Was Lesbias sparrow a bullfinch?
A footnote to Michael McCarthy’s speculations on the subject of Lesbia’s sparrow (Nature Notebook, 29 August): in 1788, William Cowper wrote a mock-heroic ode “On the Death of Mrs Throckmorton’s Bullfinch”. It was prompted by an incident described by the poet in a letter: “Mrs Frog’s piping bullfinch has been eaten by a rat, and the villain left nothing but poor Bully’s beak behind him . . . . Did ever fair lady, from the Lesbia of Catullus to the present day, lose her bird and find no poet to commemorate the loss?” The linking of poor Bully and Lesbia’s “sparrow” here is suggestive, and appears to support the contention that the latter could indeed have been a bullfinch. Interestingly, the poem states that Bully was born in the Rhineland (and imported as a cage-bird to Britain?) and that “Though by nature mute, Or only with a whistle blest,/ Well-taught, he all the sound expressed/ Of flageolet or flute”. Not only Mrs Throckmorton, but Cowper’s cousin, Lady Hesketh, kept a pet bullfin
