ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS 105 



whether he knew much about them or not. He 

 would orate upon art, music, poetry, and religion, 

 of which he knew a great deal, and even on 

 Natural History, about which he knew nothing, but 

 he was always charming to everybody — and especi- 

 ally to children — and I have several letters from 

 him which show the trouble this great man, whose life 

 was then oppressed with all the cares of a Prime 

 Minister, took to discuss with an insignificant boy 

 like myself the relations of birds and their influence 

 on human character. 



Speaking of Natural History, we should expect 

 that our best poets, being embued with a love of all 

 that was beautiful and interesting in the great 

 out-of-doors, would display some slight knowledge 

 of the subject, but my experience is, that there is 

 no class of writers — with the exception of modern 

 novelists and pressmen — who are so woefully ignor- 

 ant of what goes on around them in the country 

 as our poets. Tennyson is not so bad, as he never 

 ventures beyond a description of common things 

 associated with his early Lincolnshire home. George 

 Meredith knew a little about plants, and Keats 

 had probably heard a nightingale. "I do love 

 bullfinches," said Matthew Arnold one day at 

 Murthly, as we stopped to admire two chaffinches 

 that settled on the roadway in front of us. Now 

 Matthew Arnold was an Oxford man and a scholar, 

 but he did not know the commonest birds, plants 

 or trees, and with all his learning he missed the best 

 in fife. The only poet whose work ranges over a 

 vast variety of subjects, and who makes few mis- 

 takes in the ways of birds and beasts, is Rudyard 

 Kipling, who, being a mental giant, like Roosevelt, 



