BLACKBIRDS, NIGHTINGALES, ETC. 315 



fore the nightingale has this great advantage 

 practically all to itself. I cannot help thinking that 

 it owes to this that easy and unquestioned superiority 

 which has been accorded to it in popular estimation 

 over all our other song-birds, especially such glorious 

 ones as the skylark, thrush, blackcap, blackbird, etc.* 



It will be said that I cannot appreciate the song of 

 the nightingale, though I am trying only properly 

 to appreciate that of other members of the choir. 

 Yet if I were to say that Shakespeare was full of 

 imperfections, that Julius CcBsar was a dull play. 

 King Lear a — I forget what, something uncompli- 

 mentary — play, and Richard III. such a one as 

 allowed " the discerning admirer " (a nom de plume) 

 to see the author's quill-driven expression whilst 

 writing it ; that, moreover, the seven ages of man 

 was by no means a fine passage, and that Hamlet's 

 soliloquy had been much over-rated, it would not be 

 said, on this account, that I was unable to appreciate 

 Shakespeare. I judge so, because others who make 

 these and similar statements (whether they or the 

 Baconians are the more pestilent, I find it difficult to 

 decide) pass, apparently, for the appreciative persons, 

 which, I suppose, they think themselves to be. Yet 

 how they can think so puzzles me, for people who 

 write in this way must be, really, as much bored by 

 Shakespeare as Shakespeare would have been by them, 

 had an introduction been possible — and surely they 

 must have found this out. I wish the poor, gullible 



* But do the musical powers of some birds differ in different 

 countries? Never have I heard the two last sinj here as I have in 

 Germany. Germans, as we know, are very musical. Have the same 

 general causes which etc., etc. ? 



