202 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



Rumtifooian character, as delineated by the brisk and 

 pithy Hobson, let us turn to the autobiography. 

 Being tanned and furrowed by wandering barefoot in 

 the tropics, this muscular and supple epigrammatist 

 was in personal appearance " half Rosinante, half 

 Bucephalus," and " on taking a view of me from top 

 to toe you would say that the after part of Tithonus 

 had been glazed upon the lower part of Ajax." He 

 was, he says, descended from Sir Thomas More, and 

 the Catholic Watertons were, of course, eclipsed since 

 the sway of " that ferocious brute, Henry VIII," that 

 " adulterous king with his cormorant court," a very 

 proper father to the " old virgin queen " who resides 

 not among "those happy souls who dwell in yellow 

 meads of asphodel," but " in the sulphurous walks 

 beyond the river Styx." I would, he says, " rather 

 run the risk of going to hell with the Venerable Bede 

 than make a dash at heaven in company with Dutch 

 William." 



At school he was a nailer for finding birds' nests, 

 and the birch merely inflamed " my ruling passion.'* 

 " Thus are bright colours in crockery-ware made per- 

 manent by the action of fire; thus is dough turned 

 into crust by submitting it to the oven's heat," is our 

 hero's Euphuistic comment upon the efficacy of refor- 

 mative punishment. After leaving the Jesuits' college 

 at Stonyhurst, and enjoying a run of fevers and 

 earthquakes in Lisbon, he went to Demerara, and had 

 some desultory fighting with the Spaniards up the 

 Orinoco. The corpulent Governor of Angustura affords 

 him an opportunity for one of those racy Panzaisms 

 with which his works are pitted : "He (the Governor) 

 had not got half-way through his soup before he 

 began visibly to liquefy. I looked at him and be- 

 thought me of the old saying, * How I sweat ! ' said 

 the mutton-chop to the gridiron." Then follows a 

 maze of adventures and long wanderings between 1804 

 and 1825, told with such candour, not to say in- 

 genuousness, that I can only exclaim with him against 

 the scurrilous Swainson, the naturalist and green-eyed 

 monster who threw a shameful doubt on them. 



