224 Summer Studies of Birds and Books CHAP, vin 



only imagine a little upright man with a keen eye 

 and complacent expression, and probably with a 

 strong common sense and practical turn of mind, 

 quite ready to assert himself where he thought he 

 had a right, but also quite unwilling to push himself 

 into notice in a world where he was not at home. 

 Still, if we are really to know anything worth know- 

 ing about him, we must go to his book, and read it 

 again and again ; and it will always charm us with 

 the same lesson of keen and sympathetic insight 

 into nature, of perfect candour in reasoning, and of 

 admirable taste in expression. Sentimentality and 

 pedantry are alike absent from it; where he feels 

 tenderly he rather hints it than expresses it, and 

 when his scholarship induces him to quote a line of 

 Virgil, he invariably hits the mark with it. As a 

 man he must have had his faults, but as the writer 

 of his one book he assuredly came very near to 

 perfection. 



