CHARLES WATERTON 207 



There was once a scientific squabble as to the defective 

 scent of the vulture, and when a vulture's eyes had been 

 put out and he had refused food immediately afterwards, 

 Waterton bursts forth with, " I myself have been un- 

 able to eat when in the gripes," and since the vultures 

 have received such " a tremendous blow on the nose," 



*' I am now quite prepared to receive accounts from Charleston 

 of vultures attacking every shoulder-of-mutton sign in the streets, 

 or attempting to gobble down the painted sausages over the shop 

 doors, or tugging with might and main at the dim and faded eyes 

 in some decaying portrait of the immortal Doctor Franklin." 



What good sense there is here and expressed with how 

 pungent a wit ! He hated docking, and looked upon 

 all " the animal creation " as beautiful, having a special 

 fondness for the toad. Even when we see a dead cay- 

 man, " we may remark, with the monster hero, treading 

 over his own prostrate mother, we did not think that 

 they had been so handsome." His opinion about the 

 " Hanoverian rat," " that it actually came over in the 

 same ship which conveyed the new dynasty to these 

 shores," is not perhaps strictly accurate, but who would 

 not sacrifice all the exact classifications in the world 

 for so seductive a comment ? It was not considered 

 true in his time that " the sooty-black crow is as chaste 

 and constant as the snow-white dove " ; but I for 

 one, had I read Waterton in his lifetime, would never 

 have believed otherwise. I shall know exactly what 

 to do now " in case of collision with the larger canine 

 tribes," I shall feel a particular veneration for the cor- 

 morant after reading : " Stay here, poor wandering 

 mariner, so long as it pleaseth thee to do so. I do not 

 care if thou takest all the eels in the lake. Thou art 

 welcome to them." 



Had Waterton given us nothing but whimsies, his 

 were not only an odd but an obvious personality. 

 But Waterton combines the incompatibles of truth and 

 eccentricity, much in the same way that Lamb did. 

 With Lamb the process was a conscious literary artifice, 

 as it was with Lear's Fool. But Waterton reveals 

 truth in and through a series of antics of which he was 



