Pigeons in Poetry and Literature. 
9 
pleasure I owe to you, having taken to the home-loving, domestic pigeons as a rustic imitation of 
your doves ; and they blend well with my flower-garden.” This passage carries one back 
irresistibly to poor Mary Queen of Scots, who, in a letter dated 1574, thus writes to a friend 
abroad : “ I beg you to procure me pigeons, red partridges, and hens from Barbary. I intend to 
endeavour to rear them in this country, or to feed them in cages as I do all the small birds I 
can come by — a pastime for a prisoner.” 
We must not, however, linger in the tempting fields of English literature, and a few more 
quotations must suffice. Thus does Tom Hood — he who sung the “ Song of the Shirt” — connect 
pigeons with a home : — 
“No clog was at the threshold, great or small ; 
No pigeon on the roof— no household creature — 
No cat demurely dosing on the wall — 
Not one domestic feature.” 
And how exquisitely does Tennyson, in “ The Gardener’s Daughter,” bring in the habits of 
pigeons to illustrate the play of feeling he is describing ! 
“ We spoke of other things : we ’coursed about 
The subject most at heart, more near and near. 
Like doves about a dovecote, wheeling round 
The central wish, until we settled there." 
Tennyson had evidently watched the dovecote with an observant eye, for the delight the 
inmates take in basking in the sun — especially the morning sun — had not escaped him. Thus he 
writes in his “Princess:” — 
“ Back again we crost the court 
To Lady Psyche’s : as we entered in 
There sat along the forms, like morning doves. 
That sun their milky bosoms on the thatch, 
A patient row of pupils.” 
Whether Pope ever kept fancy pigeons is uncertain ; but from his known acquaintance 
with old John Moore, the first authentic writer upon them, to whom he addressed the curious 
lines quoted by-and-by, he must have known much about them. A contemporary of Pope — 
John Gray — certainly had “an eye” for their beauties; for in his “Epistle to the Earl of 
Burlington ” he writes : — 
“Then Turnham Green, which dainty pigeons fed, 
But feeds no more, for Solomon is dead. ” 
To which is added in a note, “ Solomon was a man famed for keeping pigeons.” But farther back 
still, going back in our gossipy review beyond our oldest pigeon-writer (Moore), midway almost 
to that gigantic genius with whom we began, we may make just two extracts from dear, garrulous, 
we fear most unprincipled, but certainly most entertaining, Samuel Pepys, who must assuredly have 
been sent into the world for the express purpose of keeping a diary. In the first, speaking of the 
effects of the Great Fire of London, he clearly proves the existence of pigeon-fanciers — ay, and of 
“dormers” too — even in those days; for he writes, “Among other things the poor pigeons, I 
perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and barbuies till they 
burned their wings and fell down.” In the second, dated September 11, 1661, he writes the 
following, which will go to the very hearts of all cat-plagued pigeon-fanciers : “ To Dr. Williams, 
who did carry me into his garden, where he hath abundance of grapes ; and he did show me a dog 
2 
