2o8 Cummings, A biographical sketch of Col. George Monagu. 



whether he was mad — a difficult decision which must fall to the 

 lot of every biographer of Blake. Montagu was neither a liar, nor a 

 vagabond nor a lunatic. He started no movement, he was the centre 

 of no new culture. The Préraphaélites or the Transcendentalists 

 will not be called into account. Let the dead bury their dead. 

 Col. George Montagu was just an upright simple-minded, English 

 country gentleman — un cœur simple, in the meaning of Flau- 

 bert — who loved Natural History with a love which imme- 

 diately appeals to all who are naturalists rather than to those for 

 whom zoology is only an academic affectation. 



Edward Fitzgerald wished there were more biographies of the 

 lesser men. It is certainly impossible to claim for Montagu any- 

 thing more . than that he was a painstaking and practical field 

 zoologist who helped to lay the foundations of the Natural His- 

 tory of our country. He is distinctly one of the lesser men in 

 the gallery of English zoologists. He was a decidedly com- 

 mon-place individual, clever but not intellectual, industrious 

 but not very brilliant. There were many men, no doubt, in 

 England, in his day of far greater talents-, witty, able and in- 

 tellectual men, with magnetism of personality and commanding 

 strength of character. Yet none or very few perhaps have left 

 any record behind of their passage through the world. Never a 

 whisper reaches us that ever they lived and died. Fame is uncer- 

 tain and too dependent on the chance play of circumstances ever 

 to occupy the mind of thoughtful men for long. Who ever 

 would have heard of Amiel if he had not formed the diary 

 habit, or of Mendel if de Vries, Correns or Tschermak had not 

 rediscovered him ? It may perhaps be food for the reflective 

 cynic to be told that nevertheless the memory of Montagu, one 

 of the lesser men, is perpetuated. Yet I am disposed to believe 

 that Montagu was one of those men whom Fitzgerald meant 

 when he said that more biographies of them were very desirable. 



There is no gainsaying his enthusiasm for zoology, for in 

 178g he wrote to Gilbert White that were he not bound by 

 conjugal attachments he would have liked to ride his hobby 

 into distant parts. The zeal indicated in the letters and proved 

 by the extent of his researches made in the troublous times of 

 the end of the 18 th and beginning of the igth century perhaps 

 suggest to the reader at first a virtuoso so entirely immersed in 

 his studies as to be careless of the destiny of his country and 



