86 A RETROSPECT OF THE LITERATURE 



Student, it will prove, — if we may venture to predict of the future, 

 from a retrospect of the past, — a work of great practical utility and 

 value. At the same time, it grieves us to state that., in the perhaps 

 exaggerated expectations which we had formed of Mr. Selby's great- 

 er work, we have been most woefully disappointed. The figures of 

 some of the birds, therein delineated, are, indeed, executed with ad- 

 mirable fidelity, boldness, and spirit ; but, in general, they do not 

 come out well from the ground : they are deficient in prominence 

 and rotundity ; and look as if they had been drawn from flattened 

 specimens. This objection, if we recollect right, — for the cumbrous 

 work is not now before us, — applies, with peculiar force, to the fi- 

 gure of the Great Bustard (vol. i, plate 64). The outline of many 

 of the subjects is, moreover, ijicorrect ; and the character not hap- 

 pily caught, and emhodied, by the Artist. Thus, were it not for the 

 fortunate accompaniment of the name, we should not have recog- 

 nized, in Mr. Selby's sketch, the figure of our old friend, the Rook, 

 — the bare-faced crow, Corvus nudirostris, of the quaint, humourous, 

 and sarcastic Senex.* The smaller birds are, also, without excep- 

 tion, in the rather awkward, though amusing, predicament of the 

 Irishman's Prize-Bull, — " a great deal larger than the life." 



Most of our readers are, probably, aware that Professor Rennie, 

 so celebrated for his ambi-dexterity and dispatch in the manufacture 

 of books, has, in addition to his other almost innumerable works, 

 published a new Edition of Col. Montagu's valuable Dictionary, 

 under the somewhat extraordinary title of an 0? nithological Dic- 

 tionary of British Birds, Now what any Ornithological Dictionary 

 could properly have treated of save Birds, we possess not the sub- 

 tlety of brain, fitting it to comprehend. This strange blunder 

 would have been, however, like a mole on the face of an otherwise 

 beautiful woman, but of little consequence, had the book proved 

 what, in these times, a Dictionary of British Birds, with the mate- 

 rials, the talents, and the industry, possesssd by the highly-gifted 

 Editor, ought surely to have been. Still, the numerous sins of 

 omission and commission, displayed in this most faulty compilation, 

 have already been visited so severely by the lash of criticism, that 



• See Analyst, vol. i, p. 259. 



