For many years Elisha Cain was its overseer.

'Cain and Abel were the first farmers, and you see one of them grumbled.

As the inventor of murder, and the father of the art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius.

[Footnote 157: Cowper's verse in The Task seems to be all that is happy in the way of translation of Varro's text, "divina natura dedit agros, ars humana aedificavit urbes": but Cowley's "God the first garden made, and the first city Cain" was probably Cowper's source.

'Tis true, in some places, his wit is independent of his words, as in that of the Rebel Scot "Had CAIN been Scot, GOD would have changed his doom, Not forced him wander, but confined him home.

But, notwithstanding its manifold immeasurable imaginations, Cain is only a polemical controversy, the doctrines of which might have been better discussed in the pulpit of a college chapel.

This is exceedingly fine also, and wonderful as a variation upon that awful music; but Cain is the astonishment and the overwhelmingness.

[Abelem fuisse morsibus dilaceratum à Cain;] by many others, with the jaw-bone of an ass; which is the tooling adopted by most painters.