I. THE ROBIN. 7 



destruction of the creatures which they professed to 

 beheve even the Most High would not see perish 

 without pity ; and, in recent days, it is fast becoming 

 the only definition of aristocracy, that the principal 

 business of its life is the killing of sparrows. 



Sparrows, or pigeons, or partridges, what does it 

 matter .'' " Centum mille perdrices plumbo con- 

 fecit;"* that is, indeed, too often the sum of the 

 life of an English lord ; much questionable now, if 

 indeed of more value than that of many sparrows. 



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

 so much 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;t is it 

 not one equally strange that, master of the forests 

 of England for a thousand years, and of its libraries 

 for three hundred, he left the natural history of birds 

 to be written by a card-printer's lad of Newcastle.-* 

 Written, and not written, for indeed we have no 

 natural history of birds written yet. It cannot be 

 written but by a scholar and a gentleman ; and no 

 English gentleman in recent times has ever thought 

 of birds except as flying targets, or flavourous dishes. 

 The only piece of natural history worth the name in 

 the English language, that I know of, is in the few 



* The epitaph on Count Zachdarm, in " Sartor Resartus." 

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



