PREFACE. 



No apology for the production of a 

 work of this kind is necessary, and I give 

 none, except it be the book itself. Those 

 in whose bosoms the seeds of refinement, 

 sown by Education or Nature, have sprang 

 into stately and pleasant trees, will hail 

 the work as having supplied a void too 

 long existing. Those who despise, or 

 affect to despise, the little warblers on 

 whose habits and treatment it discourses, 

 will have a prejudice not to be easily 

 overcome; and one, moreover, which, de- 

 spising them as I do, I care not to ob- 

 literate. 



Shakspeare decries "the man who hath 

 no music in his soul;" and any other 

 vigorous writer might make a very fine, 

 as well as just invective against him who 

 loves not the music of birds. So far as 

 my own observation has been extended, it 

 has satisfied me that he who listens not 



