was no real need of it. Puss discovered no token of fear, nor Marquis the least symptom of hostility. There is, therefore, it should seem, no natural antipathy between dog and hare, but the pursuit of the one occasions the flight of the other, and the dog pursues because he is trained to it; they eat bread at the same time out of the same hand, and are in all respects sociable and friendly.

I should not do complete justice to my subject, did I not add that they have no ill scent belonging to them, that they are indefatigably nice in keeping them

selves clean, for which purpose nature has furnished them with a brush under each foot; and that they are never infested by any vermin.

May 28, 1784.

MEMORANDUM FOUND AMONG MR. COWPER'S PAPERS.

Tuesday, March 9, 1786.

This day died poor Puss, aged eleven years eleven
He died between twelve and one at noon, of

months.
mere old age, and apparently without pain.

THOMAS GRAY.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

THOMAS GRAY was born in London, December 26, 1716, and died in Cambridge, July 30, 1771. Thus a full hundred years separated him from Milton, and what a difference there was in the two centuries in which these two poets lived! Each was a scholar in his tastes, and each was a poet who wrote not because he was a scholar and loved poetry, but because he knew himself possessed of the spark divine, and made his scholarship tributary to his poetry. But when Milton began to write, the sky was warm with the afterglow of the great Elizabethans ; when Gray came forward, the sky was lighted by the cold splendor of Pope's aurora. Milton passed quickly into the tempestuous period of the English civil war; Gray dwelt in the placid days which seemed scarcely to know any change in the barometer presaging the storms which swept over Europe shortly after his death.

And yet Gray, living apparently a timid life in the shelter of a university, and pleasing himself with literature, was one of the makers of English poetry. That is, he not only passed the torch along, but he fed it with new oil, so that the poets who followed him wrote better and differently because of his influence. The details of his life are soon told; the life of an unmarried scholar in times of

peace has few adventures. His father, Philip Gray, who inherited a good fortune, was a shrewd man of business, but apparently a violent and not over kind person, with