THE ZooLoGist—NoveMBER, 1876. 5133 
The Eagles of Poetry and Prose. By the late Ep>warp Newman. 
[The following fragment appears to have been written with some idea 
that it should form the commencement of a popular work, to be entitled 
‘British Bird Biography’; the idea was probably abandoned, for no con- 
tinuation is to be found.] 
EacGLss are of two kinds and of two characters: the first may be 
called the poetic eagle ; he is royal, noble, lordly, brave: he strikes 
only at “the antlered monarch of the glen,” or at some beautiful 
child playing at the cottage-door; in either case he grasps the 
object in his talons, and soars aloft with it, up the face of some 
perpendicular crag; he will do this regardless of his enraged 
pursuers, at whom he shrieks his utter contempt and waves his 
defiant wing, and pursues his steady course unscathed through the 
bullets which ascend from below or the rocks hurled at him from 
above. His eyrie is a palace, where he feeds sumptuously every 
day, he and his spouse and the little ones. Woe to the cragsman 
who attempts to reach that eyrie! it would be certain death: it 
were safer to beard the lion in his den than to approach the 
monarch of the air in his exalted eyrie: cutlass and blunderbuss 
would prove unavailing: from the moment the cragsman makes 
the attempt his fate is sealed. Such is the eagle of poetry, the 
eagle of the imagination ! 
The eagle of prose is a very different bird: he will glide over 
the moors in search of a dead sheep that has fallen from a preci- 
pice, or, better still, for a dead horse—rare dainty: five or six—in 
one instance seven—eagles have been disturbed at this unsavoury 
repast: he will gorge himself with the carrion until he can scarcely 
fly. He is frightened at the yelping of a fox; trembles at the 
baying of a collie; dreads the shepherd boy, and flies hither and 
thither, in the extremity of fear, when pursued by the sea gull, the 
skua, the kestrel, or the hoodie—birds that are ever ready to pursue 
and insult his imperial majesty. Some reader may reasonably 
object that there are not enough dead horses, or dead sheep, to 
feed all the eagles of Scotland and Ireland. Oh, no! he will seize 
the newly dropped lamb, or a rabbit caught in a gin, or a ptarmigan 
struck by a peregrine, or a turkey poult, or a gosling from a farm- 
yard; but a dead rat is his particular weakness; whether on his 
native hills or in an aviary nothing is so acceptable as a dead rat. 
SECOND SERIES—VOL. XI. 3 F 
