LOVES MEINIE. 7 



ter ? " Centum mille perdrices plnmbo confecit ; " * tliat 

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

 lord ; much questionable now, if indeed of more ^•alue 

 than that of many sparrows. 



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

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

 yet left it to the farmers of Scotland to relieve draught 

 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 Newcastle ? Written, and not written, for in- 

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

 cannot be written but l)y a scholar and a gentleman ; and 

 no Encjlish o-entleman in recent times has ever thouijlit of 

 birds except as flying targets, or flavourous dishes. The 

 only piece of natural history worth the 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 Besartus " 

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



