3 //SS BE ATS ON AND HER PETS. 
65 
that one might with ease select the books and pictures which 
would appeal to canaries, and there is more than one popular 
divine whose volumes would always adorn the seed-room table. 
Budgerrygars, in whom Miss Benson takes a deeply sentimental 
interest, are a little more to my mind. Their coats are much 
prettier, and are, indeed, exquisite by the side of the canary’s 
mawkish yellow. But the budgerrygars are wanting in taste. 
Their sentimental public fondlings, interesting at first, grow 
shocking by their prolongation. They remind one of amorous 
couples on a bank holiday, or of an under-bred minor poet 
maundering about his connubial felicity. One has a strange idea 
that the budgerr5'gar, when it grows a little older, may obtain 
some employment in the cit)q may live in the suburbs, and may 
turn into a canary. 
From Miss Benson’s delightful book I must not part without 
a word of praise for the illustrations, some of which are exceed- 
ingly happy.* No one, I think, has ever drawn a better guinea- 
pig (pp. 123, 126), and her field-mouse, standing on its hind-legs 
and grasping the bowl of a spoon with its paws while it greedily 
imbibes, is admirably life-like. Her cats are nicely drawn and 
fluffy, but nothing will induce me to believe that Pasht had so 
long a tail (p. 32). Of Jack, the canary, on p. 85, I will only 
say that it undoes, by its bold and obviously truthful portrai- 
ture, all that Miss Benson, in her partiality, has been trying to 
perform by her text. Intellect — in that eye ? Fleart — in that 
tail ? Never shall it be admitted. We advise all lovers of 
excellent stories about animals to buy Subject to Vanity, and to 
decide for themselves. 
Edmund Gosse. 
Two are here reproduced by the courtesy of the publishers. 
