BT WAT OF APPENDIX. 
209 
birds and keeps them in cages to be amused by 
their twitterings. This is not a question of 
morality, nor even of sentiment, as some imagine ; 
but rather of taste, of the sense of fitness, of that 
something vaguely described as the feeling for 
nature, which is not universal. Thus, one man 
will dine with zest on a pheasant, partridge, or 
quail, but would be choked by a lark ; while another 
man will eat pheasant and lark with equal pleasure. 
Both may be good, honest, moral men; only one 
has that something which the other lacks. In one 
the soul responds to the skylark's music " sing- 
ing at heaven's gate," in the other not; to one 
the roasted lark is merely a savoury morsel ; the 
other, be he never so hungry, cannot dissociate 
the bird on the dish from that heavenly melody 
which reojistered a sensation in his brain, to be 
thereafter reproduced at will, together with the 
revived emotion. It is a curious question, and is 
no nearer to a settlement when one of these two I 
have described turns round and calls his neighbour 
a gross feeder, a worshipper of his belly, a soulless 
and brutish man; and when the other answers "pooh- 
pooh," and goes on complacently devouring larks with 
great gusto, until he is himself devoured of death. 
To those with whom I am in sympathy in this 
matter, who love to listen to and are yearly 
invigorated by the skylark's music, and whose 
p 
