70 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



scarcely a Dutchman could be seen either in Demerara or in Esse- 

 quibo. Numbers of my former foreign friends had sunk into the 

 grave, and numbers had gone to join their brethren in Surinam, the 

 last remaining colony of Holland on the terra fir ma of South 

 America. 



" The stork, whose shape and habits at once announce him to be 

 a lover of swamps and quagmires, is carefully protected in Holland- 

 The natives know his value ; and so good an understanding exists 

 betwixt themselves and this bird, that he appears in the heart of their 

 towns without the slightest symptoms of fear, and he builds his huge 

 nest upon the flat of their chimney-tops.* Would but our country 

 gentlemen put a stop to the indiscriminate slaughter of birds by their 

 ruthless gamekeepers, we should not have to visit Holland in order 

 to see the true habits of the stork, nor roam through Germany to 

 enjoy the soaring of the kite, a bird once very common in this part 

 of Yorkshire, but now a total stranger to it. 



" The Japan monsters shown in the museum at the Hague are 

 clumsy fabrications. I could make better work with my left hand. 

 The moth has perforated them to a great extent. 'Tis time, indeed, 

 that they were cast out of the way. One of them put me in mind oi 

 Ovid's ' Famine/ 



' Hirtus erat crinis, cava lumina, pallor in ore, 

 Labra incana situ, scabrae rubigine fauces.' 



But a sight of Potter's bull repays one for the penance done in 

 examining these mouldering imitations of what may be termed death 

 alive. 



" Celebrated as the museum at Leyden is in most of its depart- 

 ments, that of zoology, as far as preparation goes, is wretched in the 

 extreme. It is as bad as our own in London, and we might fancy 

 that Swainson had been there with his own taxidermy, marring every 

 form and every feature. It is lamentable, indeed, that such cele- 



* "It is thought a very wicked thing to hurt them," says Southey, writing 

 from Leyden in 1825. " They make their nests, which are as large as a great 

 clothes-basket, upon the houses and churches, and frequently when a house of 

 church is built, a wooden frame is made on the top for the storks to build 

 in." [ED.] 



