AVALON AND A BLACKBIRD 191 



a person talking sweetly and mingling talk with 

 snatches of song — it is all this combined which has 

 served to make the blackbird a favourite and more 

 to most of us as a songster than any other, not excepting 

 the nightingale. If the editor of some widely-circu- 

 lating newspaper would put the question to the vote, 

 the blackbird would probably come first, in spite of 

 the myths and traditions which have endeared certain 

 other species to us from childhood — the cuckoo the 

 messenger of spring, the dove that mourns for its 

 love, and Philomel leaning her breast upon a thorn ; 

 the temple-building martlet, and robin redbreast 

 who in winter comes to us for crumbs and has so great 

 an affection for our kind that in woods and desert 

 places he will strew leaves over the friendless bodies 

 of unburied men. 



But, it may be said, we have always had the blackbird 

 in Britain, a resident species, very common and univer- 

 sally distributed — why does it not figure more promi- 

 nently in our old literature ? If this can be taken as 

 a test undoubtedly the blackbird comes a long way 

 after the nightingale, though this species is known only 

 in a portion of England, actually less than a fourth 

 part of the British area over which the black ouzel with 

 orange-tawny bill is a familiar songster. It is however 

 not a good test. The fact that our older poets, in- 

 cluding those of Scotland and Wales, make much of 

 the nightingale merely serves to show that they 

 were following a convention of the Continental poets, 

 ancient and modern. 



