188 
MICHELET’S “ L’OISEAU.” 
[Nature and Art, June 1, 1867. 
need only turn the pages before us to find them at their busy 
game. As we look at one of the scenes, we remember an old 
room which we have not entered for ever so many years. 
There is a bright morning sunshine on the turf and 
shrubbery outside ; but the glass door of the room is 
darkened by a pair of cherry trees in full blossom. The 
youngster within, poring over his book, suddenly looks up ; 
he has been startled by a rush and chatter ; and there they 
are, five bold dashing birds, hooded with black and breasted 
with yellow : they are twittering and fluttering one above 
another, or swinging head downwards from a spray, and 
sending a shower of blossoms right and left. He watches 
them, half sorry for the rifled bough ; but he would give up 
whole days of flowers and all hopes of cherries for the sake 
of catching “ ae blink o’ the bonnie birdies.” “That may 
be all very fine for you,” some market-gardener will reply, 
“ but I don’t moil and toil in my orchard just to pamper up 
a flock of idle titmice.” Oh, hard-headed Rusticus, what are 
the labours of thee and thy cart-horse compared with those 
of the father of eighteen tits ? And whilst working for 
them, is ,he not also working for thee ? True, he has a 
reckless way of picking at a worm in the bud ; yet strike the 
balance, and he may prove to be the best labourer on thy 
grounds. But we are appealing to a practical man, who 
only believes what he sees, and cannot see very far. And 
thus the slaughter of the innocents still goes on, in spite of 
letters to the Times on the great subject of little birds. 
The question is really great, for it is permanent ; whilst 
the Luxemburg affair is already beginning to pass over. 
Michelet enters upon this part of his discourse with becom- 
ing gravity : something after this fashion. The greedy 
husbandman, as Virgil justly terms him, — the husbandman 
blinded by his greed — grudges to his friends what he lavishes 
upon his foes. Not a grain for him who, in the rainy 
season, turned every leaf over and over, and routed up the 
nests of the larvae ! but sacks of corn for the full-grown 
insects, and whole fields for the nomade hordes, which the 
birds would at least have decimated ! Wherever the bird 
has been outlawed, the insect has avenged him. In the isle 
of Bourbon a price was set upon the head of the martin : 
he disappeared, and the locusts took possession of the 
island. A similar scourge swept across North America 
when they doomed the starling, the defender of the maize. 
Even the sparrow protects more than he destroys ; and he 
has been recalled to Hungary, after years of proscription, 
in order to check the ravages of the cockchafer. The latter 
insect, in its grub state, devours the roots of the grasses ; 
and “ I have seen (says Michelet) a meadow in Normandy 
where the entire surface was dried up, and could be rolled 
off the subsoil like a carpet.” And why was this ? Because 
they had effectually scared away the crows. The deadliest 
enemies of the northern harvest pass the winter under- 
ground. They lie there in the shape of eggs. A few are 
touched by frost, but most of them are beyond its reach. 
In spring they swarm into life, and maintain it at the 
expense of the farmer. This is the time for the rook, who 
plucks up the withered grass, and destroys the destroyer. 
And as for the creeping things upon plant or tree, no purge 
is so good for them as the mother titmouse, who can 
scarcely keep her score of young beaks quiet with three 
hundred worms a day. 
We have just been quoting the statistics of Michelet, 
who seems to have mustered the beaks of two broods of the 
titmouse together. It is quite true that, in the course of 
the summer, there have sometimes been more than twenty 
in one nest, all agape for caterpillars. That hole in a 
woodland tree, where the brave nest-mother sits hissing and 
pecking at the schoolboy’s finger, ought to be held at least 
as sacred as our game preserves. It is a lion’s den, but 
only for our enemies. It swallows flocks and herds 
that would otherwise have blackened and shrivelled up 
the leaves, and hung the branches with hideous webs. 
And as each successive brood leaves home, the growing tits 
by no means leave their appetites behind them. They soon 
rival their parents in hopping along the twigs after the 
grub, and in stretching their wings after the moth. Their 
powers of vision are microscopic. It is stated by Mudie 
(British Birds, 1854, vol. i., p. 405) that “ an insect a 
quarter of an inch long will appear as large to the eye of 
the long-tailed tit as the common mouse does to the eye of 
man when held as near as it can be seen.” Thus, in the 
orchards at winter-time, they ferret out the eggs of vermin 
where no gardener could possibly detect them. The other 
members of the same family, whether clad in black and 
yellow or in bright blue feathers, are almost equally sharp- 
sighted and useful ; and the thefts which they commit are 
very trifling. Yet these friends of the countryman are 
strung up by him, and borne in triumph to the sparrow- 
clubs ; together with blackbirds and thrushes, which have 
consumed more slugs than fruits ; and together with the 
finches, including even Goldie, who lives by clearing the land 
of weeds and thistles. Can it be said that they order these 
matters better in France ? Not a bit, we fear. We have 
somewhere read of French rustics whose only notion of a 
wild bird was a magpie. And in the present volumo 
(p. 397) a diatribe against idle shooting begins thus : 
“ There are many kinds of birds that no longer halt in their 
passage over France. One may see them, high out of range, 
straining their pinions, and saying to each other, ‘ Onward, 
hasten onward ! keep aloof from the land of death, the land 
of destruction.’ ” 
At the end of this diatribe Giacomelli has placed one of 
his elegant tail-pieces. It is the stump of an old double- 
barrelled gun, with two dicky-birds perched on the lock, 
singing “ Oh be joyful.” It prefigures a millennium which 
is still far distant. Whenever it does arrive, it will bring 
cold comfort to the game birds. They will soon disappear 
when they cease to afford a good day’s shooting ; so that 
each of them literally falls for the benefit of his kindred. 
One cannot easily defend amateur butchery on high moral 
grounds. Excuses may be found, but none that are worth 
searching’ for. The one thing certain is that we English- 
men are not likely to lose our sporting instincts till we turn 
vegetarians. For the present, then, we leave the pheasant 
to tiie sportsman ; but we do exhort him to leave the 
swallow to us. It was meant to be something better than 
a flying target. Again, the farmer must be forgiven if he 
knocks over a few sparrows and yellow-hammers at harvest- 
time ; but he ought to be shamed out of encouraging the 
varmint chaps who snare and poison by wholesale. Lastly, 
how about the schoolboy F We agree with Howitt (in his 
excellent “ Country Book ”) that it is useless, if not unde- 
sirable, to warn a boy against clambering after eggs, but 
that he may very easily be taught the unmanliness of kid- 
napping the callow young. The most experienced bird- 
fancier cannot foster them as their parents would have done, 
and what can be expected from their still ruder foster-father ? 
They are half-forgotten at school-time, and wholly forgotten 
at cricket-time ; and they get alternately starved and 
crammed, and suffer tortures before they die. Even the 
fledglings rarely thrive. We remember too well our own 
jays and jackdaws. We hope that our descendants will be 
better schooled, and therefore less brutal. 
There are two birds that already owe a great deal to 
literature, in the shape of nursery rhyme. Every child 
knows the “ Courtship and Death of Cock Robin,” and also 
the kindly legend that tells how “ the robin redbreast and 
the wren are God Almighty’s cock and hen and we doubt 
whether Science will ever protect the gentle pair more effec- 
tually. Once, and once only, we have seen a wretched 
urchin shoot a cock-robin. He did not know what he was 
doing, for he was half crazy with the desire of killing. It 
was almost the first time that he had held a gun in his hands, 
and the skylarks had been deriding him for half an hour. 
He turned round against the nearest object, and fired. As 
the shot left the barrel he beheld a picture that appealed to 
him too late — the tragedy of an instant. On the topmost 
twig was a female bird, bending down towards her mate, 
who stretched up to her from another twig, his whole frame 
quivering with song : the instant passed, and he dropped. 
His young murderer was heart-stricken. “ I only hope 
that it is not a robin,” he cried, as he ran to pick it up. 
Many of the feathers were “dyed doubly red” (like the 
lips of Fair Rosamond when Queen Eleanor struck them), 
but there was no mistaking the native colour of the breast. 
"We ourselves helped to dig his grave, and we have never 
