Cummings, A biogrnphical sketch of Col. George Montagu. SOQ 



ignorant of the perils besetting her — a Nero fiddling while Rome 

 burnt. But nothing is further from the truth. Montagu was 

 sufficiently old fashioned to be a patriot. He was a soldier who 

 fought for his country and believed in the martial axiom that 

 might is right. The fact is he was a Colonel, an upright and 

 honourable man with a mind perhaps a little too conscious of 

 its own rectitude, very susceptible to outrage and a temperament 

 somewhat irate according to type. 



Critics before and since the days of the "tartarly Quarterly" 

 were apt to be outspoken and Montagu's Ornithological Dictionary 

 appears to have received some severe treatment from the 

 reviewers on its first appearance for in the introduction to 

 the Supplement which appeared some years later he concludes 

 with a plea for leniency towards errors caused by a slip of the 

 pen or by typographical delinquencies. Then he goes on, in the 

 grand manner, "From those whose pen sips no other drink but 

 gall, we have no more expectation of favour than from the hand 

 of an assassin continually imbued in blood. Their trades are 

 somewhat congenial, (sic) each stabs in the dark and are too fre- 

 quently actuated by similiar motives." No one but a Colonel 

 could have written thus. 



If the truth must be told Montagu was not the master of a 

 very perfect style nor of a very perfect grammar. A reviewer 

 of the Supplement, writing in the Monthly Review for August, 

 1817, enters a protest against the legitimacy of such modes of 

 expression as: — "it was thought most advantageous to the 

 public to give it in its present state than to wait," "innumerate," 

 "ossious," "delatable," "feathers which characterizes," "curviture," 

 "the coverts of the ears is," "a projecting callous," "its rarity and 

 extreme locality has been," "where there was scarcely any mem- 

 branous divisions," "the size and weight is," "a mucous membrane/' 

 "it should seem the shag is subject to vary in the form of their 

 occasional crest," "must be very different in Picardy than in 

 Sussex," "neither Brisson nor Buffon appear to have," ,"the 

 mottled appearance of old and new feathers are," "the same 

 indicative of immaturity," — whence it appears that the Colonel 

 found the problems of grammar and spelling for more intrac- 

 table than the problems of zoological science with many of 

 which he so ably dealt. So far as the spelling goes he sinned 

 in good company — Dickens and R. L. Stevenson could not spell 



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