love's meinie. 



Scotland to relieve draught horses from the 

 bearing-rein?* 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 New- 

 castle ? f 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 lines of Milton on the Creation. 

 The only example of a proper manner of con- 

 tribution to natural history is in White's 

 Letters from Selborne. You know I have 

 always spoken of Bewick as pre-eminently a 

 vulgar or boorish person, though of splendid 

 honour and genius ; his vulgarity shows in 

 nothing so much as in the poverty of the 

 details he has collected, with the best inten- 

 tions, and the shrewdest sense, for English 



* Sir Arthur Helps. '•' Animals and their Masters," p. 67. 

 t Ariad. Flor., p. 221 ; vi. 45 (227), 



