researches of the Public Schools Commission. There was an established
system and a regular vocabulary of bullying. Yet Cowper seems not to
have been so unhappy there as at the private school; he speaks of
himself as having excelled at cricket and football; and excellence in
cricket and football at a public school generally carries with it,
besides health and enjoyment, not merely immunity from bullying, but
high social consideration. With all Cowper's delicacy and
sensitiveness, he must have had a certain fund of physical strength, or
he could hardly have borne the literary labour of his later years,
especially as he was subject to the medical treatment of a worse than
empirical era. At one time he says, while he was at Westminster, his
spirits were so buoyant that he fancied he should never die, till a
skull thrown out before him by a gravedigger as he was passing through
St. Margaret's churchyard in the night recalled him to a sense of his
mortality.

The instruction at a public school in those days was exclusively
classical. Cowper was under Vincent Bourne, his portrait of whom is in
some respects a picture not only of its immediate subject, but of the
schoolmaster of the last century. "I love the memory of Vinny Bourne.
I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or
any of the writers in his way, except Ovid, and not at all inferior to
him. I love him too with a love of partiality, because he was usher of
the fifth form at Westminster when I passed through it. He was so
good-natured and so indolent that I lost more than I got by him, for he
made me as idle as himself. He was such a sloven, as if he had trusted
to his genius as a cloak for everything that could disgust you in his
person; and indeed in his writings he has almost made amends for all. .
. . . I remember seeing the Duke of Richmond set fire to his greasy
locks and box his ears to put it out again." Cowper learned, if not to