I04 The Poets Beasts. 



the Jews were ever any stricter than they are now ; and I 

 think he would be a foolhardy man who should walk 

 past a Hebrew pickpocket with a rasher of bacon sticking 

 obviously out of his coat-tails. 



It is not likely that any one, with eyes to see and ears 

 to hear, could write a paragraph descriptive of a summer 

 evening without mentioning the bat. So the regular occur- 

 rence of the bat-feature in Clare, Hurdis, Blomfield, 

 Wilson, Garth, Grahame, Wordsworth, Collins, Gay, Shelley, 

 and all the others who have sung of twilight, was only to be 

 expected. But it is curious that none should have made 

 remark of the flitter-mouse's amazing eyesight, admired its 

 unrivalled dexterity on the wing, or wondered at its voice 

 — those needle-points of sound, which are too keen and 

 quick for many ears to catch. 



Recent investigations by railway companies have shown 

 what a dangerous proportion of humanity is wholly or 

 partially colour-blind, and similar inquiries would prove 

 that a very large number of persons are unconscious of 

 their being partially deaf A test case is the bat's acute 

 voice. So Tennyson, requiring a simile, says " our voices 

 were thinner and fainter than any flitter-mouse shriek." I 

 have myself known four persons out of a company of six 

 unable to catch the sounds uttered by bats when hawking 

 overhead. Coleridge, for instance, says " the bat wheels 

 silent by," as if it was the regular thing for bats to be silent, 

 whereas the fact is, that it is very unusual for bats to be 

 silent when wheeling after insects. So the chances are 

 that Coleridge was bat-deaf. Yet he hears (in the same 

 stanza) " the solitary humble-bee singing in the bean-flower" 

 — one bee in a bean-ficld and not a score of bats overhead ! 

 But perhgj^s his humble-bee was really a cockchafer, or ten 

 thousand of them, busy among the beans. Crabbe could 

 hear the bats " feebly shriek," and speaks of the sound as 



