love's meinie. 13 



10. You probably, some of you, never heard of the 

 bhie-breast ; very few, certainly, have seen one alive, 

 and, if alive, certainly not wild in England. 



Here is a picture of it, daintily done,"^ and you can 

 see the pretty blue shield on its breast, perhaps, at this 

 distance. Yain shield, if ever the fair little thing is 

 w^retched enough to set foot on English ground ! I find 

 the last that was seen was shot at Margrate so lon^ a2:o as 

 18^2, — and there seems to be no official record of any 

 visit before that, since Mr. Thomas Embledon shot one 

 on Newcastle town moor in 1816. But this rarity of visit 

 to us is "strange; other birds have no such clear objection 

 to being shot, and really seem to come to England ex- 

 pressly for the purpose. And yet this blue-bird — (one 

 can't say " blue robin " — I think we shall have to call 

 him " bluet," like the cornflower) — stays in Sweden, 

 where it sings so sweetly that it is called " a hundred 

 tongues." 



11. That, then, is the utmost which the lords of land, 

 and masters of science, do for us in their watch wpon our 

 feathered suppliants. One kills them, the other writes 

 classifying epitaphs. 



We have next to ask what the poets, painters, and 

 monks have done. 



The poets — among whom I affectionately and reverent- 

 ly class the sweet singers o£ the nursery, mothers and 



* Mr. Gould's, in his " Birds of Great Britain." 



