LOVE S MEINIE. 7 



ter ? " Centum mille perdrices plumbo confecit ; " ^ that 

 is, indeed, too often the sum of the life of an English 

 lord ; much questionable now, if indeed of more value 

 than that of many sparrows. 



3. Is it not a strange fact, that, interested in nothing so 

 much for the last two hundred years, as in his horses, he 

 yet left it to the farmers of Scotland to relieve drauo:ht 

 horses from the bearing-rein ; f is it not one equally 

 strange that, master of the forests of England for a thou- 

 sand years, and of its libraries for three hundred, he left 

 the natural history of birds to be written by a card-prin- 

 ter's lad of l^ewcastle ? Written, and not written, for in- 

 deed we have no natural history of birds written yet. It 

 cannot be written but by a scholar and a gentleman ; and 

 no Eno^lish jyentleman in recent times has ever thousrht of 

 birds except as flying targets, or flavourous dishes. The 

 only piece of natural history worth tlie name in the Eng- 

 lish language, that I know of, is in the few lines of Milton 

 on the Creation. The only example of a proper manner 

 of contribution to natural history is in White's Letters 

 from Selborne. You know I have always spoken of Bew- 

 ick as pre-eminently a vulgar or boorish person, though 

 of splendid honour and genius; his vulgarity shows in 

 nothing so much as in the poverty of the details he has 

 collected, with the best intentions, and the shrewdest 



* The epitaph on Count Zachdarm, in " Sartor Resartus." 

 f Sir Arthur Helps. " Animals and their Masters," p. 67. 



