quality among English poets, the gift of humour, which was very singularly absent from others who possessed many other of the higher qualities of the intellect. Certain of his poems, moreover,—for example, “To Mary,” “The Receipt of my Mother’s Portrait,” and the ballad “On the Loss of the Royal George,”—will, it may safely be affirmed, continue to be familiar to each successive generation in a way that pertains to few things in literature. Added to this, one may note Cowper’s distinction as a letter-writer. He ranks among the half-dozen greatest letter-writers in the English language, and he was perhaps the only great letter-writer with whom the felicity was due to the power of what he has seen rather than what he has read.
Bibliography.—The first important life of Cowper was by Hayley in 1803. In its complete form it appeared in 4 volumes in 1806 and was reprinted in 1809 and 1812. It was reprinted again by the Rev. T. S. Grimshawe with the Correspondence in 8 volumes in 1835. Robert Southey’s much more valuable Life and Letters appeared also in 15 volumes in 1834–1837. The Private Correspondence, edited by John Johnson, appeared in 2 volumes in 1824 and again in 1835. The Complete Correspondence, edited by Thomas Wright, was published in 1904, but more correspondence appeared in Notes and Queries, July, August and September 1904, and in The Poems of William Cowper, edited by J. C. Bailey (1905). Edward Dowden unearthed new correspondence with William Hayley in The Atlantic Monthly (1907). Short lives of Cowper have appeared in many quarters, from Thomas Taylor’s (1833) to Goldwin Smith’s in the “English Men of Letters” series (1880). Another brief biography of great merit is attached to the Globe edition of Cowper’s Works. Essays by Leslie Stephen, Stopford Brooke, Whitwell Elwin, George Eliot and Walter Bagehot deserve attention. See also St Beuve’s Causeries du Lundi (1868), vol. xi.; Letters of Lady Hesketh to John Johnson (1901); John Newton, by the Rev. Josiah Bull (1868); Cowper and Mary Unwin, by Caroline Gearey (1900); and A Concordance to the Poetic Works of William Cowper, by John Neave (1887). (C. K. S.)
COWRY, the popular name of the shells of the Cypraeida, a
family of mollusks. Upwards of 100 species are recognized,
and they are widely distributed over the world—their habitat
being the shallow water along the sea-shore. The best known
is the money cowry or Cypraea moneta, a small shell about half
an inch in length, white and straw-coloured without and blue
within, which derives its distinctive name from the fact that in
various countries it has been employed as a kind of currency.
(See Shell-money.) In Africa among those tribes, such as the
Niam-Niam, who do not recognize their monetary value, the
shells are in demand as fashionable decorations, just as in
Germany they were in use as an ornament for horses’ harness, and
were popular enough to acquire several native names, such as
Brustharnisch or breastplates, and Otterköpfchen or little adders’
heads. Besides the Cypraea moneta various species are employed
in this decorative use. The Cypraea aurora is a mark of chieftainship
among the natives of the Friendly Islands; the Cypraea
annulus is a favourite with the Asiatic islanders; and several of
the larger kinds have been used in Europe for the carving of
cameos. The tiger cowry, Cypraea tigris, so well known as a
mantelpiece ornament in England and America, is commonly
used by the natives of the Sandwich Islands to sink their nets;
and they have also an ingenious plan of cementing portions of
several shells into a smooth oval ball which they then employ as a
bait to catch the cuttle-fish. While the species already mentioned
occur in myriads in their respective habitats, the Cypraea princeps
and the Cypraea umbilicata are extremely rare.
COW-TREE, or Milk-tree, Brosimum Galactodendron (natural
order Moraceae), a native of Venezuela. As in other members of
the order, the stem contains a milky latex, which flows out in
considerable quantities when a notch is cut in it. The “milk”
is sweet and pleasant tasting. Another species, B. Alicastrum,
the bread-nut tree, a native of central America and Jamaica,
bears a fruit which is cooked and eaten. The bread-fruit
(Artocarpus) is an allied genus of the same natural order.
COX, DAVID (1783–1859), English painter, was born on the 29th of April 1783, in a small house attached to the forge of his father, a hardworking master smith, in a mean suburb of Birmingham. Turning his hand to what he could get to do, Joseph Cox, the father, was both blacksmith and whitesmith, and when the war with France began took to the making of bayonets and horse shoes, on wholesale commission, and immediately the boy David was thought able to assist he was taken from the poor elementary school in the neighbourhood, and set to the anvil. The attempt to turn the boy to this kind of labour had, however, been made too early; it was too heavy for his strength, and he was sent to what was called by the cyclops of Birmingham a “toy trade,” making lacquered buckles, painted lockets, tin snuff-boxes and other “fancy” articles. Here David very soon acquired some power of painting miniatures, and his talents might have been misdirected had his master, Fieldler by name, not released him from his apprenticeship by dying by his own hand; and David found an opening as colour-grinder and scene-painter’s fag in the theatre then leased, with several others, by the father of Macready, the tragedian.
This obscure step, not one of promotion at the time, was really the most important incident in the uneventful career of Cox. The boy, who had inherited a rather weakly body, and had been trained with care by a pious mother, while intellectually negative and unable to cope with any kind of learning whatever, had endless perseverance, great strength of application, and all through life remained genial, gentle, simple-minded and modest, his penetration and self-reliance being wholly professional, inspired by his love of nature and his knowledge of his subject. Not very quick, and with little versatility, he went step by step in one line of study from the time he began to get the smallest remuneration for his pictures to the age of seventy-five, when he painted large in oil very much the same class of subjects he had of old produced small in water-colours, with the same impressive and unaffectedly noble sentiment, only increased by the mastery of almost infinite practice. He was never led astray by fictitious splendour of any kind, except once indeed in 1825, when he imitated Turner, and produced a classic subject he called “Carthage, Aeneas, and Achates.” He never visited Venice or Egypt, or crossed the Channel except for a week or two in Belgium and Paris, and never even went to Scotland for painting purposes. Bettws-y-Coed and its neighbourhood was everything to him, and characteristics most truly English were beloved by him with a sort of filial instinct. So completely did he love the country, that even London, where it was his interest to live, had few attractions, and did not retain him long.
This residence in the metropolis which began in 1804 was, however, of the most essential educational advantage to him. The Water-Colour Society was established the year after he arrived, and was mainly supported by landscape-painters. He was not, of course, admitted at first into membership, not till 1813, before which time an attempt to establish a rival exhibition had been made. In this Cox joined, the result being very serious to him, an entire failure entailing the seizure and forced sale of all the pictures. At that time the tightest economy was the rule with him, and to save the trifling cost of new strainers or stretching boards, he covered up one picture by another. When these works were prepared for re-sale, fifty years afterwards, some of them yielded picture after picture, peeled off the boards like the waistcoats from the body of the gravedigger in Hamlet!
While lodging near Astley’s Circus he married his landlady’s daughter, and then took a modest cottage at Dulwich, where he gradually left off scene-painting and became teacher, giving lessons at ten shillings a lesson. This entailed walking to the pupils’ homes, and the gift of the paintings done before the pupils. These have since been frequently sold for large sums, but his own price, when lucky enough to sell his best works, was never over a few pounds, and more frequently about fifteen shillings. Sometimes, indeed, he sold them in quantities at two pounds a dozen to be resold to country teachers. By and by he resisted the leaving of the work done to the pupil, but with little advantage to himself, as he saw no end to the accumulation of his own productions, and actually tore them up, and threw them into areas, or pushed them into drains during his trudge homeward. A number of years after he pointed out a particular drain to a friend, and said, “Many a work of mine has gone down that way to the Thames!”
Shortly after he had turned thirty, his stay in London suddenly
