Progress of English Poetry 
with her ingenuity of a barrister, insisted 
in a passage already referred to: 
The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark, 
When neither is attended ; and I think 
The nightingale, if she should sing by day, 
When every goose is cackling, would be thought 
No better a musician than the wren.1 
The lapse of two centuries from the 
time of Chaucer witnessed a change in 
the mood of English poetry in regard to 
its treatment of birds. The simple and 
unaffected joy in the voices of the grove, 
so conspicuous in the poems of the author 
of the Canterbury Tales, had not become 
less, but it had been accompanied by 
the growth of a more observant and con- 
templative spirit. While bird-music was 
as much appreciated as ever, a much wider 
field of interest in the feathered tribes had 
been entered upon. Greater familiarity 
with bird-life had been attained, and much 
more was known about the habits of birds. 
1 Merchant of Venice, v. 1. 102. 
III 
