THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 B. H. Blackwell.
 
 
 i^ry-^ ' 
 
 LOVE'S MEINIE.
 
 LO V E'S M E I N I E 
 
 
 THREE LECTURES ON 
 GREEK AND ENGLISH BIRDS 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D., D.C.L. 
 
 HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD ; AND 
 
 HONORARY FELLOW OF CORPUS CHRISTI 
 
 COLLEGE, OXFORD 
 
 THIRD EDITION 
 
 GEORGE ALLEN, SUNNYSIDE, ORPINGTON 
 
 AND 
 156, CHARING CROSS ROAD, LONDON 
 
 1897 
 [y4// rights reserved]
 
 Printed by Ballantvne, Hanson & Co 
 At the Ballantyne Press
 
 r^^ 6.241 
 
 s n -. • -> 
 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 Brantwood, g^/i/uf!e, 1881. 
 
 Quarter past five, morning. 
 
 The birds chirping feebly, — mostly chaf- 
 finches answering each other, the rest dis- 
 composed, I fancy, by the June snow ; * the 
 lake neither smooth nor rippled, but like a 
 surface of perfectly bright glass, ill cast ; 
 the lines of wave few and irregular, like flaws 
 in the planes of a fine crystal. 
 
 I see this book was begun eight years ago ; 
 — then intended to contain only four Oxford 
 lectures : but the said lectures also ' intended ' 
 to contain the cream of forty volumes of 
 scientific ornithology. Which intentions, all 
 and sundry, having gone, Carlyle would have 
 said, to water, and more piously-minded 
 persons, to fire, I am obliged now to cast my 
 
 * The summits of the Old Man, of Wctherlam, and 
 Helvellyn, were all white, on the morning when this was 
 written. 
 
 20908 1 fj
 
 Vi PREFACE. 
 
 materials into another form : and here, at all 
 events, is a bundle of what is readiest under 
 my hand. The nature and name of which I 
 must try to make a httle more intelligible 
 than my books have lately been, either in 
 text or title. 
 
 'Meinie' is the old English word for 
 'Many,' in the sense of 'a many' persons 
 attending one, as bridesmaids, when in sixes 
 or tens or dozens ; — courtiers, footmen, and 
 the like. It passes gradually into 'Menial,' 
 and unites the senses of Multitude and 
 Servitude. 
 
 In the passages quoted from, or referred to 
 in, Chaucer's translation of the Romance of 
 the Rose, at the end of the first lecture, any 
 reader who cares for a clue to the farther sig- 
 nificances of the title, may find one to lead him 
 safely through richer labyrinths of thought 
 than mine : and ladder enough also, — if there 
 be either any heavenly, or pure earthly. Love, 
 in his own breast, — to guide him to a pretty 
 bird's nest ; both in the Romances of the Rose 
 and of Juliet, and in the Sermons of St. Francis 
 and St. Bernard. 
 
 The term ' Lecture ' is retained, for though
 
 PREFACE. Vll 
 
 I lecture no more, I still write habitually in a 
 manner suited for oral delivery, and imagine 
 myself speaking to my pupils, if ever I am 
 happily thinking in myself. But it will be 
 also seen that by the help of this very 
 familiarity of style, I am endeavouring, in 
 these and my other writings on Natural 
 History, to compel in the student a clearness 
 of thought and precision of language which 
 have not hitherto been in any wise the virtues, 
 or skills, of scientific persons. Thoughtless 
 readers, who imagine that my own style (such as 
 it is, the one thing which the British public con- 
 cedes to me as a real power) has been formed 
 without pains, may smile at the confidence 
 with which I speak of altering accepted, and 
 even long-established, nomenclature. But the 
 use which I now have of language has taken 
 me forty years to attain ; and those forty 
 years spent, mostly, in walking through the 
 wilderness of this world's vain words, seeking 
 how they might be pruned into some better 
 strength. And I think it likely that at last 
 I may put in my pruning-hook with effect ; 
 for indeed a time must come when English 
 fathers and mothers will wish their children to
 
 Vin PREFACE. 
 
 learn English again, and to speak it for all 
 scholarly purposes ; and, if they use, instead, 
 Greek or Latin, to use them only that they 
 may be understood by Greeks or Latins ;* and 
 not that they may mystify the illiterate many 
 of their own land. Dead languages, so called, 
 may at least be left at rest, if not honoured ; 
 and must not be torn in mutilation out of their 
 tumuli, that the skins and bones of them may 
 help to hold our living nonsense together; 
 while languages called living, but which 
 live only to slack themselves into slang, or 
 bloat themselves into bombast, must one day 
 have new grammars written for their license, 
 and new laws for their insolence. 
 
 Observe, however,, that the recast methods 
 of classification adopted in this book, and in 
 'Proserpina,' must be carefully distinguished 
 from their recastings of nomenclature. I am 
 perfectly sure that it is wiser to use plain 
 short words than obscure long ones ; but 
 not in the least sure that I am doing the best 
 that can be done for my pupils, in classing 
 
 Greek is now a living nation's language, from Messina 
 to Delos— and Latin still lives for the well-trained churchmen 
 and gentlemen of Italy.
 
 PREFACE. IX 
 
 swallows with owls, or milkworts with violets. 
 The classification is always given as tentative ; 
 and, at its utmost", elementary : but the nomen- 
 clature, as in all probability conclusive. 
 
 For the rest, the success and the service 
 of all depend on the more or less thorough 
 accomplishment of plans long since laid, and 
 which would have been good for little if their 
 coping could at once have been conjectured or 
 foretold in their foundations. It has been 
 throughout my trust, that if Death should 
 write on these, "What this man began to 
 build, he was not able to finish," God may 
 also WTite on them, not in anger, but in aid, 
 
 " A stronger than he, cometh."
 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE V 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 THE ROBIN I 
 
 LECTURE IL 
 
 THE SWALLOW 45 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 THE DABCHICK3 93 
 
 APPENDIX 189 
 
 INDEX 221
 
 LOVE'S MEINIE. 
 
 " 11 etoit tout convert d'oisiaulx." 
 
 Romance of the Rose. 
 
 LECTURE I.* 
 
 THE ROBIN. 
 
 I. Among the more splendid pictures in the 
 Exhibition of the Old Masters, this year, you 
 cannot but remember the Vandyke portraits of 
 the two sons of the Duke of Lennox. I think 
 you cannot but remember it, because it would 
 be difficult to find, even among the works of 
 Vandyke, a more striking representation of 
 the youth of our English noblesse ; nor one 
 in which the painter had more exerted himself, 
 or with better success, in rendering the de- 
 corous pride and natural grace of honourable 
 aristocracy. 
 
 Vandyke is, however, inferior to Titian and 
 
 * Delivered at Oxford, March 15th, 1S73. 
 
 A 
 
 f
 
 love's meinie. 
 
 Velasquez, in that his effort to show this 
 noblesse of air and persons may always be 
 detected ; also the aristocracy of Vandyke's 
 day were already so far fearful of their own 
 position as to feel anxiety that it should be 
 immediately recognized. And the effect of 
 the painter's conscious deference, and of the 
 equally conscious pride of the boys, as they 
 stood to be painted, has been somewhat to 
 shorten the power of the one, and to abase 
 the dignity of the other. And thus, in the 
 midst of my admiration of the youths' beauti- 
 ful faces, and natural quality of majesty, set 
 off by all splendours of dress and courtesies 
 of art, I could not forbear questioning with 
 myself what the true value was, in the scales 
 of creation, of these fair human beings who 
 set so high a value on themselves; and, — as 
 if the only answer, — the words kept repeating 
 themselves in my ear, " Ye are of more value 
 than many sparrows." 
 
 2. Passeres, arpovdoi, — the things that open 
 their wings, and are not otherwise noticeable ; 
 small birds of the land and wood ; the food 
 of the serpent, of man, or of the stronger 
 creatures of their own kind, — that even these.
 
 I. THE ROBIN. 3 
 
 though among the simplest and obscurest of 
 beings, have yet price in the eyes of their 
 Maker,„ and that the death of one of them 
 cannot take place but by His permission, has 
 long been the subject of declamation in our 
 pulpits, and the ground of much sentiment in 
 nursery education. But the declamation is 
 so aimless, and the sentiment so hollow, that, 
 practically, the chief interest of the leisure of 
 maijkind has been found in the destruction 
 of the creatures which they professed to be- 
 lieve even the Most High would not see perish 
 without pity ; and, in recent days, it is fast 
 becoming the only definition of aristocracy, 
 that the principal business of its life is the 
 killing of sparrows. 
 
 Sparrows, or pigeons, or partridges, what 
 does it matter ? " Centum mille perdrices 
 plumbo confecit ; " * that is, indeed, too often 
 the sum of the life of an English lord ; much 
 questionable now, if indeed of more value than 
 that of many sparrows. 
 
 3. Is it not a strange fact, that, interested in 
 nothing so much for the last two hundred years, 
 as in his horses, he yet left it to the farmers of 
 
 * Tlie epitaph on Count Zachdarm, in " Sartor Resartus."
 
 love's meinie. 
 
 Scotland to relieve draught horses from the 
 bearing-rein?* is it not one equally strange 
 that, master of the forests of England for a 
 thousand years, and of its libraries for three 
 hundred, he left the natural history of birds 
 to be written by a card-printer's lad of New- 
 castle ? f Written, and not written, for indeed 
 we have no natural history of birds written 
 yet. It cannot be written but by a scholar 
 and a gentleman ; and no English gentleman 
 in recent times has ever thought of birds 
 except as flying targets, or flavourous dishes. 
 The only piece of natural history worth the 
 name in the English language, that I know of, 
 is in the few lines of Milton on the Creation. 
 The only example of a proper manner of con- 
 tribution to natural history is in White's 
 Letters from Selborne. You know I have 
 always spoken of Bewick as pre-eminently a 
 vulgar or boorish person, though of splendid 
 honour and genius ; his vulgarity shows in 
 nothing so much as in the poverty of the 
 details he has collected, with the best inten- 
 tions, and the shrewdest sense, for English 
 
 * Sir Arthur Helps. '•' Animals and their Masters," p. 67. 
 t Ariad. Flor., p. 221 ; vi. 45 (227),
 
 I. THE ROBIN. 5 
 
 ornithology. His imagination is not cultivated 
 enough to enable him to choose, or arrange. 
 
 4. Nor can much more be said for the 
 observations of modern science. It is vulgar 
 in a far worse way, by its arrogance and 
 materialism. In general, the scientific natural 
 history of a bird consists of four articles, — 
 first, the name and estate of the gentleman 
 whose gamekeeper shot the last that was seen 
 in England ; secondl}', two or three stories of 
 doubtful origin, printed in every book on the 
 subject of birds for the last fifty years ; thirdly, 
 an account of the feathers, from the comb to 
 the rump, with enumeration of the colours 
 which are never more to be seen on the living 
 bird by English eyes ; and, lastly, a discussion 
 of the reasons why none of the twelve names 
 which former naturalists have given to the 
 bird are of any further use, and why the 
 present author has given it a thirteenth, which 
 is to be universally, and to the end of time, 
 accepted. 
 
 5. You may fancy this is caricature; but 
 the abyss of confusion produced by modern 
 science in nomenclature, and the utter void of 
 the abyss when you plunge into it after any
 
 6 love's MEINIE. 
 
 one useful fact, surpass all caricature. I have 
 in my hand thirteen plates of thirteen species 
 of eagles ; eagles all, or hawks all, or falcons 
 all — whichever name you choose for the great 
 race of the hook-headed birds of prey — some 
 so like that you can't tell the one from the 
 other, at the distance at which I show them 
 to you, all absolutely ahke in their eagle or 
 falcon character, having, every one, the falx 
 for its beak, and every one, flesh for its prey. 
 Do you suppose the unhappy student is to be 
 allowed to call them all eagles, or all falcons, 
 to begin with, as would be the first condition 
 of a wise nomenclature, establishing resem- 
 blance by specific name, before marking varia- 
 tion by individual name ? No such luck. I 
 hold you up the plates of the thirteen birds 
 one by one, and read you their names off" the 
 back : — 
 
 The first, is an Aquila, 
 
 The second, a Halieetus. 
 
 The third, a Milvus. 
 
 The fourth, a Pandion. 
 
 The fifth, an Astur. 
 
 The sixth, a Falco. 
 
 The seventh, a Pernis.
 
 i. THE ROBIN. 7 
 
 The eighth, a Circus. 
 
 The ninth, a Buteo. 
 
 ■ The tenth, ' an Archibuteo. 
 
 . The eleventh, an Accipiter. 
 
 The twelfth, an Erythropus. 
 
 And the thirteenth, a Tinnunculus. 
 There's a nice little lesson to entertain a 
 parish schoolboy with, beginning his natural 
 history of birds ! 
 
 6, There are not so many varieties of robin 
 as of hawk, but the scientific classifiers are not 
 to be beaten. If they cannot find a number 
 of similar birds to give different names to, 
 they will give two names to the same one. 
 Here are two pictures of your own redbreast, 
 out of the tw^o best modern works on ornitho- 
 logy. In one, it is called " Motacilla rubecula ; " 
 in the other, " Rubecula familiaris." 
 
 7. It is indeed one of the most serious, as 
 one of the most absurd, weaknesses, of modern 
 naturalists to imagine that a7iy presently in- 
 vented nomenclature can stand, even were it 
 adopted by the consent of nations, instead of 
 the conceit of individuals. It will take fifty 
 years' digestion before the recently ascertained 
 elements of natural science can permit the
 
 8 ' love's meinie. 
 
 arrangement of species in any permanently 
 (even over a limited period) nameable order ; 
 nor then, unless a great man is born to perceive 
 and exhibit such order. In the meantime, the 
 simplest and most descriptive nomenclature is 
 the best. Every one of these birds, for in- 
 stance, might be called falco in Latin, hawk in 
 English, some word being added to distinguish 
 the genus, which should describe its principal 
 aspect or habit. Falco montium, Mountain 
 Hawk ; Falco silvarum. Wood Hawk ; Falco 
 procellarum. Sea Hawk; and the like. Then, 
 one descriptive epithet would mark species. 
 Falco montium, aureus. Golden Eagle; Falco 
 silvarum, apivorus, Honey Buzzard; and so 
 on ; and the naturalists of Vienna, Paris, and 
 London should confirm the names of known 
 creatures, in conclave, once every half-century, 
 and let them so stand for the next fifty years. 
 
 8. In the meantime, you yourselves, or, 
 to speak more generally, the young rising 
 scholars of England, — all of you who care for 
 life as well as literature, and for spirit, — even 
 the poor souls of birds, — as well as lettering 
 of their classes in books, — you, with all care, 
 should cherish the old Saxon-English and
 
 I. THE ROBIN. 9 
 
 Norman-French names of birds, and ascertain 
 them with the most affectionate research — 
 never despising even the rudest or most pro- 
 vincial forms : all of them will, some day or 
 other, giv£ you clue to historical points of 
 interest. Take, for example, the common 
 EngHsh name of this low-flying falcon, the 
 most tameable and affectionate of his tribe, 
 and therefore, I suppose, fastest vanishing 
 from- field and wood, the buzzard. That 
 name comes from , the Latin " buteo," still 
 retained by the ornithologists; but, in its 
 original form, valueless, to you. But when 
 you get it comfortably corrupted into Pro- 
 vengal "Busac," (whence gradually the French 
 busard, and our buzzard,) you get from it the 
 delightful compound " busacador," "adorer of 
 buzzards" — meaning, generally, a sporting 
 person ; and then you have Dante's Bertrand 
 de Born, the first troubadour of war, bearing 
 witness to you how the love of mere hunting 
 and falconry was already, in his day, degrading 
 the miHtary classes, and, so far from being a 
 necessary adjunct of the noble disposition of 
 lover or soldier, was, even to contempt, showing 
 itself separate from both.
 
 10 LOVERS MEINtfi, 
 
 " Le ric home, cassador, 
 M'enneion, e'l buzacador. 
 Parian de volada, d'austor, 
 Ne jamais, d'armas, ni d'amor." 
 
 The rich man, the chaser, 
 
 Tires me to death ; and the adorer of buzzards. 
 
 They talk of covey and hawk, 
 
 And never of arms, nor of love. 
 
 " Cassador," of course, afterwards becomes 
 "chasseur," and "austor" "vautour." But 
 after you have read this, and familiarized 
 your ear with the old word, how differently 
 Milton's phrase will ring to you, — " Those 
 who thought no better of the Living God 
 than of a buzzard idol," — and how literal it 
 becomes, when we think of the actual differ- 
 ence between a member of Parliament in 
 Milton's time, and the Busacador of to-day ; 
 — and all this freshness and value in the 
 reading, observe, come of your keeping the 
 word which great men have used for the 
 bird, instead of letting the anatomists blunder 
 out a new one from their Latin dictionaries. 
 
 9. There are not so many nameable varie- 
 ties, I just now said, of robin as of falcon ; but 
 this is somewhat inaccurately stated. Those
 
 T„ THE ROBIN, I I 
 
 thirteen birds represented a very large propor- 
 tion" of the entire group of the birds of prey, 
 which io my sevenfold classification I recom- 
 mended you to call universally, " hawks." The 
 robin is only one of the far greater multitude of 
 small birds which live almost, indiscriminately 
 on grain or insects, and which I recommended 
 you to call generally " sparrows " ; but of the 
 robin itself, there are two important European 
 varieties — one red-breasted, and the other 
 blue-breasted. 
 
 10. You probably, some of you, never heard 
 of the blue-breast; very few, certainly, have 
 seen one aHve, and, if alive, certainly not wild 
 in England. 
 
 Here is a picture of it, daintily done,* and 
 you can see the pretty blue shield on its 
 breast, perhaps, at this distance. Vain shield, 
 if ever the fair little thing is wretched enough 
 to set foot on English ground ! I find the last 
 that was seen was shot at Margate so long ago 
 as 1842, — and there seems to be no official re- 
 cord of any visit before that, since Mr. Thomas 
 Embledon shot one on Newcastle town moor 
 in 1 8 16. But this rarity of visit to us is 
 
 * Mr. Gould's, in his " Birds of Great Britain."
 
 12 love's meinie. 
 
 strange ; other birds have no such clear 
 objection to being shot, and really seem to 
 come to England expressly for the purpose. 
 And yet this blue-bird — (one can't say " blue 
 robin " — 1 think we shall have to call him 
 " bluet," like the cornflower) — stays in Sweden, 
 where it sings so sweetly that it is called "a 
 hundred tongues." 
 
 II. That, then, is the utmost which the 
 lords of land, and masters of science, do for 
 us in their watch upon our feathered sup- 
 pliants. One kills them, the other writes 
 classifying epitaphs. 
 
 We have next to ask what the poets, 
 painters, and monks have done. 
 
 The poets — among whom I affectionately 
 and reverently class the sweet singers of the 
 nursery, mothers and nurses — have done 
 much ; very nearly all that I care for your 
 thinking of. The painters and monks, the 
 one being so greatly under the influence of the 
 other, we may for the present class together; 
 and may almost sum their contributions to orni- 
 thology in saying that they have plucked the 
 wings from birds, to make angels of men, and 
 the claws from birds, to make devils of men.
 
 I. THE ROBIN. I 3 
 
 If you were to take away from religious art 
 these two great helps of its — I must say, on 
 the whole, very feeble — imagination; if 3'ou 
 were -to take from it, I say, the power of putting 
 wings on shoulders, and claws on fingers and 
 toes, how wonderfully the sphere of its angelic 
 and diabolic characters would be contracted ! 
 Reduced only to the sources of expression in 
 face or movements, you might still find in 
 good early sculpture very sufficient devils ; 
 but the best angels would resolve themselves, 
 I think, into little more than, and not often into 
 so much as, the likenesses of pretty women, 
 with that grave and (I do not say it ironically) 
 majestic expression which they put on, when, 
 being very fond of their husbands and children, 
 they seriously think either the one or the other 
 have misbehaved themselves. 
 
 12. And it is not a little discouraging for 
 me, and may well make you doubtful of my 
 right judgment in this endeavour to lead you 
 into closer attention to the bird, with its wings 
 and claws still in its own possession; — it is 
 discouraging, I say, to observe that the be- 
 ginning of such more faithful and accurate 
 observation in former art, is exactly coeval
 
 14 love's meinie. 
 
 with the commencement of its decHne. The 
 feverish and ungraceful natural history of 
 Paul, called, "of the birds," Paolo degli 
 Uccelli, produced, indeed, no harmful result on 
 the minds of his contemporaries, they watched 
 in him, with only contemptuous admiration, 
 the fantasy of zoological instinct which filled 
 his house with painted dogs, cats, and birds, 
 because he was too poor to fill it with real 
 ones. Their judgment of this morbidly natu- 
 ralistic art was conclusively expressed by the 
 sentence of Donatello, when going one morn- 
 ing into the Old Market, to buy fruit, and 
 finding the animal painter uncovering a pic- 
 ture, which had cost him months of care, 
 (curiously symbolic in its subject, the infidelity 
 of St. Thomas, of the investigatory fingering 
 of the natural historian,) " Paul, my friend," 
 said Donatello, "thou art uncovering the 
 picture just when thou shouldst be shutting 
 it up." 
 
 13. No harm, therefore, I repeat, but, on 
 the contrary, some wholesome stimulus to the 
 fancy of men like Luca and Donatello them- 
 selves, came of the grotesque and impertinent 
 zoology of Uccello,
 
 I. THE ROBIN. I 5 
 
 But the fatallest_ institutor of proud modern 
 anatomical and scientific art, and of all that 
 has polluted the dignit}^, and darkened the 
 QJiarity, of the greater ages, was Antonio 
 PoUajuoIo of Florence. Antonio (that is to 
 say) the Poulterer — so named from the trade 
 of his grandfather, and with just so much of 
 his grandfather's trade left in his own dis- 
 position, that being set by Lorenzo Ghiberti 
 to complete one of the ornamental festoons 
 of the gates of the Florentine Baptistery, 
 there, (says Vasari) " Antonio produced a 
 quail, which may still be seen, and is so 
 beautiful, na}^, so perfect, that it wants nothing 
 but the power of flight." 
 
 14. Here, the morbid tendency was as 
 attractive as it was subtle. Ghiberti himself 
 fell under the influence of it ; allowed the 
 borders of his gates, with their fluttering birds 
 and bossy fruits, to dispute the spectators' 
 favour with the religious subjects they en- 
 closed ; and, from that day forward, minute- 
 ness and muscularity were, with curious 
 harmony of evil, delighted in together ; and 
 the lancet and the microscope, in the hands of 
 fools, were supposed to be complete substitutes
 
 1 6 love's meinie. 
 
 for imagination in the souls of wise men : so 
 that even the best artists are gradually com- 
 pelled, or beguiled, into compliance with the 
 curiosity of their day ; and Francia, in the city 
 of Bologna, is held to be a " kind of god, more 
 particularly " (again I quote Vasari) " after he 
 had painted a set of caparisons for the Duke 
 of Urbino, on which he depicted a great forest 
 all on fire, and whence there rushes forth an 
 immense number of every kind of animal, with 
 several human figures. This terrific, yet truly 
 beautiful representation, was all the more 
 highly esteemed for the time that had been ex- 
 pended on it in the plumage of the birds, and 
 other minutiae in the delineation of the different 
 animals, and in the diversity of the branches 
 and leaves of the various trees seen therein ; " 
 and thenceforward the catastrophe is direct, to 
 the ornithological museums which Breughel 
 painted for gardens of Eden, and to the still life 
 and dead game of Dutch celebrities. 
 
 15. And yet I am going to invite you to-day 
 to examine, down to almost microscopic detail, 
 the aspect of a small bird, and to invite you to 
 do this, as a most expedient and sure step in 
 your study of the greatest art.
 
 I. THE ROBIN. 17 
 
 But the difference in our motive of examina- 
 tion will entirely alter the result. To paint 
 birds -that we may sliow how minutely we can 
 paint,.'is among the most contemptible occupa- 
 tions of art. To paint them, that we may show 
 how beautiful they are, is not indeed one of its 
 highest, but quite one of its pleasantest and 
 most useful ; it is a skill within the reach of 
 every student of average capacity, and which, 
 so faj as acquired, will assuredly both make 
 their hearts kinder, and their lives happier. 
 
 Without further preamble, I will ask you to 
 look to-day, more carefully than usual, at your 
 well-known favourite, and to think about him 
 with some precision. 
 
 16. And first. Where does he come from ? 
 I stated that my lectures were to be on 
 English and Greek birds ; but we are apt to 
 fancy the robin all our own. How exclu- 
 sively, do you suppose, he really belongs 
 to us ? You would think this was the first 
 point to be settled in any book about him. I 
 have hunted all my books through, and can't 
 tell you how much he is our own, or how far 
 he is a traveller. 
 
 And, indeed, are not all our ideas obscure 
 
 B
 
 1 8 love's meinie. 
 
 about migration itself? You are broadly told 
 that a bird travels, and how wonderful it is 
 that it finds its way; but you are scarcely 
 ever told, or led to think, what it really 
 travels for — whether for food, for warmth, or 
 for seclusion — and how the travelling is con- 
 nected with its fixed home. Birds have not 
 their town and country houses, — their villas 
 in Italy, and shooting boxes in Scotland. 
 The country in which they build their nests 
 is their proper home, — the country, that is to 
 say, in which they pass the spring and sum- 
 mer. Then they go south in the winter, for 
 food and warmth ; but in what lines, and by 
 what stages ? The general definition of a 
 migrant in this hemisphere is a bird that goes 
 north to build its nest, and south for the 
 winter ; but, then, the one essential point to 
 know about it is the breadth and latitude of 
 the zone it properly inhabits, — that is to say, 
 in which it builds its nest ; next, its habits 
 of life, and extent and line of southing in the 
 winter ; and finally, its manner of travelling. 
 
 17. Now, here is this entirely familiar bird, 
 the robin. Quite the first thing that strikes 
 me about it, looking at it as a painter, is the
 
 I. THE ROBIN. I 9 
 
 small effect it seems to have had on the minds 
 of the southern nations. I trace nothing of 
 it definitely, either in the art or literature 
 of Greece or Italy. I find, even, no definite 
 name for it ; you don't know if Lesbia's 
 *' passer " had a red breast, or a blue, or a 
 brown. And yet Mr. Gould says it is abun- 
 dant in all parts of Europe, in all the islands 
 of the Mediterranean, and in Madeira and the 
 Azores. And then he says — (now notice the 
 puzzle of this), — " In many parts of the Con- 
 tinent it is a migrant, and, contrary to what 
 obtains with us, is there treated as a vagrant, 
 for there is scarcely a country across the 
 water in which it is not shot down and eaten." 
 
 " In many parts of the Continent it is a 
 migrant." In what parts — how far — in what 
 manner ? 
 
 1 8. In none of the old natural history books 
 can I find any account of the robin as a 
 traveller, but there is, for once, some sufficient 
 reason for their reticence. He has a curious 
 fancy in his manner of travelling. Of all 
 birds, you would think he was likely to do it 
 in the cheerfullest way, and he does it in the 
 saddest. Do you chance to have read, in the
 
 20 LOVES MEINIE. 
 
 Life of Charles Dickens, how fond he was of 
 taking long walks in the night and alone ? 
 The robin, en voyage, is the Charles Dickens 
 of birds. He always travels in the night, and 
 alone ; rests, in the day, wherever day chances 
 to find him ; sings a little, and pretends he 
 hasn't been anywhere. He goes as far, in 
 the winter, as the north-west of Africa; and 
 in Lombardy, arrives from the south early 
 in March ; but does not stay long, going on 
 into the Alps, where he prefers wooded and 
 wild districts. So, at least, says my Lombard 
 informant. 
 
 I do not find him named in the list of 
 Cretan birds ; but even if often seen, his 
 dim red breast was little likely to make much 
 impression on the Greeks, who knew the 
 flamingo, and had made it, under the name 
 of Phcenix or Phoenicopterus, the centre of 
 their myths of scarlet birds. They broadly 
 embraced the general aspect of the smaller 
 and more obscure species, under the term 
 ^ov6o<i, which, as I understand their use of 
 it, exactly implies the indescribable silky 
 brown, the groundwork of all other colour 
 in so many small birds, which is indistinct
 
 I. THE ROBIN. 21 
 
 among green leaves, and absolutely identifies 
 itself with dead onqs, or with mossy stems. 
 
 19, r -think I show it you more accurately 
 fti the robin's back than I could in any other 
 bird ; iXe mode of transition into more brilliant 
 colour is, in him, elementarily simple ; and 
 although there is nothing, or rather because 
 there is nothing, in his plumage, of interest 
 like that of tropical birds, or even of our own 
 gam'e-birds, I think it will be desirable for 
 you to learn first from the breast of the 
 robin what a feather is. Once knowing that, 
 thoroughly, we can further learn from the 
 swallow what a wing is ; from the chough 
 what a beak is; and from the falcon what a 
 claw is. 
 
 I must take care, however, in neither of 
 these last two particulars, to do injustice to 
 our little English friend here ; and before we 
 come to his feathers, must ask you to look at 
 his bill and his feet. 
 
 20. I do not think it is distinctly enough 
 i'elt by us that the beak of a bird is not only 
 its mouth, but its hand, or rather its two 
 hands. For, as its arms and hands are turned 
 into wings, all it has to depend upon, in
 
 2 2 love's meinie. 
 
 economical and practical life, is its beak. 
 The beak, therefore, is at once its sword, 
 its carpenter's tool-box, and its dressing- 
 case ; partly also its musical instrument ; all 
 this besides its function of seizing and pre- 
 paring the food, in which functions alone it 
 has to be a trap, carving-knife, and teeth, all 
 in one. 
 
 21. It is this need of the beak's being a 
 mechanical tool which chiefly regulates the 
 form of a bird's face, as opposed to a four- 
 footed animal's. If the question of food were 
 the only one, we might wonder why there 
 were not more four-footed creatures living 
 on seeds than there are ; or why those that 
 do — field-mice and the like — have not beaks 
 instead of teeth. But the fact is that a bird's 
 beak is by no means a perfect eating or food- 
 seizing instrument. A squirrel is far more 
 dexterous with a nut than a cockatoo ; and 
 a dog manages a bone incomparably better 
 than an eagle. But the beak has to do so 
 much more! Pruning feathers, building nests, 
 and the incessant discipline in miHtary arts, 
 are all to be thought of, as much as feeding. 
 
 Soldiership, especially, is a much more
 
 I. THE ROBIN. 23 
 
 imperious necessity among birds than quad- 
 rupeds. Neither lions nor wolves habitually 
 use claws or teeth in contest with their own 
 species; but birds, for their partners, their 
 nests, their hunting-grounds, and their per- 
 sonal dignity, are nearly always in contention; 
 their courage is unequalled by that of any 
 other race of animals capable of compre- 
 hending danger ; and their pertinacity and 
 endurance have, in all ages, made them an 
 example to the brave, and an amusement to 
 the base, among mankind. 
 
 22. Nevertheless, since as sword, as trowel, 
 or as pocket-comb, the beak of the bird has 
 to be pointed, the collection of seeds may be 
 conveniently entrusted to this otherwise pene- 
 trative instrument, and such food as can only 
 be obtained by probing crevices, splitting 
 open fissures, or neatly and minutely picking 
 things up, is allotted, pre-eminently, to the 
 bird species. 
 
 The food of the robin, as you know, is very 
 miscellaneous. Linnaeus says of the Swedish 
 one, that it is " delectatus euonymi baccis," — 
 "delighted with dogwood berries," — the dog- 
 wood growing abundantly in Sweden, as once
 
 24 LOVES MEINIE. 
 
 in Forfarshire, where it grew, though only a 
 bush usually in the south, with trunks a foot 
 or eighteen inches in diameter, and the tree 
 thirty feet high. But the Swedish robin's 
 taste for its berries is to be noted by you, 
 because, first, the dogwood berry is commonly 
 said to be so bitter that it is not eaten by 
 birds (Loudon, " Arboretum," ii., 497, i.); and, 
 secondly, because it is a pretty coincidence 
 that this most familiar of household birds 
 should feed fondly from the tree which gives 
 the housewife her spindle, — the proper name 
 of the dogwood in English, French, and 
 German being alike " Spindle-tree." It feeds, 
 however, with us, certainly, most on worms 
 and insects. I am not sure how far the 
 following account of its mode of dressing its 
 dinners may be depended on : I take it from 
 an old book on Natural History, but find it, 
 more or less, confirmed by others : " It takes 
 a worm by one extremity in its beak, and 
 beats it on the ground till the inner part 
 comes away. Then seizing it in a similar 
 manner by the other end, it entirely cleanses 
 the outer part, which alone it eats." 
 
 One's first impression is that this must be
 
 I. THE ROBIN. 25 
 
 a singularly unpleasant operation for the worm, 
 however fastidiously delicate and exemplary 
 in the.jobin. But' I suppose the real mean- 
 ing fs, that as a worm lives by passing earth 
 through its bod}^ the robin merely compels 
 it to quit this — not ill-gotten, indeed, but now 
 quite unnecessary — wealth. We human crea- 
 tures, who have lived the lives of worms, col- 
 lecting dust, are served by Death in exactly 
 the ^ame manner. 
 
 23. You will find that the robin's beak, then, 
 is a very prettily representative one' of general 
 bird power. As a weapon, it is very formidable 
 indeed; he can kill an adversary of his own 
 kind with one blow of it in the throat; and is 
 so pugnacious, " valde pugnax," says Linnaeus, 
 " ut non una arbor duos capiat erithacos," — 
 " no single tree can hold two cock-robins ; " 
 and for precision of seizure, the little flat hook 
 at the end of the upper mandible is one of the 
 most delicately formed points of forceps which 
 you can find among the grain eaters. But I 
 pass to one of his more special perfections. 
 
 24. He is very notable in the exquisite 
 silence and precision of his movements, as 
 opposed to birds who either creak in flying, or
 
 26 LOVES MEINIE. 
 
 waddle in walking. "Always quiet," says 
 Gould, "for the silkiness of his plumage 
 renders his movements noiseless, and the 
 rustling of his wings is never heard, any more 
 than his tread on earth, over which he bounds 
 with amazing sprightliness." You know how 
 much importance I have always given, among 
 the fine arts, to good dancing. If you think of 
 it, you will find one of the robin's very chief 
 ingratiatory faculties is his dainty and delicate 
 movement, — -his footing it featly here and there. 
 Whatever prettiness there may be in his red 
 breast, at his brightest he can always be out- 
 shone by a brickbat. But if he is rationally 
 proud of anything about him, I should think a 
 robin must be proud of his legs. Hundreds 
 of birds have longer and more imposing ones — 
 but for real neatness, finish, and precision of 
 action, commend me to his fine little ankles, 
 and fine little feet ; this long stilted process, 
 as you know, corresponding to our ankle-bone. 
 Commend me, I say, to the robin for use of 
 his ankles — he is, of all birds, the pre-eminent 
 and characteristic Hopper; none other so light, 
 so pert, or so swift. 
 
 25. We must not, however, give too much
 
 I. THE ROBIN. 27 
 
 credit to his legs in this matter. A robin's 
 hop- is half a flight ; he hops, very essentially, 
 with wings and tail, as well as with his feet, 
 ^nd the exquisitely rapid opening and quivering 
 of the tail-feathers certainly give half the force 
 to his leap. It is in this action that he is put 
 among the motacillae, or wagtails ; but the 
 ornithologists have no real business to put 
 him among them. The swing of the long 
 tail-feathers in the true wagtail is entirely con- 
 sequent on its motion, not impulsive of it — 
 the tremulous shake is after alighting. But 
 the robin leaps with wing, tail, and foot, all in 
 time, and all helping each other. Leaps, I say ; 
 and you check at the word; and ought to 
 check: you look at a bird hopping, and the 
 motion is so much a matter of course, you 
 never think how it is done. But do you think 
 you would find it easy to hop like a robin if 
 you had two — all but wooden — legs, like this ? 
 26. I have looked wholly in vain through 
 all my books on birds, to find some account 
 of the muscles it uses in hopping, and of the 
 part of the toes with which the spring is given. 
 I must leave you to find out that for your- 
 selves; it is a little bit of anatomy which I
 
 2 8 love's meinie. 
 
 think it highly desirable for you to know, but 
 which it is not my business to teach you. Only 
 observe, this is the point to be made out. 
 You leap yourselves, with the toe and ball 
 of the foot ; but, in that power of leaping, 
 you lose the faculty of grasp ; on the contrary, 
 with your hands, you grasp as a bird with its 
 feet. But you cannot hop on your hands. A 
 cat, a leopard, and a monkey, leap or grasp 
 with equal ease ; but the action of their paws 
 in leaping is, I imagine, from the fleshy ball 
 of the foot ; while in the bird, characteristi- 
 cally 'yafi-y^rcovv^, this fleshy ball is reduced to 
 a boss or series of bosses, and the nails are 
 elongated into sickles or horns; nor does 
 the springing power seem to depend on the 
 development of the bosses. They are far 
 more developed in an eagle than a robin ; 
 but you know how unpardonably and pre- 
 posterously awkward an eagle is when he 
 hops. When they are most of all developed, 
 the bird walks, runs, and digs well, but leaps 
 badly. 
 
 27. I have no time to speak of the various 
 forms of the ankle itself, or of the scales of 
 armour, more apparent than real, by which
 
 I. THE ROBIN. 29 
 
 the foot and ankle are protected. The use 
 of this lecture is not either to describe or to 
 exhibit these varieties to you, but so to 
 awaken your attention to the real points of 
 character, that, when you have a bird's foot 
 to draw, you may do so with intelligence and 
 pleasure, knowing whether you want to ex- 
 press force, grasp, or firm ground pressure, 
 or dexterity and tact in motion. And as the 
 actions of the foot and the hand in man are 
 made by every great painter perfectly expres- 
 sive of the character of mind, so the expres- 
 sions of rapacit}^, cruelty, or force of seizure, 
 in the harp}', the gryphon, and the hooked 
 and clawed evil spirits of early religious art, 
 can only be felt by extreme attention to the 
 original form. 
 
 28. And now I return to our main question, 
 for the robin's breast to answer, " What is a 
 feather ? " You know something about it al- 
 ready ; that it is composed of a quill, with its 
 lateral filaments terminating generally, more 
 or less, in a point ; that these extremities of 
 the quills, lying over each other like the tiles 
 of a house, allow the wind and rain to pass 
 over them with the least possible resistance,
 
 30 
 
 LOVE S MEINIE. 
 
 and form a protection alike from the heat and 
 the cold ; which, in structure much resembling 
 the scale-armour assumed by man for very 
 different objects, is, in fact, intermediate, 
 exactly, between the fur of beasts and the 
 scales of fishes ; having the minute division of 
 the one, and the armour-like symmetry and 
 succession of the other. 
 
 29. Not merely symmetry, observe, but ex- 
 treme flatness. Feathers are smoothed down, 
 as a field of corn by wind with rain ; only the 
 swathes laid in beautiful order. They are fur, 
 so structurally placed as to imply, and submit 
 to, the perpetually swift forward motion. In 
 fact, I have no doubt the Darwinian theory on 
 the subject is that the feathers of birds once 
 stuck up all erect, like the bristles of a brush, 
 and have only been blown flat by continual 
 flying. 
 
 Nay, we might even sufficiently represent 
 the general manner of conclusion in the 
 Darwinian system by the statement that if you 
 fasten a hair-brush to a mill-wheel, with the 
 handle forward, so as to develop itself into a 
 neck by moving alwa3^s in the same direction, 
 and within continual hearing of a steam-whistle.
 
 I. THE ROBIN. 31 
 
 after a certain number of revolutions the hair- 
 brush will fall in love w^ith the whistle ; they 
 will marry, lay an egg, and the produce will be 
 ^'nightingale. 
 
 30. Whether, however, a hog's bristle can 
 turn into a feather or not, it is vital that 3^ou 
 should know the present difference between 
 them. 
 
 The scientific people will tell 3^ou that a 
 featljer is composed of three parts — the down, 
 the laminae, and the shaft. 
 
 But the common-sense method of stating the 
 matter is that a feather is composed of two 
 parts, a shaft with lateral filaments. For the 
 greater part of the shaft's length, these fila- 
 ments are strong and nearly straight, forming, 
 by their attachment, a finely warped sail, like 
 that of a windmill. But towards the root of 
 the feather they suddenly become weak, and 
 confusedly flexible, and form the close down 
 which immediately protects the bird's body. 
 
 To show you the typical arrangement of 
 these parts, I choose, as I have said, the 
 robin ; because, both in his power of flying, 
 and in his colour, he is a moderate and 
 balanced bird ■, — not turned into nothing but
 
 32 
 
 LOVES MEINIE. 
 
 wings, like a swallow, or nothing but neck 
 and tail, like a peacock. And first for his 
 flying power. There is one of the long 
 feathers of robin's wing, and here (Fig. i) 
 the analysis of its form. 
 
 31. First, in pure outline (a), seen from 
 
 Fig. I. 
 
 (Twice the size of reality.) 
 A 
 
 a 2 
 
 B 
 
 above, it is very nearly a long oval, but with 
 this peculiarity, that it has, as it were, pro- 
 jecting shoulders at a i and a 2. I merely 
 desire you to observe this, in passing, because 
 one usually thinks of the contour as sweeping 
 unbroken from the root to the point. I have
 
 I. THE ROBIN. 33 
 
 not time to-day to enter on any discuEsion of 
 the r€ason for it, which will appear when we 
 examine the placing of the wing feathers for 
 tlieir stroke. 
 
 Now, I hope you are getting accustomed 
 to the general method in which I give you 
 the analysis of all forms — leaf, or feather, 
 or shell, or limb. First, the plan ; then the 
 profile ; then the cross-section. 
 
 I „take next, the profile of my feather 
 (b, Fig. i), and find that it is twisted as 
 the sail of a windmill is, but more distinctly, 
 so that you can always see the upper surface 
 of the feather at its root, and the under at its 
 end. Every primary wing-feather, in the fine 
 flyers, is thus twisted ; and is best described 
 as a sail striking with the power of a scymitar, 
 but with the flat instead of the edge. 
 
 32. Further, you remember that on the 
 edges of the broad side of feathers you find 
 always a series of undulations, irregularly 
 sequent, and lapping over each other like 
 waves on sand. You might at first imagine 
 that this appearance was owing to a slight 
 ruffling or disorder of the filaments ; but 
 it is entirely normal, and, I doubt not, so
 
 34 
 
 LOVE S MEINIE. 
 
 constructed, in order to ensure a redundance 
 of material in the plume, so that no accident 
 or pressure from wind may leave a gap any- 
 where. How this redundance is obtained 
 you will see in a moment by bending any 
 feather the wrong way. Bend, for instance, 
 
 this plume, B, Fig. 2, into the reversed curve, 
 A, Fig. 2 ; then all the filaments of the plume 
 become perfectly even, and there are no 
 waves at the edge. But let the piume return 
 into its proper form, B, and the tissue being 
 now contracted into a smaller space, the edge 
 waves are formed in it instantly.
 
 I. THE ROBIN. 3 5 
 
 Hitherto, I liave been speaking only of 
 the Pilaments arranged for the strength and 
 continuiiy of the energetic pkime ; they are 
 "entirely different when they are set together 
 for d^'coration instead of force. After the 
 feather of the robin's wing, let us examine 
 one from his breast. 
 
 33. I said, just now, he might be at once 
 outshone by a brickbat. Indeed, the day 
 before yesterday, sleeping at Lichfield, and 
 seeing, the first thing when I woke in the 
 morning, (for I never put down the blinds of 
 my bedroom windows,) the not uncommon 
 sight in an English country town of an en- 
 tire house-front of very neat, and very flat, 
 and very red bricks, with very exactly squared 
 square windows in it ; and not feeling my- 
 self in anywise gratified or improved by the 
 spectacle, I was thinking how in this, as in 
 all other good, the too much destroyed all. 
 The breadth of a robin's breast in brick-red 
 is delicious, but a whole house-front of brick- 
 red as vivid, is alarming. And yet one cannot 
 generalize even that trite moral with any safety 
 — for infinite breadth of green is delightful, how- 
 ever green ; and of sea or sky, hov/ever blue.
 
 36 love's meinie 
 
 You must note, however, that the robin's 
 charm is greatly helped by the pretty space 
 of grey plumage which separates the red 
 from the brown back, and sets it off to its 
 best advantage. There is no great brilliancy 
 in it, even so relieved ; only the finish of it 
 is exquisite. 
 
 34. If you separate a single feather, you 
 will find it more like a transparent hollow 
 shell than a feather (so delicately rounded 
 the surface of it), — grey at the root, where 
 the down is, — tinged, and only tinged, 
 with red at the part that overlaps and is 
 visible ; so that, when three or four more 
 feathers have overlapped it again, all together, 
 with their joined red, are just enough to give 
 the colour determined upon, each of them 
 contributing a tinge. There are about thirty 
 of these glowing filaments on each side, (the 
 whole being no larger across than a well- 
 grown currant,) and each of these is itself 
 another exquisite feather, with central quill 
 and lateral webs, whose filaments are not to 
 be counted. 
 
 The extremity of these breast plumes parts 
 slightly into two, as you see in the peacock's,
 
 i. THE ROBIN. 37 
 
 and many other such decorative ones. The 
 tiar.sition from the entirely leaf-hke shape of 
 the active phame, with its obhque point, to the 
 -more or less symmetrical dualism of the decora- 
 tive plume, corresponds with the change from 
 the pointed green leaf to the dual, or heart- 
 shaped, petal of many flowers. I shall return 
 to this part of our subject, having given you, 
 I believe, enough of detail for the present. 
 
 35. I have said nothing to-day of the my- 
 thology of the bird, though I told you that 
 would always be, for us, the most important 
 part of its natural history. But I am obliged, 
 sometimes, to take what we immediately want, 
 rather than what, ultimately, we shall need 
 chiefly. In the second place, you probably, 
 most of you, know more of the mythology 
 of the robin than I do, for the stories about 
 it are all northern, and I know scarcely any 
 myths but the Italian and Greek. You will 
 find under the name " Robin," in Miss Yonge's 
 exhaustive and admirable " History of Christian 
 Names," the various titles of honour and en- 
 dearment connected with him, and with the 
 general idea of redness, — from the bishop 
 called " Bright Red Fame," who founded the
 
 38 love's MEINIE. 
 
 first great Christian church on the Rhine, (1 
 am afraid of your thinking I mean a pun, 
 in connection with robins, if I tell 3^ou the 
 locality of it,) down through the Hoods, 
 and Roys, and Grays, to Robin Goodfellow, 
 and Spenser's " Hobbinol," and our modern 
 "Hob," — joining on to the "goblin," which 
 comes from the old Greek Ko/3aXo9. But I 
 cannot let you go without asking you to 
 compare the English and French feeling 
 about small birds, in Chaucer's time, with 
 our own on the same subject. I say English 
 and French, because the original French of 
 the Romance of the Rose shows more affec- 
 tion for birds than even Chaucer's translation, 
 passionate as he is, always, in love for any 
 one of his little winged brothers or sisters. 
 Look, however, either in the French or English 
 at the description of the coming of the God 
 of Love, leading his carol-dance, in the garden 
 of the Rose. 
 
 His dress is embroidered with figures of 
 flowers and of beasts ; but about him fly the 
 livino- birds. The French is : 
 
 V3 
 
 II etoit tout couvert d'oisiaulx 
 De rossignols et de papegaux
 
 I. THE ROBIN. 39 
 
 De calendre, et de mesangel. 
 II semblait que ce fut une angle 
 Qui fuz tout droit venuz du ciel. 
 
 * 36. There are several points of philology in 
 this tT-gnsitional French, and in Chaucer's 
 translation, which it is well worth your patience 
 to observe. The monkish Latin "angelus," 
 you see, is passing through the very unpoetical 
 form "angle," into "ange;" but, in order to 
 get a rhyme with it in that angular form, the 
 French troubadour expands the bird's name, 
 " mesange," quite arbitrarily, into "mesangel." 
 Then Chaucer, not liking the " mes " at the 
 beginning of the word, changes that unscrupu- 
 lously into " arch ; " and gathers in, though 
 too shortl}'', a lovely bit from another place 
 about the nightingales flying so close round 
 Love's head that they strike some of the leaves 
 off his crown of roses ; so that the English 
 runs thus : 
 
 But nightingales, a full great rout 
 That flien over his head about, 
 The leaves felden as they flien 
 And he was all with birds wrien. 
 With popinjay, with nightingale. 
 With chelaundre, and with v.odewale,
 
 40 love's meinie. 
 
 With finch, with lark, and with archangel. 
 
 He seemed as he were an angell, 
 
 That down were comen from Heaven clear. 
 
 Now, when I first read this bit of Chaucer, 
 without referring to the original, I was greatly 
 delighted to find that there was a bird in his 
 time called an archangel, and set to work, 
 with brightly hopeful industry, to find out 
 what it was. I was a little discomfited by 
 finding that in old botany the word only meant 
 "dead-nettle," but was still sanguine about 
 my bird, till I found the French form descend, 
 as you have seen, into a mesangel, and finally 
 into mesange, which is a provincialism from 
 fxeLov, and means, the smallest of birds — or, 
 specially here,— a titmouse. I have seldom 
 had a less expected or more ignominious fall 
 from the clouds. 
 
 37. The other birds, named here and in the 
 previous description of the garden, are intro- 
 duced, as far as I can judge, nearly at random, 
 and with no precision of imagination like that 
 of Aristophanes ; but with a sweet childish 
 delight in crowding as many birds as possible 
 into the smallest space. The popinjay is 
 always prominent ; and I want some of you to
 
 I. THE ROBIN. 41 
 
 help me (for I have not time at present for the 
 chase) in hunting the parrot down on his first 
 appearance in Europe. Just at this particular 
 J'ime. he contested favour even with the falcon ; 
 and I think it a piece of good fortune that I 
 chanced to draw for you, thinking only of its 
 brilliant colour, the popinjay, which Carpaccio 
 allows to be present on the grave occasion of 
 St George's baptizing the princess and her 
 fatl^r. 
 
 38. And, indeed, as soon as the Christian 
 poets begin to speak of the singing of the 
 birds, they show themselves in quite a diffe- 
 rent mood from any that ever occurs to a 
 Greek. Aristophanes, with infinitely more 
 skill, describes, and partly imitates, the sing- 
 ing of the nightingale ; but simply as beautiful 
 sound. It " fills the thickets with honey ; " 
 and if in the often-quoted — ^just because it 
 is not characteristic of Greek literature — 
 passage of the Coloneus, a deeper sentiment 
 is shown, that feeling is dependent on associa- 
 tion of the bird-voices with deeply pathetic 
 circumstances. But this troubadour finds his 
 heart in heaven by the power of the singing 
 only : —
 
 42 love's meinie. 
 
 Trop parfoisaient beau servise 
 Ciz oiselles que je vous devise. 
 II chantaient un chant ytel 
 Com fussent angle esperitel. 
 
 We want a moment more of word-chasing 
 to enjoy this. " Oiseau," as you know, comes 
 from " avis ; " but it had at this time got " oisel " 
 for its singular number, of which the terminating 
 "sel" confused itself with the "selle," from 
 " ancilla " in domisella and demoiselle ; and 
 the feminine form " oiselle " thus snatched for 
 itself some of the delightfulness belonging to 
 the title of a young lady. Then note that 
 "esperitel" does not here mean merely spiritual, 
 (because all angels are spiritual) but an " angle 
 esperitel " is an angel, of the air. So that, in 
 English, we could only express the meaning 
 in some such fashion as this : — 
 
 They perfected all their service of love, 
 These maiden birds that I tell you of. 
 They sang such a song, so finished-fair, 
 As if they were angels, born of the air. 
 
 39. Such were the fancies, then, and the 
 scenes, in which Englishmen took delight in 
 Chaucer's time. England was then a simple 
 country ; we boasted, for the best kind of riches,
 
 I. THE ROBIN. 43 
 
 our birds and trees, and our wives and children. 
 We-had now grown to be a rich one ; and our 
 jSrst pleasure is in shooting our birds ; but it 
 Iras become too expensive for us to keep our 
 trees. Lord Derb}^, whose crest is the eagle 
 and child — you will find the northern name 
 for it, the bird and bantling, made classical 
 by Scott — is the first to propose that wood- 
 birds should have no more nests. We must 
 cut ^own all our trees, he says, that we may 
 effectively use the steam-plough ; and the effect 
 of the steam-plough, I find by a recent article 
 in the Cornhill Magazine, is that an English 
 labourer must not any more have a nest, nor 
 bantlings, neither; but may only expect to 
 get on prosperously in life, if he be perfectly 
 skilful, sober, and honest, and dispenses, at 
 least until he is forty-five, with the " luxury 
 of marriage." 
 
 40. Gentlemen, 3^ou may perhaps have 
 heard me blamed for making no effort here 
 to teach in the artizans' schools. But I can 
 only say that, since the future life of the 
 English labourer or artizan (summing the 
 benefits to him of recent philosophy and 
 economy) is to be passed in a country
 
 44 love's MEINIE. 
 
 without angels and without birds, without 
 prayers and without songs, without trees and 
 without flowers, in a state of exemplary 
 sobriety, and (extending the Catholic celibacy 
 of the clergy into celibacy of the laity) in a 
 state of dispensation with the luxury of mar- 
 riage, I do not believe he wall derive either 
 profit or entertainment from lectures on the 
 Fine Arts.
 
 LECTURE II.* 
 
 THE SWALLOW. 
 
 41. We are to-day to take note of the form 
 of a creature which gives us a singular 
 example of the unity of what artists call 
 beauty, with the fineness of mechanical 
 structure, often mistaken for it. You cannot 
 but have noticed how little, during the years 
 of my past professorship, I have introduced 
 any questions as to the nature of beauty. 
 I avoided them, partly because they are 
 treated of at length in my books; and 
 partly because they are, in the last degree, 
 unpractical. We are born to like or dislike 
 certain aspects of things ; nor could I, by 
 any arguments, alter the defined tastes 
 which you received at your birth, and 
 which the surrounding circumstances of life 
 have enforced, without any possibility of 
 your voluntary resistance to them. And the 
 * Delivered at Oxford, May 2nd, 1873. 
 
 45
 
 46 love's meinie. 
 
 result of those surrounding circumstances, 
 to-day, is that most Enghsh youths would 
 have more pleasure in looking at a locomotive 
 than at a swallow ; and that many English 
 philosophers would suppose the pleasure so 
 received to be through a new sense of beauty. 
 But the meaning of the word " beauty " in the 
 fine arts, and in classical literature, is properly 
 restricted to those very qualities in which the 
 locomotion of a swallow differs from that of 
 an engine. 
 
 42. Not only from that of an engine ; but 
 also from that of animals in whose members 
 the mechanism is so complex as to give them 
 a resemblance to engines. The dart of the 
 common house - fly, for instance, in full 
 strength, is a more wonderful movement than 
 that of a swallow. The mechanism of it is 
 not only more minute, but the swiftness of the 
 action so much greater, that the vibration of 
 the wing is invisible. But though a schoolboy 
 might prefer the locomotive to the swallow, 
 he would not carry his admiration of finely 
 mechanical velocity into unqualified sympathy 
 withi the workmanship of the God of Ekron ; 
 and would generally suppose that flies were
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. 47 
 
 made only to be food for the more graceful 
 fly-eatcher, — whose finer grace you will 
 discover- upon reflection, to be owing to 
 the very moderation and simplicity of its 
 structure, and to the subduing of that in- 
 finitude of joints, claws, tissues, veins, and 
 fibres which inconceivably vibrate in the 
 microscopic * creature's motion, to a quite 
 intelligible and simple balance of rounded 
 body upon edged plume, maintained not 
 without visible, and sometimes fatigued, 
 exertion, and raising the lower creature into 
 fellowship with the voUtion and the virtue of 
 humanity. 
 
 43. With the virtue, I say, in an exceedingly 
 qualified sense ; meaning rather the strength 
 and art displayed in overcoming difficulties, 
 than any distinct morality of disposition. The 
 bird has kindly and homely qualities ; but its 
 principal ** virtue" for us^ is its being an in- 
 carnate voracity, and that it moves as a con- 
 suming and cleansing power. You sometimes 
 hear it said of a humane person that they 
 would not kill a fly : from 700 to lOOO flies 
 
 * I call it so because the members and action of it cannot 
 be seen with the unaided eye.
 
 48 love's meinie. 
 
 a day are a moderate allowance for a baby 
 swallow. 
 
 44. Perhaps, as I say this, it may occur to 
 some of you to think, for the first time, of 
 the reason of the bird's name. For it is 
 very interesting, as a piece of language 
 study, to consider the different power on our 
 minds, — nay, the different sweetness to the 
 ear, — which, from association, these same two 
 syllables receive, when we read them as a 
 noun, or as a verb. Also, the word is a 
 curious instance of the traps which are con- 
 tinually open for rash etymologists. At first, 
 nothing would appear more natural than that 
 the name should have been given to the bird 
 from its reckless function of devouring. But 
 if you look to your Johnson, you will find, 
 to your better satisfaction, that the name 
 means "bird of porticos," or porches, from 
 the Gothic "swale;" "subdivale," — so that 
 he goes back in thought as far as Virgil's, 
 " Et nunc porticibus vacuis, nunc humida 
 circum, stagna sonat." Notice, in passing, 
 how a simile of Virgil's, or any other great 
 master's, will probably tell in two or more 
 ways at once. Juturna is compared to the
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. 49 
 
 swallow, not merely as winding and turning 
 sv,-i^tly in her chariot, but as being a water- 
 n^-mph hy birth, — " Stagnis quae, flumini- 
 JDUsque sonoris, praesidet." How many 
 different creatures in one the swallow is by 
 birth, as a Virgilian simile is many thoughts 
 in one, it would take many more lectures 
 than one to show you clearly; but I will 
 indicate them with such rough sketch as is 
 possible. 
 
 45. It belongs, as most of you know, to a 
 family of birds called Fissi-rostres, or, literally, 
 spHt-beaks. Split heads would be a better 
 term, for it is the enormous width of mouth 
 and power of gaping which the epithet is 
 meant to express. A dull sermon, for in- 
 stance, makes half the congregation " fissi- 
 rostres." The bird, however, is most vigilant 
 when its mouth is widest, for it opens as a 
 net to catch whatever comes in its way, — 
 hence the French, giving the whole family 
 the more literal name, " Gobble - fly " — 
 Gobe-mouche, extend the term to the open- 
 mouthed and too acceptant appearance of a 
 simpleton. 
 
 46. Partly in order to provide for this width
 
 50 LOVES MEINIE. 
 
 of mouth, but more for the advantage in flight, 
 the head of the swallow is rounded into a 
 bullet shape, and sunk down on the shoulders, 
 with no neck whatever between, so as to give 
 nearly the aspect of a conical rifle bullet to the 
 entire front of the body ; and, indeed, the bird 
 moves more like a bullet than an arrow — 
 dependent on a certain impetus of weight 
 rather than on sharp penetration of the air. 
 I say dependent on, but I have not yet been 
 able to trace distinct relation between the 
 shapes of birds and their powers of flight. I 
 suppose the form of the body is first determined 
 by the general habits and food, and that nature 
 can make any form she chooses volatile ; only 
 one point I think is always notable, that a 
 complete master of the art of flight must be 
 short-necked, so that he turns altogether, if he 
 turns at all. You don't expect a swallow to 
 look round a corner before he goes round it ; 
 he must take his chance. The main point is 
 that he may be able to stop himself, and turn, 
 in a moment. 
 
 47. The stopping, on any terms, is difficult 
 enough to understand ; nor less so, the original 
 gaining of the pace. We always think of flight
 
 II THE SWALLOW. 5 J 
 
 as if the main difficulty of it were onl}^ in 
 keeping up in the air; — but the buoj^ancy is 
 coi?reivab!c enough, the far more wonderful 
 matter is the getting along. You find it hard 
 work to row yourself at anything like speed, 
 though your impulse-stroke is given in a heavy 
 element, and your return-stroke in a light one. 
 But both in birds and fishes, the impelling 
 stroke and its return are in the same element ; 
 and if, for the bird, that medium yields easily 
 to its impulses, it secedes as easily from the 
 blow that gives it. And if 3^ou think what an 
 effort 3-ou make to leap six feet, with the earth 
 for a fulcrum, the dart either of a trout or a 
 swallow, with no fulcrum but the water and 
 air they penetrate, will seem to 3'ou, I think, 
 greatly marvellous. Yet of the mode in which 
 it is accomplished 3'ou will as yet find no 
 undisputed account in any book on natural 
 history, and scarcely, as far as I know, 
 definite notice even of the rate of flight. 
 What do you suppose it is ? We are apt 
 to think of the migration of a swallow, as we 
 should ourselves of a serious journey. How 
 long, do you think, it would take him, if he flew 
 uninterruptedl3', to get from here to Africa ?
 
 52 love's meinie. 
 
 48. Michelet gives the rate of his flight (at 
 full speed, of course,) as eighty leagues an 
 hour. I find no more sound authority ; but 
 do not doubt his approximate accuracy ; * still 
 how curious and how provoking it is that 
 neither White of Selborne, Bewick, Yarrell, 
 nor Gould, says a word about this, one should 
 have thought the most interesting, power of 
 the bird.j- 
 
 Taking Michelet's estimate — eighty French 
 leagues, roughly two hundred and fifty miles, 
 an hour — we have a thousand miles in four 
 hours. That is to say, leaving Devonshire 
 after an early breakfast, he could be in Africa 
 to lunch. 
 
 49. He could, I say, if his flight were 
 constant; but though there is much incon- 
 sistency in the accounts, the sum of testimony 
 seems definite that the swallow is among the 
 
 * I wrote this some time ago, and the endeavours I have 
 since made to verify statements on points of natural history 
 which I had taken on trust have given me reason to doubt 
 everybody's accuracy. The ordinary flight of the swallow 
 does not, assuredly, even in the dashes, reach anything like 
 this speed. 
 
 t Incidentally suggestive sentences occur in the history 
 of Selborne, but its author never comes to the point, in 
 this case.
 
 11. THE SWALLOW. 53 
 
 most fatiguable of birds. " When the weather 
 is ha ^'3'," (I quote Yarrell) " they will alight on 
 fishing-L'Oats a league or two from land, so 
 lired that when any one tries to catch them, 
 they raji scarcely fly from one end of the boat 
 to the other." 
 
 I have no time to read to you the interesting 
 evidence on this point given by Yarrell, but 
 only that of the brother of White of Selborne, 
 at Gibraltar. " My brother has alwaj's found," 
 he himself writes, " that some of his birds, and 
 particularly the swallow kind, are very sparing 
 of their pains in crossing the Mediterranean ; 
 for when arrived at Gibraltar, they do not ' set 
 forth their airy caravan, high over seas,' but 
 scout and hurry along in little detached parties 
 of six or seven in a company ; and sweeping 
 low, just over the surface of the land and water, 
 direct their course to the opposite continent at 
 the narrowest passage they can find." 
 
 50. You will observe, however, that it 
 remains an open question whether this fear of 
 sea may not be, in the swallow, like ours of 
 the desert. The commissariat department is 
 a serious one for birds that eat a thousand flics 
 a day when just out of the egg; and it is
 
 54 LOVES MEINIE. 
 
 possible that the weariness of swallows at sea 
 may depend much more on fasting than flying. 
 Captain (or Admiral ?) Sir Charles Wager says 
 that " one spring-time, as he came into sound- 
 ings in the English Channel, a great flock of 
 swallows came and settled on all his rigging; 
 every rope was covered ; they hung on one 
 another like a swarm of bees; even the decks 
 were filled with them. They seemed almost 
 famished and spent, and were only feathers 
 and bone ; but, being recruited with a night's 
 rest, took their flight in the morning." 
 
 51. Now I detain you on this point some- 
 what, because it is intimately connected with 
 a more important one. I told you we should 
 learn from the swallow what a wing was. 
 Few other birds approach him in the beauty 
 of it, or apparent power. And yet, after all 
 this care taken about it, he gets tired ; and 
 instead of flying, as we should do in his 
 place, all over the world, and tasting the 
 flavour of the midges in every marsh which 
 the infinitude of human folly has left to breed 
 gnats instead of growing corn, — he is of all 
 birds, characteristically, except when he ab- 
 solutely can't help it, the stayer at home;
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. 5 5 
 
 and contentedly lodges himself and his family 
 in -an old chimne}', when he might be flying 
 dli over -the world. 
 
 - At least you would think, if he built in an 
 Englisji chimney this year, he would build in 
 a French one next. But no. Michelet prettily 
 says of him, "He is the bird of return." If 
 you will only treat him kindly, year after year, 
 he comes back to the same niche, and to the 
 same hearth, for his nest. 
 
 To the same niche ; and builds himself an 
 opaque walled house within that. Think of this 
 a little, as if you heard of it for the first time. 
 
 52. Suppose you had never seen a swallow; 
 but that its general habit of life had been 
 described to you, and you had been asked, 
 how you thought such a bird would build 
 its nest. A creature, observe, whose life is 
 to be passed in the air ; whose beak and 
 throat are shaped with the fineness of a net 
 for the catching of gnats ; and whose feet, 
 in the most perfect of the species, are so 
 feeble that it is called the Footless Swallow, 
 and cannot stand a moment on the ground 
 with comfort. Of all land birds, the one 
 that has least to do with the earth ; of all
 
 56 love's meinie. 
 
 the least disposed, and the least able, to stop 
 to pick anything up. What will it build with ? 
 Gossamer, we should say, — thistledown,— 
 anything it can catch floating, like flies. 
 But it builds with stiff clay. 
 
 53. And observe its chosen place for building 
 also. You would think, by its play in the air, 
 that not only of all birds, but of all creatures, 
 it most delighted in space and freedom. You 
 would fancy its notion of the place for a nest 
 would be the openest field it could find ; that 
 anything like confinement would be an agony 
 to it ; that it would almost expire of horror at 
 the sight of a black hole. 
 
 And its favourite home is down a chimney. 
 
 54. Not for your hearth's sake, nor for your 
 company's. Do not think it. The bird will 
 love you if you treat it kindly; is as frank 
 and friendly as bird can be ; but it does not, 
 more than others, seek your society. It 
 comes to your house because in no wild 
 wood, nor rough rock, can it find a cavity 
 close enough to please it. It comes for the 
 blessedness of imprisonment, and the solem- 
 nity of an unbroken and constant shadow, in 
 the tower, or under the eaves.
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. 57 
 
 Do you suppose that this is part of its 
 necessary economy, and that a swallow could 
 not catch flies unless it lived in a hole ? 
 . Not so. This instinct is part of its brother- 
 hood with anothci race of creatures. It is 
 given to complete a mesh in the reticulation 
 of the orders of life. 
 
 55. I have already given 3'ou several reasons 
 for my wish that you should retain, in classi- 
 fying birds, the now rejected order of Picae. 
 I am going to read you a passage from Hum- 
 boldt, which shows you what difficulties one 
 may get into for want of it. 
 
 You will find in the second volume of his 
 personal narrative, an account of the cave of 
 Caripe in New Andalusia, which is inhabited 
 by entirely nocturnal birds, having the gaping 
 mouths of the goat-sucker and the swallow, 
 and yet feeding on fruit. 
 
 Unless, which Mr. Humboldt does not tell 
 us, they sit under the trees outside, in the 
 night time, and hold their mouths open, for 
 the berries to drop into, there is not the 
 smallest occasion for their having wide mouths, 
 like swallows. Still less is there any need, 
 since they are fruit eaters, for their living in
 
 58 love's meinie. 
 
 a cavern 1,500 feet out of daylight. They 
 have only, in consequence, the trouble of carry- 
 ing in the seeds to feed their young, and the 
 floor of the cave is thus covered, by the seeds 
 they let fall, with a growth of unfortunate pale 
 plants, which have never seen day. Nay, they 
 are not even content with the darkness of 
 their cave ; but build their nests in the funnels 
 with which the roof of the grotto is pierced like 
 a sieve ; live actually in the chimney, not of 
 a house, but of an Egyptian sepulchre ! The 
 colour of this bird, of so remarkable taste in 
 lodging, Humboldt tells us, is " of dark bluish- 
 grey, mixed with streaks and specks of black. 
 Large white spots, which have the form of a 
 heart, and which are bordered with black, mark 
 the head, the wings, and the tail. The spread 
 of the wings, which are composed of seventeen 
 or eighteen quill feathers, is three feet and a 
 half. Suppressing, with Mr. Cuvier, the order 
 of Picae, we must refer this extraordinary bird 
 to the SparrowsT 
 
 56. We can only suppose that it must be, 
 to our popular sparrows, what the swallow of 
 the cinnamon country is to our subordinate 
 swallow. Do you recollect the cinnamon
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. 59 
 
 swallows of Herodotus, who build their mud 
 nests in the faces of the cliffs where Dionusos 
 was brought up, and where nobody can get 
 near them ; and how the cinnamon merchants 
 fetch them joints of meat, which the unadvised 
 birds, fl3'ing up to their nests with, instead of 
 cinnamon, — nest and all come down together, — 
 theoriginalof Sinbad's valley-of-diamond story? 
 
 57. Well, Humboldt is reduced, by neces- 
 sities of recent classification, to call a bird 
 three feet and a half across the wings, a 
 sparrow. I have no right to laugh at him, for 
 I am just going, myself, to call the cheerfullest 
 and brightest of birds of the air, an owl. All 
 these architectural and sepulchral habits, these 
 Egyptian manners of the sand-martin, digging 
 caves in the sand, and border-trooper's habits 
 of the chimney swallow, living in round towers 
 instead of open air, belonging to them as con- 
 nected with the tribe of the falcons through 
 the owls ! and not only so, but with the mam- 
 malia through the bats ! A swallow is an 
 emancipated owl, and a glorified bat ; but it 
 never forgets its fellowship with night. 
 
 58. Its ancietzt fellowship, I had nearly 
 written; so natural is it to think of these
 
 6o love's meinie. 
 
 similarly-minded creatures, when the feelings 
 that both show are evidently useless to one 
 of them, as if the inferior had changed into 
 the higher. The doctrine of development 
 seems at first to explain all so pleasantly, that 
 the scream of consent with which it has been 
 accepted by men of science, and the shriller 
 vociferation of the public's gregarious applause, 
 scarcely permit you the power of antagonist 
 reflection. I must justify to-day, in graver 
 tone than usual, the terms in which I have 
 hitherto spoken, — it may have been thought 
 with less than the due respect to my audience, 
 — of the popular theory. 
 
 59. Supposing that the octohedrons of 
 galena, of gold, and of oxide of iron, were 
 endowed with powers of reproduction, and 
 perished at appointed dates of dissolution or 
 solution, you would without any doubt have 
 heard it by this time asserted that the 
 octohedric form, which was common to all, 
 indicated their descent from a common pro- 
 genitor; and it would have been ingeniously 
 explained to you how the angular offspring 
 of this eight-sided ancestor had developed 
 themselves, by force of circumstances, into their
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. 6 1 
 
 distinct metallic perfections; how tlie galena 
 had become grey and brittle under prolonged 
 subterranean heat, and the gold yellow and 
 ductile, as it was rolled among the pebbles of 
 amber-coloured streams. 
 
 60. By the denial to these structures of any 
 individually reproductive energy, you are forced 
 to accept the inexplicable (and why expect it 
 to be otherwise than inexplicable ?) fact, of the 
 forrfiation of a series of bodies having very 
 similar aspects, qualities, and chemical rela- 
 tions to other substances, which yet have no 
 connection whatever with each other, and are 
 governed, in their relation with their native 
 rocks, by entirely arbitrary laws. It has been 
 the pride of modern chemistry to extricate 
 herself from the vanity of the alchemist, and 
 to admit, with resignation, the independent, 
 though apparently fraternal, natures, of silver, 
 of lead, of platinum, — aluminium, — potassium. 
 Hence, a rational philosophy would deduce the 
 probability that when the arborescence of dead 
 crystallization rose into the radiation of the 
 living tree, and sentient plume, the splendour 
 of nature in her more exalted power would not 
 be restricted to a less variety of design ; and
 
 62 love's meinie. 
 
 the beautiful caprice in which she gave to the 
 silver its frost and to the opal its fire, would 
 not be subdued under the slow influences of 
 accident and time, when she wreathed the 
 swan with snow, and bathed the dove in irides- 
 cence. That the infinitely more exalted powers 
 of life must exercise more intimate influence 
 over matter than the reckless forces of co- 
 hesion ; — and that the loves and hatreds of the 
 now conscious creatures would modify t^ieir 
 forms into parallel beauty and degradation, we 
 might have anticipated by reason, and we 
 ought long since to have known by observation. 
 But this law of its spirit over the substance^of 
 the creature involves, necessarily, the indis- 
 tinctness of its type, and the existence of 
 inferior and of higher conditions, which whole 
 aeras of heroism and affection — whole seras 
 of misery and misconduct, — confirm into 
 glory, or confuse into shame. Collecting the 
 causes of changed form, in lower creatures, by 
 distress, or by adaptation, — by the disturbance 
 or intensifying of the parental strength, and 
 the native fortune — the wonder is, not that 
 species should sometimes be confused, but 
 that the greater number of them remain so
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. 63 
 
 splendidly, so manifest]}^, so eternally distinct ; 
 and that the vile industries and vicious curi- 
 os; Lies of riodern ' science, while they have 
 robbed the fields of England of a thousand 
 living creatures, have not created in them one. 
 
 61. But even in the paltry knowledge we 
 have obtained, what jinanimity have we ? — 
 what security ? Suppose any man of ordinary 
 sense, knowing the value of time, and the 
 relative importance of subjects of thought, and 
 that the whole scientific world was agog con- 
 cerning the origin of species, desired to know 
 first of all — what was meant by a species. 
 
 He would naturally look for the definition of 
 species first among the higher animals, and 
 expect it to be best defined in those which 
 were best known. And being referred for 
 satisfaction to the 226th page of the first 
 volume of Mr. Darwin's " Descent of Man," 
 he would find this passage : — 
 
 " Man has been studied more carefully than 
 any other organic being, and yet there is the 
 greatest possible diversity among capable 
 judges, whether he should be classed as 
 a single species or race, or as two (Virey), 
 as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five
 
 64 love's meinie. 
 
 (Blumenbach), six (Biiffon), seven (Hunter), 
 eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen 
 (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), 
 twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawford), or as 
 sixty-three according to Burke." 
 
 And in the meantime, while your men of 
 science are thus vacillating, in the definition 
 of the species of the only animal they have the 
 opportunity of studying inside and out, between 
 one and sixty-three ; and disputing about 
 the origin, in past ages, of what they cannot 
 define in the present ones; and deciphering 
 the filthy heraldries which record the relation 
 of humanity to the ascidian and the crocodile, 
 you have ceased utterly to distinguish between 
 the two species of man, evermore separate by 
 infinite separation : of whom the one, capable 
 of loyalty and of love, can at least conceive 
 spiritual natures which have no taint from 
 their own, and leave behind them, diff'used 
 among thousands on earth, the happiness they 
 never hoped, for themselves, in the skies ; and 
 the other, capable only of avarice, hatred, and 
 shame, who in their lives are the companions 
 of the swine, and leave in death nothing but 
 food for the worm and the vulture.
 
 II. THE SWALLOW, 65 
 
 62. Now I have first traced for you the re- 
 lations of the creature we are examining to 
 thosc beneatli it and above, to the bat and to 
 the falcon. But you will find that it has still 
 others to entirely another world. As you 
 watch it glance and skim over the surface of 
 the waters, has it never struck you what re- 
 lation it bears to the creatures that glance and 
 glide under their surface ? Fly-catchers, some 
 of them, also, — fly-catchers in the same man- 
 ner, with wide mouth ; while in motion the bird 
 almost exactly combines the dart of the trout 
 with the dash of the dolphin, to the rounded 
 forehead and projecting muzzle of which its 
 own bullet head and bill exactly correspond. 
 In its plunge, if you watch it bathing, you may 
 see it dip its breast just as much under the 
 water as a porpoise shows its back above. 
 You can only rightly describe the bird by the 
 resemblances, and images of what it seems to 
 have changed from, — then adding the fantastic 
 and beautiful contrast of the unimaginable 
 change. It is an owl that has been trained by 
 the Graces. It is a bat that loves the morning 
 light. It is the aerial reflection of a dolphin. 
 It is the tender domestication of a trout. 
 
 E
 
 66 love's meinie. 
 
 63. And yet be assured, as it cannot have 
 been all these creatures, so it has never, in 
 truth, been any of them. The transformations 
 beHeved in by the mythologists are at least 
 spiritually true ; you cannot too carefully trace 
 or too accurately consider them. But the trans- 
 formations believed in by the anatomist are as 
 yet proved true in no single instance, and in 
 no substance, spiritual or material ; and I can- 
 not too often, or too earnestly, urge you not 
 to waste your time in guessing what animals 
 may once have been, while you remain in 
 nearly total ignorance of what they are. 
 
 64. Do you even know distinctly from each 
 other, — (for that is the real naturalist's busi- 
 ness ; instead of confounding them with each 
 other), — do you know distinctly the five great 
 species of this familiar bird ? — the swallow, 
 the house-martin, the sand-martin, the swift, 
 and the Alpine swift ? — or can you so much 
 as answer the first question which would 
 suggest itself to any careful observer of the 
 form of its most familiar species, — yet which 
 I do not find proposed, far less answered, in 
 any scientific book, — namely, why a swallow 
 has a swallow-tail ?
 
 II. THE SWALLOW, 6"] 
 
 It is true that the tail feathers in many 
 birJc appear to be entirely, — even cumbrously, 
 decoiative; as in the peacock, and birds of 
 paradise. But I am confident that it is not 
 so in the swallow, and that the forked tail, 
 so defined in form and strong in plume, has 
 indeed important functions in guiding the 
 flight ; yet notice how surrounded one is on 
 all sides with pitfalls for the theorists. The 
 forked tail reminds you at once of a fish's ; 
 and yet, the action of the two creatures is 
 wholly contrary. A fish lashes himself forward 
 with his tail, and steers with his fins ; a swallow 
 lashes himself forward with his fins, and steers 
 with his tail ; partly, not necessarily, because 
 in the most dashing of the swallows, the swift, 
 the fork of the tail is the least developed. 
 And I never watch the bird for a moment 
 without finding myself in some fresh puzzle 
 out of which there is no clue in the scientific 
 books. I want to know, for instance, how the 
 bird turns. What does it do with one wing, 
 what witli the otiicr ? Fancy the pace that 
 has to be stopped ; tlic force of bridle-hand 
 put out in an instant. Fancy how the wings 
 must bend with the strain ; what need there
 
 68 love's meinie. 
 
 must be for the perfect aid and work of every 
 feather in them. There is a problem for you, 
 students of mechanics, — How does a swallow 
 turn ? 
 
 You shall see, at all events, to begin with, 
 to-day, how it gets along. 
 
 65. I say you shall see; but indeed you 
 have often seen, and felt, — at least with your 
 hands, if not with your shoulders, — when you 
 chanced to be holding the sheet of a sail. 
 
 I have said that I never got into scrapes 
 by blaming people wrongly ; but I often do 
 by praising them wrongl3\ I never praised, 
 without qualification, but one scientific book 
 in my life (that I remember) — this of Dr. 
 Pettigrew's on the Wing ; * — and now I must 
 
 * "On the Physiology of Wings." Transactions of the 
 Royal Society of Edinburgh. Vol. xxvi., Part ii. I cannot 
 sufficiently express either my wonder or regret at the petu- 
 lance in which men of science are continually tempted into 
 immature publicity, by their rivalship with each other. 
 Page after page of this book, which, slowly digested and 
 taken counsel upon, might have been a noble contribution 
 to natural history, is occupied with dispute utterly useless to 
 the reader, on the question of the priority of the author, by 
 some months, to a French savant, in the statement of a 
 principle which neither has yet proved ; while page after 
 page is rendered worse than useless to the reader by the 
 author's passionate endeavour to contradict the ideas o(
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. 69 
 
 qualify my praise considerably, discovering, 
 whe*: I examined the book farther, that the 
 good dof^ior had described the motion of a 
 bird as resembling that of a kite, without ever 
 inquiring what, in a bird, represented that 
 somewhat important part of a kite, the string. 
 
 unquestionably previous investigators. The problem of flight 
 was, to all serious purpose, solved by Borelli in 16S0, and 
 the following passage is very notable as an example of the 
 way in which the endeavour to obscure the light of former 
 ages lOO fatally dims and distorts that by which modern men 
 of science walk, themselves. " Borelli, and all who have 
 written since his time, are unanimous in affirming that the 
 horizontal transference of the body of the bird is due to the 
 perpendicular vibration of the wings, and to the yielding of 
 the posterior or flexible margins of the wings in an upward 
 direction, as the wings descend. 1" (Dr. Pettigrew) "am, 
 however, disposed to attribute it to the fact (ist), that the 
 wings, both when elevated and depressed, leap forwards 
 in cur\'es, those curves uniting to form a continuous waved 
 track; (2nd), to the tendency -which the body of the bird has 
 to swing forwards, in a more or less horizontal direction, 
 when once set in motion; (3rd), to the construction of the 
 wings ; they are elastic helices or screws, which twist and 
 untwist while they vibrate, and tend to bear nfwards and 
 onwards anyweii;ht suspended fro/n them ; (4th), to the action 
 of the air on the under surfaces of the wings ; (5th), to the 
 ever-varying power -with -which the -wings are mged, Ihis 
 being greatest at the beginning of the down-stroke, and least 
 at the end of the up one ; (6lh), to the contraction of the 
 voluntary muscles and clastic ligaments, and to the effect 
 produced by the various inclined surfaces formed by the 
 wings during their oscillations ; (7th), to the -weight of the 
 bird — weight itself, when acting upon wings, becoming
 
 70 LOVE S MEINIE. 
 
 You will, however, find the book full of im- 
 portant observations, and illustrated by valu- 
 able drawings. But the point in question you 
 must settle for yourselves, and you easily 
 may. Some of you perhaps, knew, in your 
 time, better than the doctor, how a kite 
 stopped ; but I do not doubt that a great many 
 of you also know, now, what is much more 
 
 a propelling power, and so contributing to horizontal 
 motion." 
 
 I will collect these seven reasons for the forward motion, 
 in the gist of them, which I have marked by italics, that the 
 reader may better judge of their collective value. The bird 
 is carried forward, according to Dr. Pettigrew — 
 
 1. Because its wings leap forward. 
 
 2. Because its body has a tendency to swing forward. 
 
 3. Because its wings are screws so constructed as to screw 
 
 upwards and onwards any body suspended from 
 them. 
 
 4. Because the air reacts on the under surfaces of the 
 
 wings. 
 
 5. Because the wings are urged with ever-varying power. 
 
 6. Because the voluntary muscles contract. 
 
 7. Because the bird is heavy. 
 
 What must be the general conditions of modern science, 
 when it is possible for a man of great experimental know- 
 ledge and practical ingenuity, to publish nonsense such as 
 this, becoming, to all intents and purposes, insane, in the 
 passion of his endeavour to overthrow the statements of his 
 rival? Had he merely taken patience to consult any ele- 
 mentary scholar in dynamics, he would have been enabled 
 to understand his own machines, and develope, with credit to 
 himself, what had been rightly judged or noticed by others.
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. "J I 
 
 to the purpose, how a ship gets along. I will 
 take «-he simplest, the most natural, the most 
 beautiful of sails, — the lateen sail of the 
 -Mediterranean. 
 
 66. I draw it rudely in outline, as it would 
 be set for a side-wind on the boat you pro- 
 bably know best, — the boat of burden on the 
 Lake of Geneva (Fig. 3), not confusing the 
 drawing by adding the mast, which, you know, 
 rakes a little, carrying the yard across it. {a). 
 Then, with your permission, I will load my 
 boat thus, with a few casks of Vevay vintage 
 — and, to keep them cool, we will put an 
 awning over them, so {b). Next, as we are 
 classical scholars, instead of this rustic stern 
 of the boat, meant only to run easily on a flat 
 shore, we will give it an Attic efi^oXov (c). 
 (We have no business, indeed, yet, to put an 
 efi^oXov on a boat of burden, but I hope some 
 day to see all our ships of war loaded with 
 bread and wine, instead of artillery.) Then I 
 shade the entire form (c) ; and, lastly, reflect 
 it in the water (</)— and you have seen some- 
 thing like that before, besides a boat, haven't 
 you ? 
 
 There is the gist of the whole business for
 
 72 
 
 LOVES MEINIE. 
 
 you, put in ver}'- small space ; with these only 
 differences : in a boat, the air strikes the sail ; 
 in a bird, the sail strikes the air : in a boat. 
 
 Fig. 3. 
 
 a 
 
 the force is lateral, and in a bird downwards ; 
 and it has its sail on both sides. I shall leave 
 you to follow out the mechanical problem for
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. 73 
 
 yourselves, as far as the mere resolution of 
 forcf- is concerned. My business, as a 
 painter, is only with the exquisite organic 
 weapon that deals with it. 
 
 6^. Of which you are now to note farther, 
 that a bird is required to manage his wing 
 so as to obtain two results with one blow : — 
 he has to keep himself up, as well as to get 
 along. 
 
 But observe, he only requires to keep him- 
 self up because he has to get along. The 
 buoyancy might have been given at once, if 
 nature had wanted tJiat only ; she might have 
 blown the feathers up with the hot air of the 
 breath, till the bird rose in air like a cork 
 in water. But it has to be, not a buoyant 
 cork, but a buoyant bullet. And therefore 
 that it may have momentum for pace, it 
 must have weight to carry ; and to carry 
 that weight, the wings must deliver their 
 blow with effective vertical, as well as oblique, 
 force. 
 
 Here, again, you may take the matter in 
 brief sum. Whatever is the ship's loss, is the 
 bird's gain ; whatever tendency the ship has 
 to leeway, is all given to the bird's support, so
 
 74 love's meinie. 
 
 that every atom* of force in the blow is of 
 service. 
 
 68. Therefore you have to construct your 
 organic weapon, so that this absolutely and 
 perfectly economized force may be distributed 
 as the bird chooses at any moment. That, if 
 it wants to rise, it may be able to strike 
 vertically more than obliquely; — if the order 
 is, go a-head, that it may put the oblique 
 screw on. If it wants to stop in an instant, 
 that it may be able to throw its wings up full 
 to the wind ; if it wants to hover, that it may 
 be able to lay itself quietly on the wind with 
 its wings and tail, or, in calm air, to regulate 
 their vibration and expansion into tranquillity 
 of gliding, or of pausing power. Given the 
 various proportions of weight and wing ; the 
 conditions of possible increase of muscular 
 force and quill-strength in proportion to size ; 
 and the different objects and circumstances of 
 flight, — you have a series of exquisitely com- 
 plex problems, and exquisitely perfect solu- 
 tions, which the life of the youngest among 
 
 * I don't know what word to vise for an infinitesimal 
 degree or divided portion of force : one cannot properly 
 speak of a force being cut into pieces ; but I can think of 
 no other word than atom.
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. 75 
 
 3^ou cannot be long enough to read through 
 so much as once, and of which the future 
 infinitudes of human life, however granted or 
 extended, never will be fatigued in admiration. 
 69. I take the rude outline of sail in Fig. 3, 
 and now considering it as a jib of one of our 
 
 Fig. 4. 
 
 own sailing vessels, slightly exaggerate the 
 loops at the edge, and draw curved lines from 
 them to the opposite point. Fig. 4 ; and I have 
 a reptilian or dragon's wing, which would, 
 with some ramification of the supporting ribs, 
 become a bat's or moth's ; that is to say, an 
 extension of membrane between the ribs (as
 
 ']6 love's meinie. 
 
 in an umbrella), which will catch the wind, 
 and flutter upon it, like a leaf; but cannot 
 strike it to any purpose. The flying squirrel 
 drifts like a falling leaf; the bat flits like a 
 black rag torn at the edge. To give power, 
 we must have plumes that can strike, as with 
 the flat of a sword-blade ; and to give perfect 
 power, these must be laid over each other, so 
 that each may support the one below it. I 
 use the word below advisedly : we have to 
 strike down. The lowest feather is the one 
 that first meets the adverse force. It is the 
 one to be supported. 
 
 Now for the manner of the support. You 
 must all know well the look of the machicolated 
 parapets in mediaeval castles. You know they 
 are carried on rows of small projecting but- 
 tresses constructed so that, though the upper- 
 most stone, far-projecting, would break easily 
 under any shock, it is supported by the next 
 below, and so on, down to the wall. Now 
 in this figure I am obliged to separate the 
 feathers by white spaces, to show you them 
 distinctly. In reality they are set as close to 
 each other as can be, but putting them as close 
 as I can, you get a or ^, Fig. 5, for the rough
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. 
 
 77 
 
 section of the wing, thick towards the bird's 
 head, and curved 'hke a sickle, so that in 
 striking 'down it catches the air, hke a reaping- 
 hook, and in rising up, it throws off the air 
 Hke a pent-house. 
 
 70. The stroke would therefore be vigorous, 
 and the recovery almost effortless, were even 
 the direction of both actuall}' vertical. But 
 they are vertical only with relation to the 
 
 Fig. s. 
 
 ^- 
 
 ■^ 
 
 bird's body. In space they follow the forward 
 flight, in a softly curved line ; the downward 
 stroke being as effective as the bird chooses, 
 the recovery scarcely encounters resistance in 
 the softly gliding ascent. Thus, in Fig. 5, 
 (I can only explain this to readers a little 
 versed in the elements of mechanics,) if B is 
 the locus of the centre of gravity of the bird, 
 moving in slow flight in the direction of the
 
 78 love's meinie. 
 
 arrow, W is the locus of the leading feather of 
 its wing, and a and b^ roughly, the successive 
 positions of the wing in the down-stroke and 
 recovery. 
 
 71. I say the down-stroke is as effective as 
 the bird chooses ; that is to say, it can be given 
 with exactly the quantity of impulse, and 
 exactly the quantity of supporting power, re- 
 quired at the moment. Thus, when the bird 
 wants to fly slowly, the wings are fluttered 
 fast, giving vertical blows ; if it wants to pause 
 absolutely in still air, (this large birds cannot 
 do, not being able to move their wings fast 
 enough,) the velocity becomes vibration, as in 
 the humming-bird : but if there is wind, any 
 of the larger birds can lay themselves on it 
 like a kite, their own weight answering the 
 purpose of the string,* while they keep the 
 wings and tail in an inclined plane, giving 
 them as much gliding ascent as counteracts 
 the fall. They nearly all, however, use some 
 slightly gliding force at the same time ; a single 
 stroke of the wing, with forward intent, seeming 
 enough to enable them to ghde on for half a 
 minute or more without stirring a plume. A 
 
 * See App. p. 197, § 145-
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. 79 
 
 circling eagle floats an inconceivable time 
 without visible stroke : (fancy the pretty action 
 of the nwier wing, backing air instead of water, 
 which gives exactly the breadth of circle he 
 clioose*).- But for exhibition of the complete 
 art of flight, a swallow on rough water is the 
 master of masters. A seagull, with all its 
 splendid power, generally has its work cut 
 out for it, and is visibly fighting ; but the 
 swallow plays with wind and wave as a girl 
 plays with her fan, and there are no words 
 to say how many things it does with its wings 
 in any ten seconds, and does consummately. 
 The mystery of its dart remains always in- 
 explicable to me ; no eye can trace the bend- 
 ing of bow that sends that living arrow. 
 
 But the main structure of the noble weapon 
 we may with little pains understand. 
 
 72. In the sections a and b of Fig. 5, I have 
 only represented the quills of the outer part 
 of the wing. The relation of these, and of 
 the inner quills, to the bird's body may be 
 very simply shown. 
 
 Fig. 6 is a rude sketch, typically representing 
 the wing of any bird, but actually founded 
 chiefly on the seagull's.
 
 8o 
 
 LOVES MEINIE. 
 
 It is broadly composed of two fans, A and 
 Fig, 6. 
 
 B. The outmost fan, A, is carried Ly the
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. Si 
 
 bird's hand ; of which I rudely sketch the 
 contour of the bones at a. The innermost 
 fan, :b, is carried by the bird's fore-arm, from 
 wrist to elbow, b. 
 
 The 'Strong humerus, c, corresponding to 
 our arm from shoulder to elbow, has command 
 of the whole instrument. No feathers are 
 attached to this bone ; but covering and pro- 
 tecting ones are set in the skin of it, completely 
 filling, when the active wing is open, the space 
 between it and the body. But the plumes of 
 the two great fans, A and B, are set into the 
 bones; in Fig. 8, farther on, are shown the 
 projecting knobs on the main arm bone, set 
 for the reception of the quills, which make it 
 look like the club of Hercules. The connection 
 of the still more powerful quills of the outer 
 fan with the bones of the hand is quite be- 
 yond all my poor anatomical perceptions, and, 
 happily for me, also beyond needs of artistic 
 investigation. 
 
 73. The feathers of the fan A are called the 
 
 primaries. Those of the fan B, secondaries. 
 
 Effective actions of flight, whether for support 
 
 or forward motion, are, I believe, all executed 
 
 with the primaries, every one of which may be 
 
 F
 
 82 love's meinie. 
 
 briefly described as the strongest scymitar 
 that can be made of quill substance; flexible 
 within limits, and elastic at its edges — carried 
 by an elastic central shaft — twisted like a 
 windmill sail — striking with the flat, and 
 recovering with the edge. 
 
 The secondary feathers are more rounded 
 at the ends, and frequently notched ; their 
 curvature is reversed to that of the primaries ; 
 they are arranged, when expanded, somewhat 
 in the shape of a shallow cup, with the hollow 
 of it downwards, holding the air therefore, and 
 aiding in all the pause and buoyancy of flight, 
 but little in the activity of it. Essentially they 
 are the brooding and covering feathers of the 
 wing ; exquisitely "beautiful — as far as I have 
 yet seen, most beautiful — in the bird whose 
 brooding is of most use to us ; and which has 
 become the image of all tenderness. " How 
 often would I have. gathered thy children . . . 
 and ye would not." 
 
 74. Over these two chief masses of the 
 plume are set others w^hich partly complete 
 their power, partly adorn and protect them ; 
 but of these I can take no notice at present. 
 All that I want you to understand is the action
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. 
 
 S3 
 
 of the two main masses, as the wing is opened 
 aro v,iobed. 
 
 Fig. ■/ roughly represents the upper surface 
 of the main feathers of the wing closed. The 
 secondai ies are folded over the primaries ; and 
 the primaries shut up close, with their outer 
 edges parallel, or nearly so. Fig. 8 roughly 
 
 Fig 7. 
 
 shows the outline of the bones, in this position, 
 of one of the larger pigeons.* 
 
 75. Then Fig. 9 is (always sketched in the 
 roughest way) the outer. Fig. 10 the inner, 
 
 * I find even this mere outline of anatomical structure 
 so interfere with the temper in which I wish my readers to 
 think, that I shall withdraw it in my complete edition.
 
 84 
 
 LOVES MEINIE. 
 
 surface of a seagull's wing in this position. 
 
 Fig. 8. 
 
 Next, Fig. 1 1 shows the tops of the four 
 lowest feathers in Fig. 9, in mere outline ;
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. 85 
 
 A separate (pulled off, so that they can be 
 set side by side), B shut up close in the 
 folded wing, C, opened in the spread wing. 
 
 ']6. And now, if 3-ou will yourselves watch 
 a few "Birds in flight, or opening and closing 
 their wings to prune them, you will soon 
 know as much as is needful for our art 
 purposes ; and, which is far more desirable, 
 feel how very little we know, to any purpose, 
 of even the familiar creatures that are our 
 companions. 
 
 Even what we have seen to-day * is more 
 than appears to have been noticed by the 
 most careful painters of the great schools ; 
 and you will continually fancy that I am in- 
 consistent with myself in pressing you to 
 learn, better than they, the anatomy of birds, 
 while I violently and constantly urge you to 
 refuse the knowledge of the anatomy of men. 
 But you will find, as my system developes 
 itself, that it is absolutely consistent through- 
 out. I don't mean, by telling you not to 
 study human anatomy, that you arc not to 
 
 * Larije and somewhat carefully painted diagrams were 
 shown at the lecture, which I cannot engrave but for my 
 complete edition.
 
 86 
 
 love's MEINIE. 
 
 know how many fingers and toes you have, 
 nor how you can grasp and walk with them ; 
 and, similarly, when you look at a bird, I 
 wish you to know how many claws and wing- 
 feathers it has, and how it grips and flies 
 
 Fig. 9. 
 
 with them. Of the bones, in either, I shall 
 show you little ; and of the muscles, nothing 
 but what can be seen in the living creature, 
 nor, often, even so much. 
 
 ']']. And accordingly, when I now show
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. 
 
 87 
 
 you this sketch of my favourite Holbein, and 
 tell you tliat it is entirely disgraceful he 
 should not know what a wing was, better, — 
 I don't mean that it is disgraceful he should 
 not know the anatomy of it, but that he 
 
 Fig. 10. 
 
 should never have looked at it to see how 
 the feathers lie. 
 
 Now Holbein paints men gloriously, but 
 never looks at birds ; Gibbons, the woodcutter, 
 carves birds, but can't men ; — of the two faults
 
 88 
 
 LOVES MEINIE. 
 
 Fig. iIo 
 
 the last is the worst ; but the right is in looking
 
 II. THE SWALLOW. 89 
 
 at the whole of nature in due comparison, and 
 with universal candour and tenderness. 
 . 78. At the whole of nature, I say, not at 
 j«/^r-nature — at what you suppose to be 
 above the visible nature about 3'ou. If you 
 are not inclined to look at the wings of birds, 
 which God has given you to handle and to see, 
 much less are you to contemplate, or draw 
 imaginations of, the wings of angels, which you 
 can't see. Know your own world first — not 
 denying any other, but being quite sure that 
 the place in which you are now put is the 
 place with which you are now concerned ; and 
 that it will be wiser in you to think the gods 
 themselves may appear in the form of a dove, 
 or a swallow, than that, by false theft from the 
 form of dove or swallow, you can represent the 
 aspect of gods. 
 
 79. One sweet instance of such simple con- 
 ception, in the end of the Odyssey, must surely 
 recur to your minds in connection with our 
 subject of to-day, but you may not have 
 noticed the recurrent manner in which Homer 
 insists on the thought. When Ulysses first 
 bends and strings his bow, the vibration of the 
 chord is shrill, " like the note of a swallow."
 
 90 LOVE S MEINIE. 
 
 A poor and unwarlike simile, it seems ! But 
 in the next book, when Ulysses stands with 
 his bow lifted, and Telemachus has brought 
 the lances, and laid them at his feet, and 
 Athena comes to his side to encourage him, — 
 do you recollect the gist of her speech ? " You 
 fought," she says, " nine years for the sake 
 of Helen, and for another's house : — now, re- 
 turned, after all those wanderings, and under 
 your own roof, for it, and its treasures, will 
 you not fight, then ? " And she herself flies 
 up to the house-roof, and thence, in the form 
 of the swallozv, guides the arrows of vengeance 
 for the violation of the sanctities of home. 
 
 80. To-day, then, I believe verily for the 
 first time, I have been able to put before you 
 some means of guidance to understand the 
 beauty of the bird which lives with you in 
 your own houses, and which purifies for you, 
 from its insect pestilence, the air that you 
 breathe. Thus the sweet domestic thing has 
 done, for men, at least these four thousand 
 years. She has been their companion, not of 
 the home merely, but of the hearth, and the 
 threshold ; companion only endeared by depar- 
 ture, and showing better her loving-kindness
 
 ir. THE SWALLOW, 91 
 
 by her faithful return. Type sometimes of 
 the stranger, she has softened us to hospi- 
 tality; type always of the suppliant, she has 
 enchanted us to mercy ; and in her feeble 
 presence, the cowardice, or the wrath, of 
 sacrilege has changed into the fidelities of 
 sanctuary. Herald of our summer, she glances 
 through our days of gladness ; numberer of 
 our years, she would teach us to apply our 
 hearts to wisdom ; — and yet, so little have we 
 regarded her, that this very day, scarcely 
 able to gather from all I can find told of her 
 enough to explain so much as the unfolding of 
 her wings, I can tell you nothing of her life — 
 nothing of her journeying : I cannot learn how 
 she builds, nor how she chooses the place of 
 her wandering, nor how she traces the path 
 of her return. Remaining thus blind and 
 careless to the true ministries of the humble 
 creature whom God has really sent to serve 
 us, we in our pride, thinking ourselves sur- 
 rounded by the pursuivants of the sky, can 
 yet only invest them with majesty by giving 
 them the calm of the bird's motion, and shade 
 of the bird's plume : — and after all, it is well 
 for us, if, when even for God's best mercies,
 
 92 love's meinie. 
 
 and in His temples marble-built, we think that, 
 "with angels and archangels, and all the 
 company of Heaven, we laud and magnify His 
 glorious name " — well for us, if our attempt be 
 not only an insult, and His ears open rather 
 to the inarticulate and unintended praise, of 
 "the Swallow, twittering from her straw-built 
 shed."
 
 LECTURE Ilf. 
 
 THE DAPXHICKS. 
 
 8 1. I BELIEVE that somewhere I have already 
 observed, but permit myself, for immediate 
 use, to repeat what I cannot but think the 
 sagacious observation, — that the arrangement 
 of any sort of animals must be, to say the 
 least, imperfect, if it be founded only on the 
 characters of their feet. And, of all creatures, 
 one would think birds were those which, con- 
 tinually dispensing with the use of their feet, 
 would require for their classification some 
 attention also to be paid to their bodies and 
 wings, — not to say their heads and tails. 
 Nevertheless, the ornithological arrangement 
 at present in vogue may suffice for most 
 scientific persons; but in grouping birds, so 
 that the groups m.ay be understood and re- 
 membered by children, I must try to make 
 them a little more generally descriptive. 
 
 82. In talking of parrots, for instance, it is 
 
 93
 
 94 LOVE S MEINIE. 
 
 only a small part of the creature's nature which 
 is told by its scientific name of 'Scansor/ or 
 * Climber.' That it only clutches with its 
 claws, and does not snatch or strike with 
 them; — that it helps itself about with its 
 beak, on branches, or bars of cage, in an 
 absurd manner, as if partly imagining itself 
 hung up in a larder, are by no means the 
 most vital matters about the bird. Whereas, 
 that its beak is always extremely short, and 
 is bent down so roundly that the angriest 
 parrot cannot peck, but only bite^ if you give 
 it a chance; that it can bite, pinch, or other- 
 wise apply the mechanism of a pair of nut- 
 crackers from the back of its head, with effect ; 
 that it has a little black tongue capable of 
 much talk ; above all, that it is mostly gay in 
 plumage, often to vulgarity, and always to 
 pertness ; — all these characters should surely 
 be represented to the apprehensive juvenile 
 mind, in sum ; and not merely the bird's 
 climbing qualities. 
 
 83. Again, that the race of birds called in 
 Latin ' Rasores ' do^ in the search for their 
 food, usually scratch, and kick out their legs 
 behind, living for the most part in gravelly
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. 95 
 
 or littery places, of which the hidden treasures 
 are only to be discovered in that manner, 
 s'eems to i7ie no supremely interesting custom 
 of the animal's life, but only a manner of its 
 household, or threshold, economy. But that 
 the tribe, on the whole, is unambitiously 
 domestic, and never predatory; that they fly 
 little and low, eat much of what they can 
 pick up without trouble — and are themselves 
 always excellent eating ; — yet so exemplary 
 in their own domestic cares and courtesies 
 that one is ashamed to eat them except in 
 eggs ; — that their plumage is for the most 
 part warm brown, delicately and even be- 
 witchingly spotty ;— and that, in the goodliest 
 species, the spots become variegated, and 
 inlaid as in a Byzantine pavement, deepening 
 to imperial purple and azure, and lightening 
 into lustre of innumerable eyes; — all this, I 
 hold, very clearly and positively, should be 
 explained to children as a part of science, 
 quite as exact, and infinitely more gracious, 
 than that which reckons up the whole tribe 
 of loving and luminous creatures under the 
 feebly descriptive term of 'Scratchers.' 
 
 I v/ill venture therefore to recommend my
 
 g6 love's meinie. 
 
 younger readers, in classing birds, to think 
 of them literally from top to toe — from toe 
 to top I should say, — foot, body, and head, 
 studying, with the body, the wings that bear 
 it ; and with the head, what brains it can 
 bring to bear on practical matters, and what 
 sense on sentimental. But indeed, primarily, 
 you have to consider whether the bird alto- 
 gether may not be little more than a fat, 
 cheerful little stomach, in a spotted -waist- 
 coat, and with legs to it. That is the main 
 definition of a great many birds — meant 
 to eat all day, chiefly, grubs, or grain — not 
 at all, unless under wintry and calamitous 
 conditions, meant to fast painfully, or be 
 in concern about their food. Faultless in 
 digestion — dinner lasting all day long, with 
 the delight of social intercourse — various 
 chirp and chatter. Flying or fluttering in a 
 practical, not stately, manner : hopping and 
 creeping intelligently. Sociable to man ex- 
 tremely, building and nestling and rustling 
 about him, — prying and speculating, curiously 
 watchful of him at his work, if likely to be 
 profitable to themselves, or even sometimes 
 in mere pitying sympathy, and wonder how
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. 97 
 
 such a wingless and beakless creature can do 
 anyiking* 
 
 84. ' Tlie balance of this kind of bird on 
 its legs is a very important part of its — 
 diagnosis ; (we must have a fine word now 
 and then !) Its action on the wing, is mere 
 flutter or flirt, in and out of the hedge, or 
 over it; but its manner of perch, or literally 
 * bien-seance,' is admirable matter of interest. 
 So also in the birds which are on the water 
 what these are on land ; picking up anything 
 anywhere ; lazy and fortunate, mostly, them- 
 selves ; fat, floating, daintiest darlings ; — t/ieir 
 balance on the water, also, and under it, in 
 ' ducking,' a most essential part of their busi- 
 ness and being. 
 
 85. Then, directly opposed to these, in both 
 kinds, you have the birds which must fast 
 long, and fly far, and watch or fight for their 
 food. Not stomachic in profile ; far from 
 cheerful in disposition ; more or less lonely 
 in habit ; or, if gregarious, out of the way of 
 men. The balance of these on the wing, is 
 no less essential a part of their picturing, than 
 
 * Compare ' Paradise of Birds,' (song to the young Roc, 
 page 67,) and see close of lecture for notes on that book. 
 
 G
 
 98 love's meinie. 
 
 that of the buntings, robins, and ducks on the 
 foot, or breast : and therefore, especially the 
 position of the head in flying. 
 
 86. Accordingly, for complete ornithology, 
 every bird must be drawn, as every flower 
 for good botany, both in profile, and looking 
 down upon it : but for the perchers, the 
 standing profile is the most essential ; and 
 for the falcons and gulls, the flying plan, — 
 the outline of the bird, as it would be seen 
 looking down on it, when its wings were full- 
 spread. 
 
 Then, in connection with these general out- 
 lines, we want systematic plan and profile of 
 the foot and head ; but since we can't have 
 everything at once, let us say the plan of the 
 foot, and profile of the head, quite accur- 
 ately given ; and for every bird consistently, 
 and to scale. 
 
 Profile and plan in outHne; then, at least 
 the head in light and shade, from life, so as 
 to give the expression of the eye. Fallacious, 
 this latter, often, as an indication of character ; 
 but deeply significant of habit and power: 
 thus the projecting, full, bead, which enables 
 the smaller birds to see the smallest insect or
 
 111. THE DABCHICKS. 99 
 
 grain with good in it, gives them much of their 
 bright and often £-.rch expression; while the 
 flatteneci iris under the beetling brow of the 
 'falcons, — projecting, not in frown, but as roof, 
 to sha:de the eye from interfering skylight, — 
 gives them their apparently threatening and 
 ominous gaze ; the iris itself often wide and 
 pale, showing as a lurid saturnine ring under 
 the shadow of the brow plumes. 
 
 87. I speak of things that are to be : very 
 assuredly they will be done, some day — not 
 far off, by painters educated as gentlemen, in 
 the strictest sense — working for love and truth, 
 and not for lust and gold. Much has already 
 been done by good and earnest draughtsmen, 
 who yet had not received the higher painter's 
 education, which would have enabled them to 
 see the bird in the greater lights and laws of 
 its form. It is only here and there, by Durer, 
 Holbein, Carpaccio, or other such men, that 
 we get a living bird rightly drawn ; * but we 
 may be greatly thankful for the unspared 
 labour, and attentive skill, with which many 
 illustrations of ornithology have been produced 
 
 * The Macaw in Sir Joshua's portrait of the Countess of 
 Derby is a grand example.
 
 100 love's meinie. 
 
 within the last seventy or eighty years. Far 
 beyond rivalship among them, stands Le Vail- 
 lant's monograph, or dualgraph, on the Birds 
 of Paradise, and Jays : its plates, exquisitely 
 engraved, and coloured with unwearying care 
 by hand, are insuperable in plume-texture, 
 hue, and action, — spoiled in effect, unhappily, 
 by the vulgar boughs for sustentation. Next, 
 ranks the recently issued history of the birds 
 of Lombardy ; the lithographs by Herr Oscar 
 Dressier, superb, but the colouring (chromo- 
 lithotint) poor : and then, the self-taught, but 
 in some qualities greatly to be respected, art 
 of Mr. Gould. Of which, I would fain have 
 spoken with gratitude and admiration in his 
 lifetime; had not I known, that the qualified 
 expressions necessary for true estimate of his 
 published plates, would have caused him more 
 pain, than any general praise could have coun- 
 teracted or soothed. Without special criticism, 
 and rejoicing in all the pleasure which any 
 of my young pupils may take in his drawing, 
 — only guarding them, once for all, against 
 the error of supposing it exemplary as art, — 
 I use his plates henceforward for general 
 reference; finding also that, following Mr.
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. lOI 
 
 GoiiJd's practical and natural arrangement, I 
 can ^t once throw together in groups, easily 
 comprehensible by British children, all they 
 are ever likely to see of British or Britain- 
 visitant birds : which I find fall, with frank 
 casting, into these following divisions, not in 
 any important matters varying from the usual 
 ones, and therefore less offensive, I hope, to 
 the normal zoologist than my heresies in 
 botany ; while 3'et they enable me to make 
 what I have to say about our native birds 
 more simply presentable to young minds,* 
 
 88. 1. The Hawks come first, of course, 
 massed under the single Latin term * Falco,' 
 and next them, 
 
 2. The Owi.S second, also of course, — un- 
 mistakeable, these two tribes, in all types of 
 form, and ways of living. 
 
 3. The Swallows I put next these, being 
 connected with the owls by the Goatsucker, 
 and with the falcons by their flight. 
 
 4. Tlie Pies next, whose name has a curious 
 double meaning, derived partly from the notion 
 
 * See the notes on classification, in the Appendix to the 
 volume ; published, together with the Preface, simultaneously 
 with this numlx:r.
 
 I02 love's meinie. 
 
 of their being painted or speckled birds ; and 
 partly from their being, beyond all others, 
 pecking, or pickaxe-beaked, birds. They in- 
 clude, therefore, the Crows, Jays, and Wood- 
 peckers ; historically and practically a most 
 important order of creatures to man. Next 
 which, I take the great company of the 
 smaller birds of the dry land, under these 
 following more arbitrary heads. 
 
 5. The Songsters. The Thrush, Lark, 
 Blackbird, and Nightingale, and one or two 
 choristers more. These are connected with 
 the pheasants in their speckledness, and with 
 the pies in pecking ; while the nightingale 
 leads down to the .smaller groups of familiar 
 birds. 
 
 6. The Robins, going on into the minor 
 warblers, and the Wrens ; the essential char- 
 acter of a Robin being that it should have 
 some front red in its dress somewhere ; and 
 the Crossbills being included in the class, 
 partly because they have red in their dress, 
 and partly because I don't know where else 
 to put them. 
 
 7. The Creepers and Tits — separated 
 chiefly on the ground of their minuteness,
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. IO3 
 
 and subtle little tricks and graces of move- 
 ment. 
 
 8. The Sparrows, going on into Buntings 
 and Finches. 
 
 9. The Pheasants (substituting this spe- 
 cific name for that of Scratchers). 
 
 10. The Herons ; for the most part wading 
 and fishing creatures, but leading up to the 
 Stork, and including any long-legged birds 
 that run well, such as the Plovers, 
 
 11. The DABCHICKS — the subject of our 
 present chapter. 
 
 12. The Swans and Geese. 
 
 13. The Ducks. 
 
 14. The Gulls. 
 
 Of these, I take the Dabchicks first, for 
 three sufficient reasons ; — that they give us 
 least trouble, — that they best show what I 
 mean by broad principles of grouping, — and 
 that they are the effective clasp, if not centre, 
 of all the series ; since they are the true link 
 between land and water birds. We will look 
 at one or two of their leading examples, before 
 saying more of their position in bird-society. 
 I shall give for the heading of each article, 
 the name which I propose for the bird in
 
 I04 LOVES MEINIE. 
 
 English children's schools — Dame-schools if 
 possible ; a perfectly simple Latin one, and 
 a familiar English one. The varieties of 
 existing nomenclature, will be given in the 
 Appendix, so far as I think them necessary 
 to be known or remembered. 
 
 I. 
 
 MERULA FONTIUM. TORRENT-OUZEL. 
 
 89. There are very few good popular words 
 which do not unite two or more ideas, being 
 founded on one, and catching up others as 
 they go along. Thus I find ' dabchick,' to be 
 a corruption of *dip-chick,' meaning birds 
 that only dip, and do not dive, or even duck, 
 for any length of time : but in its broader 
 and customary use it takes up the idea of 
 dabbling; and, as a class-name, stands for 
 ' dabbling-chick,' meaning a bird of small 
 size, that neither wades, nor dives, nor runs, 
 nor swims, nor flies, in a consistent manner ; 
 but humorously dabbles, or dips, or flutters, 
 or trips, or plashes, or paddles, and is 
 always doing all manner of odd and delight- 
 ful things : being also very good-humoured,
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. 10$ 
 
 and. in consequence, though graceful, inclined 
 . to plumpness ; * abd though it never waddles, 
 sometimes, for a minute or two, 'toddles,' 
 and now and then looks more like a ball than 
 a birdT For the most part, being clever, they 
 are also brave, and would be as tame as any 
 other chickens, if we would let them. They 
 are mostly shore birds, living at the edge of ir- 
 regularly broken water, either streams or sea ; 
 and the representative of the whole group 
 with which we will begin is the mysterious 
 little water -ouzel, or 'oiselle,' properly the 
 water-blackbird, — Bufifon's 'merle d'eau' — for 
 ouzel is the classic and poetic word for the 
 blackbird, or ouzel-^^^>^, "so black of hue," 
 in ' Midsummer Night's Dream.' Johnson 
 gives it from the Saxon ' osle ' ; but in 
 Chaucer it must be understood simply as 
 the feminine of oiseau. The bird in question 
 might, however, be more properly called, as 
 Bewick calls it, ' water pyot,' or water magpie, 
 for only its back and wings are black, — its 
 head brown, and breast snow white. 
 
 90. And now I must, once for all, get over a 
 difficulty in the description of birds' costume. 
 * Or in French, ' embonpoint.'
 
 io6 love's meinie. 
 
 I can always describe the neck- feathers, as 
 such, when birds have any neck to speak of; 
 but when, as the majority of dabchicks, they 
 have not any, — instead of talking of ' throat- 
 feathers ' and * stomach-feathers,' which both 
 seem to me rather ugly words, I shall call 
 the breast feathers the 'chemisette,' and all 
 below them the 'bodice.' 
 
 I am now able, without incivility, to dis- 
 tinguish the two families of Water- ouzel. 
 Both have white chemisettes, but the common 
 water-ouzel (Cinclus aquaticus of Gould) has 
 a white bodice, and the other a black one, the 
 bird being called therefore, in ugly Greek, 
 * Melanogaster,' ' black-stomached.' The black 
 bodice is Norwegian fashion — the white, 
 English ; and I find that in Switzerland there 
 is an intermediate Robin-ouzel, with a red 
 bodice : but the ornithologists are at variance 
 as to his ' specific ' existence. The chemisette 
 is always white. 
 
 91. However dressed, and wherever born, 
 the Ouzel is essentially a mountain-torrent 
 bird, and, Bewick says, may be seen perched 
 on a stone in the midst of a stream, in a con- 
 tinual dipping motion, or short curtsey often
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. lO/ 
 
 repeated, while it is watching for its food, 
 \yhich , consists of small fishes and insects, — 
 watef" insects, that is to say, caught mostly at 
 the bottom ; many-legged and shrimpy things, 
 accordmg to Gould's plate. The popular 
 tradition that it can walk under the water has 
 been denied by scientific people ; but there is 
 no doubt whatever of the fact, — see the 
 authentic evidence of it in the delightful little 
 monograph of the bird published b}^ the 
 Carlisle Naturalist's Society ; but how the 
 thing is done nobody but the ouzel knows. 
 Its strong little feet, indeed, have plenty of 
 grip in them, but cannot lay hold of smooth 
 stones, and Mr. Gould himself does not solve 
 the problem. " Some assert that it is done by 
 clinging to the pebbles with its strong claws ; 
 others, by considerable exertion and a rapid 
 movement of the wings. Its silky plumage is 
 impervious to wet ; and hence when the bird 
 returns to the surface, the pearly drops which 
 roll off into the stream arc the only evidence 
 of its recent submersion. It is, indeed, very 
 interesting to observe this pretty bird walk 
 down a stone^ quietly descettd into the water, 
 rise again perhaps at the distance of several
 
 I08 love's MEINIE. 
 
 yards down the stream, and ' fly ' * back to 
 the place it had just left, to perform the same 
 manoeuvre the next minute, the silence of 
 the interval broken by its cheerful warbHng 
 song." 
 
 92. In which, you see, we have the reason 
 for its being called ' water-blackbird,' being, 
 I think, the only one of the dabchicks that 
 really sings. Some of the others, (sandpipers) 
 pipe ; and others, the stints, say * stint ' in 
 a charming manner ; but none of them sing 
 except the oiselle. Very singularly, the 
 black-bodiced one seems to like living near 
 manufactories. "The specimen in the Nor- 
 wich Museum," says Mr. Gould, " is the 
 one mentioned by Mr. Lubbock, in 1845, as 
 ' lately ' shot at Hellesdon Mills ; and two 
 others are stated by the same author to have 
 been seen at different times by trustworthy 
 observers at Marlingford and Saxthorpe. Of 
 more recent occurrence I may mention a male 
 in my own collection, which was brought to 
 me in the flesh, having been shot in November, 
 
 * "Wing its way" in the ornithological language. I 
 shall take leave usually to substitute the vulgar word ' fly,' 
 for this poetical phrase.
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I09 
 
 1855, whilst hovering over the river between 
 the foundry bridge and the ferry. It is not 
 a httle singular that a bird so accustomed to 
 the clear running streams of the north, and 
 the quiet haunts of the * silent angler/ should 
 be found, as in this case, almost within the 
 walls of the city, sporting over a river turbid 
 and discoloured from the neighbouring fac- 
 tories, and with the busy noise of traffic on 
 every side. About the same time that this 
 bird appeared near the city, three others were 
 observed on more than one occasion on the 
 Earlham river, by Mr. Fountaine, of Easton, 
 who is well acquainted with our British birds ; 
 but these suddenly disappeared, and were not 
 seen again." 
 
 And all will disappear, and never be seen 
 again, but in skeleton, ill-covered with cam- 
 phorated rags of skin, under the present 
 scientific dispensation ; unless some kind- 
 hearted northern squire will let them have 
 the run and the dip of his brooks ; and teach 
 the village children to let them alone if they 
 like to wade down to the village. 
 
 I am sixty-two, and have passed as much 
 time out of those years by torrent sides as
 
 1 1 o love's meinie. 
 
 most people. But I have never seen a water- 
 ouzel alive. 
 
 II. 
 
 ALLEGRETTA NYMPH^A. LILY-OUZEL. 
 
 93. We have got so far, by help of our first 
 example, in the etymology of our entire class, 
 as to rest in the easily memorable root ' dab,' 
 short for dabble, as the foundation of compre- 
 hensive nomenclature. But the earlier (if not 
 Aryan !) root 'dip,' must be taken good heed to, 
 also, because, as we further study the customs 
 of aquatic chickens, we shall find that they 
 really mass themselves under the three great 
 heads of ' Duckers,' birds that duck their heads 
 only, and stick up their tails in the air; — 
 * Dippers,' birds that take real dips under, but 
 not far down, in shallow water mostly, for 
 things at the bottom, or else to get out of 
 harm's way, staying down about as long as 
 we could ourselves, if we were used to it ; — 
 and * Divers,' who plunge like stones when 
 they choose, — can go nobody knows how deep 
 in the deep sea,: — and swim under the water 
 just as comfortably as upon it, and as fast, if 
 not faster.
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. Ill 
 
 But although this is clearl}'' the practical and 
 poetical division, we can't make it a scientific 
 one ; for'the dippers and dabblers are so like 
 each other that we must take them together; and 
 so also^Ke duckers and divers are inseparable 
 in some of their forms : so that, for convenience 
 of classing, we must keep to the still more 
 general rank I have given — dabchick, duck, 
 and gull, — the last being essentially the aerial 
 sea-bird, which lives on the wing. 
 
 94. But there is 3^et one more ' mode of 
 motion ' to be thought of, in the class we are 
 now examining. Several of them ought really 
 to be described, not as dipchicks, but as trip- 
 chicks ; being, as far as I can make out, little 
 in the habit of going under water ; but much 
 in the habit of walking or tripping daintily 
 over it, on such raft or float as they may find 
 constructed for them by water-lily or other 
 buoyant leaves. Of these " come and trip it 
 as you come" chicks, — (my emendation of 
 Milton is surel}' more reasonable than the 
 emendations of commentators as a body, for 
 we do not, any of us, like to see our mistresses 
 " trip it as they^^ ") — there are, I find, pictured 
 by I\Ir. Gould, three ' species,' called by him,
 
 112 love's meinie. 
 
 Porzana Minuta, Olivaceous Crake ; Porzana 
 P3^gm3ea, Baillon's Crake ; and Porzana Maru- 
 etta, Spotted Crake. 
 
 Now, in the first place, I find ' Porzana ' to 
 be indeed Italian for 'water-hen,' but I can't 
 find its derivation ; and in the second place, 
 these little birds are neither water-hens nor 
 moor-hens, nor water-cocks nor moor-cocks ; 
 neither can I find, either in Gould, Yarrell, or 
 Bewick, the slightest notice of their voices ! — 
 though it is only in implied depreciation of 
 their quality, that we have any business to 
 call them ' Crakes,' * Croaks,' or * Creaks.' In 
 the third place, ' Olivaceous ' is not a transla- 
 tion of * Minuta,' nor ' Baillon's ' of ' Pygmaea,' 
 nor 'spotted' of 'Maruetta'; which last is 
 another of the words that mean nothing in 
 any language that I know of, though the 
 French have adopted it as * Marouette.' And 
 in the fourth place, I can't make out any 
 difference, either in text or picture, between 
 Mr. Baillon's Crake, and the * minute ' one, 
 except that the minute one is the bigger, and 
 has fewer white marks in the centre of the 
 back, 
 
 95. For our purposes, therefore, I mean to
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. 
 
 113 
 
 call all the three varieties neither Crake nor 
 Pcrzan, but 'Allegretta/ which will at once 
 remind us of their motion ; the larger one, 
 nine inches long, I find called always Spotted 
 Crake, so that shall be 'Allegretta Maculata,' 
 Spotty Allegret ; and the two little ones shall 
 be, one, the Tiny Allegret, and the other the 
 Starry Allegret (Allegretta Minuta, and Alle- 
 gretta Stellaris) ; all the three varieties being 
 generally thought of by the plain English 
 name I have given at the head of this section, 
 ' Lily-Ouzel ' (see, in § 7, page 7, the explana- 
 tion of my system of dual epithet, and its limita- 
 tions). I note, briefly, what may be properly 
 considered distinctive in the three kinds. 
 
 II.A. ALLEGRETTA NYMPH^A, MACULATA. 
 SPOTTED ALLEGRET. 
 
 96. Water-Crake or 'Skitty' of Bewick, — 
 French, * Poule d'eau Marouette/ (we may 
 perhaps take Marouette as euphonious for 
 Maculata, but I wish I knew what it meant) ; 
 — though so light of foot, flics heavily; and, 
 wlien compelled to take wing, merely passes 
 over the tops of the reeds to some place of 
 security a short distance off. (Gould.) The 
 
 H
 
 114 love's meinie. 
 
 body is " in all these Rails compressed^'' (Yarrell, 
 — he means laterally thin), which enables them 
 to make their way through dense herbage with 
 facility. I can't find anything clear about its 
 country, except that it * occasionally visits ' 
 Sweden in summer, and Smyrna in winter, 
 and that it has been found in Corfu, Sicily, 
 Crete, — Whittlesea Mere, — and Yarley Fen ; 
 — in marshes always, wherever it is ; (nothing 
 said of its behaviour on ice,) and not generally 
 found farther north than Cumberland. Its 
 food is rather nasty — water-slugs and the like, 
 — but it is itself as fat as an ortolan, " almost 
 melts in the hand." (Gould.) Its own colour, 
 brown spotted with white ; " the spots on the 
 wing coverts surrounded with black, which 
 gives them a studded or pearly appearance." 
 (Bewick, — he means by ' pearly,' rounded or 
 projecting.) Hence my specific epithet. Its 
 young are of the liveliest black, "little balls 
 of black glistening down," beautifully put by 
 Mr. Gould among the white water Crowfoot 
 (Ranunculus Aquatilis), looking like little 
 ducklings in mourning. " Its nest is made of 
 rushes and other buoyant materials matted 
 together, so as to float on, and rise or fall
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I I 5 
 
 with, the ebbing or flowing of the water like a 
 boat: and to prevent its being carried away, 
 it is moored or fastened to a reed." (Bewick.) 
 
 II.B. ALLEGRETTA NYxMPH^A, STELLARIS. 
 STARRY ALLEGRET. 
 
 97. Called * Stellaris ' by Temminck. — I do 
 not find wh}^, but it is by much the brightest 
 in colour of the three, and may be thought 
 of as the star of them. Gould says it is the 
 least, also, and calls it the ' Pigmy ' ; but we 
 can't keep that name without confusing it with 
 the 'Minuta.' 'Baillon's Crake' seems the 
 most commonly accepted title, — as the worst 
 possible. Both this, and the more quietly 
 toned Tiny, in Mr. Gould's delightful plates 
 of them, have softly brown backs, exquisitely 
 ermined by black markings at the root of each 
 feather, following into series of small waves, 
 like little breakers on sand. They have lovely 
 grey chemisettes, striped grey bodices, and 
 green bills and feet ; a little orange stain at 
 the root of the green bill, and the bright red 
 iris of the eye have wonderful effect in warm- 
 ing the colour of the whole bird : and with 
 beautiful fancy Mr. Gould lias put the Stellaris
 
 I 1 6 love's meinie. 
 
 among yellow water-lilies to set off its grey ; 
 and a yellow butterfly with blue and red spots, 
 and black-speckled wings (Papilio Machaon), to 
 harmonize both. It is just as if the flower were 
 gradually turning into the bird. Examples of 
 the Starry Allegret have been ' obtained ' — in 
 the British Islands. It is said to be numerous, 
 unobtained, in India, China, Japan, Persia, 
 Greece, North Africa, Italy, and France. I have 
 never heard of anybody's seeing it, however. 
 
 II. c. ALLEGRETTA NYMPH^A, MINUTA. 
 TINY ALLEGRET. 
 
 98. 'Tiny Allegret,' — Yarrell's 'Little 
 Crake,' (but see names in Appendix). It is 
 a little more rosy than ' Stellaris ' in the grey 
 of its neck, passing into brown ; and Mr. 
 Gould has put it witli a pink water plant, 
 which harmonizes with it to the bird's ad- 
 vantage ; while the tiny creature stands on 
 the bent leaf of a reed, and scarcely bends it 
 more ! " It runs with rapidity over broken 
 reeds, and moves gracefully, raising and dis- 
 playing its tail at every step." It has so very 
 small a tail to display, however, that I should 
 hardly think the display was worth while.
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I I 7 
 
 " It is very cunning, and especially noticeable 
 for tiie subtlety with which it wearies the dog 
 of the sportsman by executing a thousand evo- 
 lutions with surprising celerity ; whence comes 
 the trivial name of 'kill-dog' bestowed upon 
 it in some localities. Pursued to extremity, it 
 casts itself into the water, swims with ease, 
 and dives at the moment its enemy is about to 
 seize it ; or it conceals itself in a tuft of reeds 
 or a bush, and by this means often escapes 
 with impunit3^ It loves to breed among the 
 reeds, and in long and thick grass, frequently 
 in small companies of its own species, or of 
 the Stellaris. The female lays her eggs on an 
 inartificially constructed platform of decayed 
 leaves or stalks of marsh plants, slightly 
 elevated above the water." How elevated, I 
 cannot find proper account, — that is to say, 
 whether it is hung to the stems of growing 
 reeds, or built on hillocks of soil, but the bird 
 is always liable to have its nest overflowed by 
 floods. The full-grown bird is dressed in an 
 exquisite perfection of barred bodice, spotted 
 chemisette, and waved feathers edged with 
 grey on the back. 
 
 99. The reader will please recollect these
 
 I l8 love's meinie. 
 
 three Allegrets as the second group of the 
 dab- or dabble-chicks ; and, while the water- 
 ouzel is a mountain and torrent bird, these 
 inhabit exclusively flat lands and calm water, 
 belonging properly to temperate, inclining to 
 warm, climates, and able to gladden for us — 
 as their name now given implies — many scenes 
 and places otherwise little enlivened ; and to 
 make the very gnats of them profitable to us, 
 were we wise enough. Dainty and delight- 
 ful creatures in all their ways, — voice only 
 dubitable, but I hope not a shriek or a 
 squeak ; — and there seems to be no reason 
 whatever why half our fen lands should not 
 be turned into beds of white water lilies and 
 golden ducks, with jetty ducklings, to the 
 great comfort of English souls.* 
 
 III. 
 
 TREPIDA STAGNARUM. LITTLE GREBE. 
 
 lOO. The two birds — Torrent-ouzel, and 
 Lily - ouzel, — which we have been just 
 
 * Compare Bishop Stanley's account of the larger tropical 
 •Jacana,' p. 311. "One species is often tamed, and from 
 its being a resolute enemy to birds of prey, the inhabitants
 
 111. THE DABCHICKS. IIQ 
 
 describing, agree, you will observe, in delicate 
 and singular use of their feet in the water ; the 
 torrent-ouzel holding itself mysteriously at the 
 bottom ; and the lily-ouzel, less mysteriously, 
 but as skilfully, on the top (for I forgot to 
 note, respecting this raft-walking, that the 
 bird, however light, must be always careful 
 not to tread on the edges of leaves, but in the 
 middle, or, rather, as nearly as may be where 
 they are set on the stalk ; it would go in at 
 once if it trod on the edges). But both the 
 birds have the foot which is really character- 
 istic of land, not water-birds ; and especially 
 of those land species that run well. Of the 
 real action of the toes, either in running, or 
 hopping, nothing is told us by the anatomists 
 — (compare lecture on Robin, § 26) ; but I 
 hope before long to get at some of the facts 
 respecting the greater flexibiHty of the grip- 
 ping and climbing feet, and elasticity of 
 running ones; and to draw up something 
 like a properly graduated scale of the length 
 of the toes in proportion to that of the body. 
 
 of the countries where it is found" (which be they?) "rear 
 it as a protector for their fowls, as it not only feeds with 
 them, but accompanies them into the fields, and brings them 
 back in the evening ! "
 
 I20 
 
 LOVES MEINIE. 
 
 And, for one question, relative to this — the 
 balance of a bird standing, 
 not gripping — is to be thought 
 of. Taking a typical profile of 
 bird-form in its abstract, with 
 beak, belly, and foot, horizontal 
 Fig. 12. {Y\^. 12), the security of the 
 
 standing, (supposing atomic weight equal 
 
 Fig. 13 a. 
 
 through the bird's body, and the will, in 
 the ancle, of iron,) is the same as of an 
 inverted cone, between the dotted lines from 
 the extremities of the foot to those of the 
 body ; and, of course, with a little grip of the 
 foot or hind claw, the bird can be safe in 
 almost any position it likes. Nevertheless,
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. 121 
 
 when the feet are as small in proportion 
 as tlie TorrenL-ouzel's, I greatly doubt the 
 possibility of such a balance as Bewick has 
 given it (Fig. 13 a). Gould's of the black- 
 bodiced Ouzel (Fig. 1^ l^) is, I imagine, right. 
 Bewick was infallible in plume texture, and 
 expression either of the features of animals, 
 or of any action that had meaning in it ; but 
 
 Fig. 13 /;. 
 
 he was singularly careless of indifferent points 
 in geometry or perspective ; and even loses 
 character in his water-birds, by making them 
 always swim on the top of the water. 
 
 loi. But, whatever their balance of body, 
 or use of foot, the two birds just examined are.
 
 122 love's MEINIE. 
 
 as I said, essentially connected with the run- 
 ning land birds, or broadly, the Plovers ; and 
 with the Sand-runners, or (from their cry) 
 Sand-pipers, which Mr. Gould evidently asso- 
 ciates mentally with the Plovers, in his descrip- 
 tion of the plumage of the Dunlin ; while he 
 gives to them in his plates of that bird — the 
 little Stint, and common Sandpiper — most 
 subtle action with their fine feet, — thread-fine, 
 almost, in the toes ; requiring us, it seems to 
 me, to consider them as entirely land-birds, 
 however fond of the wave margins. But the 
 next real water-ouzel we come to, belongs to 
 a group with feet like little horse-chesnut 
 leaves ; each toe having its separate lobes of 
 web. Why separated, I cannot 3'et make out, 
 but the bird swims, or even dives, on occasion, 
 with dexterity and force. These lobe-footed 
 birds consist first of the Grebes, which are con- 
 nected with fresh-water ducks ; and, secondly, 
 of the Phalaropes, which are a sort of sea-gulls. 
 No bird which is not properly web-footed has 
 any business to think itself either true duck 
 or true gull ; but as, both in size and habit 
 of life, the larger grebes and phalaropes are 
 entirely aquatic and marine, I shall take out
 
 in. THE DABCHICKS. I 2 3 
 
 of them into my class of dabchicks, only those 
 which are literally dabblers in habit, and 
 chickens in size. And of the Grebes, there- 
 fore, only the one commonly known as the 
 Dabchick, the * Little Grebe,' * Col3^mbus 
 Minutus ' (Minute Diver), of Linnaeus. A 
 summary word or two, first, respecting the 
 Grebe family, will be useful. 
 
 102. Grebe, properly, I suppose. Grebe, 
 from the French, is not in Johnson, nor do 
 any of my books tell me what it means. I 
 retain it, however, as being short, not ugly, 
 and well established in two languages. We 
 may think of it as formed from gre, and 
 meaning 'a nice bird.' The specialities of the 
 whole class, easily remembered, are, first, that 
 they have chesnut-leaf feet ; secondl}^, that 
 their legs are serrated behind with a double 
 row of notches — (why ?) ; thirdly, that they 
 have no tails ; fourthly, that they have, most 
 of them, very fine and very comic crests, tufts, 
 tippets, and other variously appHed appen- 
 dages to their heads and chins, so that some 
 are called 'crested,' some 'eared/ some ' tip- 
 peted,' and so on; but the least of them, our 
 proper Dabchick, displays no absurdity of this
 
 124 love's meinie. 
 
 sort, and I have the less scruple in distinguish- 
 ing it from the others. I find, further, in 
 Stanley's classes, the Grebes placed among 
 the short-winged birds, and made to include 
 all the divers ; but he does not say how short 
 their wings are ; and his grouping them with 
 guillemots and puffins is entirely absurd, all 
 their ways and looks, and abodes, being those 
 of ducks. We can say no more of them as 
 a family, accordingly, until we know what a 
 duck is ; — and I go on to the little pet of them, 
 whose ways are more entirely its own. 
 
 103. Strangely, the most interesting fact 
 (if fact it be) that it builds a floating nest, 
 gains scarcely more than chance notice from 
 its historians. Here is Mr. Gould's account 
 of it: "The materials composing this raft or 
 nest are weeds and aquatic plants carefully 
 heaped together in a rounded form ; it is very 
 large at the base, and is so constantly added 
 to, that a considerable portion of it becomes 
 submerged ; at the same time it is sufficiently 
 buoyant to admit of its saucer-like hollow top 
 being always above the surface. In this wet 
 depression five or six eggs are laid. The 
 bird, always most alert, is still more so now,
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. 12 5 
 
 and scarcely ever admits of a near examina- 
 tion of the nest-making, or of a view of the 
 eggs. In favourable situations, however, and 
 with the aid of a telescope, the process may- 
 be watched ; and it is not a little interesting 
 to notice with what remarkable quickness the 
 dabchick scratches the weeds over her eggs 
 with her feet, when she perceives herself 
 observed, so as not to lead even to the sus- 
 picion that any were deposited on the ill- 
 shapen floating mass. This work of an 
 instant displays as much skill in deception 
 as can well be imagined." 
 
 104. It is still left to question, first, what 
 is meant by a wet depression ? — does the bird 
 actually sit in the water, and are the eggs 
 under it ? and, if not, how is the water kept 
 out ? Secondly, is the floating nest anchored, 
 and how ? Looking to other ornithologists 
 for solution of these particulars, I find nobody 
 else say anything about a floating nest at all. 
 Bewick describes it as being of a large size, 
 and composed of a very great quantity of grass 
 and water plants, at least a foot in thickness, 
 and so placed in the water that tlie female 
 hatches her eggs amidst the continual wet in
 
 126 love's meinie. 
 
 which they were first laid. Yarrell says only 
 that it is a large flat nest made of aquatic 
 plants; while Morris finally complicates the 
 whole business by telling us that the nest is 
 placed often as much as twenty or thirty yards 
 from the water, that it is composed of short 
 pieces of roots, reeds, rushes, and flags, and 
 that when dry the whole naturally becomes 
 very brittle.* 
 
 105. While, out of my fifteen volumes of 
 ornithology, I can obtain only this very vague 
 account of the prettiest bird, next to the king- 
 fisher, that haunts our English rivers, I have 
 no doubt the most precise and accurate ac- 
 counts are obtainable of the shapes of her 
 bones and the sinuosities of her larynx ; but 
 about these I am low-minded enough not to 
 feel the slightest curiosity. I return to Mr. 
 Gould, therefore, to gather some pleasanter 
 particulars ; first, namely, that she has a 
 winter and summer dress, — in winter olive 
 grey and white, but in summer, (changing at 
 marriage time) deep olive black, with dark 
 
 * I hear, from a friend in whose statements I have 
 absolute confidence, that he has found the eggs of the water- 
 hen laid on a dead sycamore leaf by the side of a shallow 
 stream, one of the many brooks near Uxbridge.
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. 12^ 
 
 chesnut chemisette. Infant dabchicks have 
 " dehcate rose -coloured bills, harlequin-hke 
 markings', and rosy-white aprons." The harle- 
 quin-hke markings I should call, rather, agate- 
 like, especially on the head, where they are 
 black and white, like an onyx. The bodies 
 look more like a little walnut-shell, or nutmeg 
 with wings to it, or things that are to be 
 wings, some day. 
 
 io6. Even when full-grown, the birds never 
 fly much, — never more, says Morris, " than six 
 or ten feet above the water, and for the most 
 part trailing their legs in it ; but either on the 
 water or under it, every movement is charac- 
 terized by the most consummate dexterity, and 
 facile agility. The most expert waterman that 
 sculls his skiff on the Thames or Isis, is 
 but an humble and unskilful imitator of the 
 dabchick. In moving straightforward (under 
 water?), the wings are used to aid its pro- 
 gress, as if in the air, and in turning it has 
 an easy gliding motion, feet and wings being 
 used, as occasion requires, sometimes on one 
 side and sometimes on the other. It walks 
 but indifferently, as may readily be imagined 
 from the position of the legs, so very far back.
 
 I 2 8 love's meinie. 
 
 It is pleasant to watch the parent bird feeding 
 her young : down she dives with a quick turn, 
 and presently rises again with, five times out 
 of six, a minnow, or other little fish, glittering 
 like silver in her bill. The young rush to- 
 wards the spot where the mother has come 
 up, but she does not drop the fish into the 
 water for them to receive until she has well 
 shaken it about and killed it, so that it may 
 not escape, when for the last time in its own 
 element. I have seen a young one which had 
 just seized, out of its turn I have no doubt, 
 the captured prey, chased away by her, and 
 pursued in apparent anger, as if for punish- 
 ment, the following one being willingly given 
 the next fish without an}^ demur." 
 
 107. Mr. Gould seems to think that the 
 dabchick likes insects and fish spawn better 
 than fish, or at least more prudently dines 
 upon them. "That fish are taken we have 
 positive evidence from examples having been 
 repeatedly picked up dead by the fishermen 
 of the Thames, with a bull-head or miller's 
 thumb in their throats, and by which they 
 had evidently been choked in the act of 
 swallowing them. That it is especially fond
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I 29 
 
 of insects is shown by the great activity it 
 displays, when in , captivity, in capturing 
 house-flies and other diptera. Those who 
 have visited Paris will probably have seen 
 the grebes in the window of the restaurateur 
 in the Rue de Rivoli. For years have a pair 
 of these birds been living, apparently in the 
 greatest enjoyment, within the glass window, 
 attracting the admiration of all the passers-by. 
 The extreme agility with which they sailed 
 round their little prison, or scrambled over 
 the half-submerged piece of rock for a fly, 
 was very remarkable. That no bird can be 
 more easily kept in a state of confinement is 
 certain." 
 
 108. This question about its food is closely 
 connected with that of its diving. So far as 
 I understand Mr. Morris, it dives only when 
 disturbed, and to escape, — remaining under 
 water, however, if need be, an almost incred- 
 ible time, and swimming underneath it to great 
 distances. Here we have, if we would only 
 think of it, the same question as that about 
 the water-ouzel, how it keeps down ; and we 
 must now note a few general points about 
 diving birds altogether.
 
 130 LOVES MEINIE. 
 
 It is easy to understand how the properly 
 so-called divers can plunge with impetus to 
 great depths, or keep themselves at the 
 bottom by continued strokes of the webbed 
 feet ; but neither how the ouzel walks at the 
 bottom, if it be specifically hghter than the 
 water, nor how a bird can swim horizontally 
 under the surface ; at least it is not enough 
 explained that the action must be always that 
 of oblique diving, the bird regulating the 
 stroke according to the upward pressure of 
 the water at different depths. 
 
 109. But there are many other points need- 
 ing elucidation. It is said (and beautifully 
 insisted on, by Michelet,) that great spaces in 
 the bones of birds that pass most of their lives 
 in flight are filled with air : presumably the 
 bones of the divers are made comparatively 
 solid, or it is even conceivable — if conceptions 
 or suppositions were of an}-- use, — that the 
 deep divers ma}^ take in water, to help them- 
 selves to sink. The enormous depths at 
 which they have been caught, according to 
 report, cannot be reached by any mere effort 
 of strength, if the body remained as buoyant 
 as it evidently is on the surface. The
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I 3 I 
 
 Strength of the wing must, however, be enor- 
 mous, for the great nprthern diver is described 
 as swimming under water "as it were with 
 the velocity of an arrow in the air" (Yarrell, 
 vol. iii., page 431); or to keep to more 
 measured fact, Sir Wilham Jardine says, " I 
 have pursued this bird in a Newhaven fishing- 
 boat with four sturdy rowers, and notwith- 
 standing it was kept almost constant!}' under 
 water by firing as soon as it appeared, the 
 boat could not succeed in making one yard 
 upon it" {ibid.^ p. 432). 
 
 no. But this is followed by the amazing- 
 statement of Mr. Robert Dunn, p. 433, that in 
 the act of diving it does not appear to make 
 the least exertion, but sinks gradually under 
 the surface, without throwing itself forward, 
 the head being the last part that disappears. 
 I am not fond of the word * impossible,' but I 
 think I am safe in saying that according to the 
 laws of nature no buoyant body can sink merely 
 by an act of volition ; and that it must pull 
 itself down by some hitherto unconceived action 
 of the feet, which in this bird are imm.ensely 
 broad and strong, and so flat that it cannot 
 walk with them, any more than we could with
 
 132 love's meinie. 
 
 two flat boards a yard square tied to our feet ; 
 but, when it is caught on land, shoves its body 
 along upon the ground, like a seal, by jerks. 
 All these diving motions are executed in a 
 more delicate but quite as wonderful way by 
 the dabchick, — more wonderful indeed it may 
 be said, because it has only the divided or 
 chesnut-leaf-like foot, to strike with. We 
 shall understand it perhaps a little better after 
 tracing, in a future talk, the history of its re- 
 lations among the smaller seagulls ; meantime, 
 in quitting the little dainty creature, I must 
 plead for a daintier Latin name than it has 
 now — ' Podiceps.' No one seems to have the 
 least idea what that means ; and ' Colymbus,' 
 diver, must be kept for the great Northern 
 Diver and his deep-sea relatives, far removed 
 from our little living ripple-line of the pools. 
 I can't think of any one pretty enough ; but 
 for the present ' Trepida ' may serve ; and 
 perhaps be applied, not improperl}', to all the 
 Grebes, with reference to their subtle and 
 instant escape from any sudden danger. (See 
 Stanley, p. 419.) " It requires all the address 
 of a keen sportsman to get within shot," and 
 when he does, the bird may still be too shrewd
 
 lil. THE DABCHICKS. I 3 3 
 
 for him. " I fired at the distance of thirty 
 yards : my gun went quick as lightning, but 
 the grebe went quicker, and scrambling over, 
 out of sight, came up again in a few seconds 
 perfectly unhurt." 
 
 I think, therefore, that unless I receive 
 some better suggestion, ' Trepida Stagnarum ' 
 may be the sufficiently intelligible Latin re- 
 naming of our easil}^ startled favourite, 
 
 IV. 
 TITANIA ARCTICA. ARCTIC FAIRY. 
 
 III. I must first get quit of the confusion 
 of names for this bird. Linnaeus, in the Fauna 
 Suecica, p. 64, calls it * Tringa Lobata,' but 
 afterwards ' Northern Tringa ' ; and his editor, 
 Gmehn, 'Dark Tringa.' Other people agree 
 to call it a 'phalarope,' but some of them 
 'northern' phalarope, some, the 'dark' phala- 
 rope ; some, the ' ashy ' phalarope, some, the 
 ' disposed to be ashy ' phalarope ; some, the 
 ' red-necked ' phalarope ; and some, ' Mr. 
 Williams's ' phalarope ; finally, Cuvier calls it 
 a ' Lobipes,' and Mr. Gould, in English, ' red- 
 necked phalarope.' Few people are likely to
 
 134 LOVE*S MEINIE. 
 
 know what ' Phalarope ' means,* and I believe 
 nobody knows what 'Tringa' means; and as, 
 also, nobody ever sees it, the little bird being 
 obliged to live in Orkney, Greenland, Norway, 
 and Lapland, out of human creatures' way, I 
 shall myself call it the Arctic Fairy. It would 
 come south if we would let it, but of course 
 Mr. Bond says, "The first specimen I ever 
 had was shot by a friend of mine in September, 
 1842, near Southend, Essex, where he saw 
 the phalarope swimming on the water, like a 
 little duck, about a mile from land ; not know- 
 ing what it was, he shot it, and kindly brought 
 it to me." Another was shot while running 
 between the metals of the Great Eastern 
 Railway, near the Stratford station, early in 
 June, 1852; and on the Norfolk coast, four 
 others have been killed during the last fifteen 
 years ; and the birds' visits, thus, satisfactorily, 
 put a stop to. I can therefore study it only 
 in Mr. Gould's drawing, on consulting which, 
 I find the bird to be simply a sea dabchick, — 
 brown stripes on the back, and all ; but the 
 webs of the feet a little finer, and in its habits 
 
 * The terminal ' pe ' is short for pus, (pous !) and ' phalero,' 
 from phalera, fringes — "Fringe-foot" ;Morris).
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I 3 5 
 
 it is more like the Lily-ouzel, according to the 
 follcvving repoic of Mr. St. John: "The red- 
 necked phalarope is certainly the most beautiful 
 little wader of ray acquaintance. There were 
 a pair of them, male and female, feeding near 
 the loch, in a little pool which was covered 
 with weeds of different kinds. Nothing could 
 be more graceful than the movements of these 
 two little birds, as they swam about in search 
 of insects, etc. Sometimes they ran ligJitly on 
 the broad leaves of the water-lily wJiich served 
 them for a raft, and entirely kept them out 
 of the water. Though not exactly web-footed, 
 the phalarope swims with the greatest ease. 
 The attachment of these two birds to each 
 other seemed very great : whenever in their 
 search for food they wandered so far apart as 
 to be hidden by the intervening weeds, the 
 male bird stopped feeding suddenly, and, 
 looking round, uttered a low and musical call 
 of inquiry, which was immediately answered 
 by the female in a different note, but perfectly 
 expressive of her answer, whicli one might 
 suppose to be to the purport that she was at 
 hand and quite safe ; on hearing her, the male 
 immediately recommenced feeding, but at the
 
 136 love's meinie. 
 
 same time making his way towards her ; she 
 also flew to meet him ; they then joined com- 
 pany for a moment or two, and, after a few 
 little notes of endearment, turned off again in 
 different directions. This scene was repeated 
 a dozen times while I was watching them. 
 They seemed to have not the slightest fear of 
 me, for frequently they came to within a yard 
 of where I was sitting, and after looking up 
 they continued catching the small water-insects, 
 etc., on the weeds, without minding my pres- 
 ence in the least." What reward the birds 
 got for this gentle behaviour, we learn from 
 the sentence following after the next two lines, 
 containing the extremely valuable contribution 
 to their natural history, that "on dissecting 
 the female we found two eggs in her." 
 
 112. All other accounts concur in express- 
 ing (with as much admiration as is possible to 
 naturalists) the kindly and frank disposition 
 of this bird ; which for the rest is almost a 
 central type of all bird power with elf gifts 
 added : it flies like a lark, trips on water-lily 
 leaves like a fairy, swims like a duck, and 
 roves like a sea-gull, having been seen sixty 
 miles from land : and, finally, though living
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I 3/ 
 
 chiefly in Lapland and Iceland, and other such 
 northern counlries; it has been seen serenely 
 swimming and catching flies in the hot water 
 of the geysers, in which a man could not bear 
 his haud. 
 
 And no less harmoniously than in report of 
 the extreme tameness, grace, and affection- 
 ateness of this bird do sportsmen agree also 
 in the treatment and appreciation of these 
 qualities. Thus says Mr. Salmon : " Although 
 we shot two pairs, those that were swimming 
 about did not take the least notice of the 
 report of the gun, and they seemed to be 
 much attached to each other ; for when one 
 of them flew to a short distance, the other 
 directly followed ; and while I held a wounded 
 female in my hand, its mate came and flut- 
 tered before my face." (Compare the scene 
 between Irene and Hector, at page 393 of 
 the May number of Aunt Judys Magazine. ) 
 And, again, says Mr. Wolley : "The bird is 
 extremely tame, swimming about my India- 
 rubber boat so near that I could almost catch 
 it in my hand ; 1 have seen it even, when far 
 from its nest, struck at many times with an 
 oar before it flew away." In its domestic
 
 138 love's meinie. 
 
 habits also the creature seems as exemplary 
 as, in its social habits, it is frank ; for on the 
 approach of danger to her nestlings, the hen 
 uses all the careful subtleties of the most 
 cunning land birds, " spreading her wings, 
 and counterfeiting lameness, for the purpose 
 of deluding the intruder ; and after leading 
 the enemy from her young, she takes wing 
 and flies to a great height, at the same time 
 displaying a peculiar action of the wings ; then 
 descending with great velocity, and making 
 simultaneously a noise with her wings. On 
 her return to her young, she uses a particular 
 cry for the purpose of gathering them together. 
 As soon as she has collected them, she covers 
 them with her wings, like the domestic hen." 
 
 113. I cannot quite make out the limits of 
 the fairy's migrations ; but it is said by Morris 
 to ' occur ' in France, Holland, Germany, Italy, 
 and Switzerland. I find that one was what 
 sportsmen call ' procured ' near York, in full 
 summer dress ; and another killed at Rotting- 
 dean, swimming in a pond in the middle of 
 the village, in the company of some ducks. 
 At Scarborough, Louth, and Shoreham, it 
 has also been captured or shot, and has been
 
 Ill, THE DABCHICKS, 139 
 
 ' found ' building nests in Sutherland : and, 
 on the whole, it seems that here is a sort of 
 petrel-partridge, and duckling-dove, and diving- 
 lark, with every possible grace and faculty 
 that bird can have, in body and soul ; ready, 
 at least in summer, to swim on our village 
 ponds, or, wait at our railway stations, and 
 make the wild north-eastern coasts of Scotland 
 gay with its dancing flocks upon the foam ; 
 were it not that the idle cockneys, and pot- 
 headed squires fresh out of ParHament, stand 
 as it were on guard all round the island, 
 spluttering small-shot at it, striking at it with 
 oars, cutting it open to find how many eggs 
 there are inside, and, in fine, sending it for 
 refuge into the hot water of Hecla, and any 
 manner of stormy solitude that it can still find 
 for itself and its amber nestlings. I have 
 never seen one, nor I suppose ever shall see, 
 but hear of some of my friends sunning them- 
 selves at midnight about the North Cape, of 
 whom, if any one will bring me a couple of 
 Arctic fairies in a basket, I think I can pledge 
 our own Squire's and Squire's lady's faith, for 
 the pair's getting some peace, if they choose 
 to take it, and as many water-lily leaves as
 
 140 love's meinie. 
 
 they can trip upon, on the tarns of Monk- 
 Coniston. 
 
 IV.B. TITANIA INCONSTANS. CHANGEFUL 
 
 FAIRY. 
 
 Phalaropiis FuUcaruis. {Coot-like Flialaropc — Gould.) 
 
 114. I think the epithet * changeful ' prettier, 
 and, until we know what a coot is like, more 
 descriptive, than ' coot-like ' ; the bird having 
 red plumage in summer, and grey in winter, 
 while the coot is always black. It is a little 
 less pretty and less amiable than its sister 
 fairy ; otherwise scarcely to be thought of but 
 as a variety, both of them being distinguished 
 from the coot, not only by colour, but by their 
 smaller size ; — (they eight inches long, it six- 
 teen) — and by the slender beaks, the coot 
 having a thick one, half-way to a puffin's. 
 
 And here, once for all, — for I see I have 
 taken no note yet of the beaks or bills of my 
 dabchicks, — I will at once arrange a formula 
 of the order of questions which it will be 
 proper to ask, and get answered, concerning 
 any bird, in the same order always, so that 
 we shall never miss anything that we ought
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I4I 
 
 to think of. And I find these questions will 
 naturally and easily fall into the following 
 twelve : 
 
 1. Country, and scope of migration. 
 
 2. 'Food. 
 
 3. Form and flight. 
 
 4. Foot. 
 
 5. Beak and eye. 
 
 6. Voice and ear. 
 
 7. Temper. 
 
 8. Nest. 
 
 9. Eggs. 
 
 10. Brood. 
 
 11. Feathers. 
 
 12. Uses in the world. 
 
 It may be thought that I have forced — and 
 not fallen into — my number 12, by packing the 
 faculties of sight and hearing into bye corners. 
 But the expression of a bird's head depends 
 on the relation of eye to beak, as the getting of 
 its food depends on their practical alliance of 
 power; and the question, for instance, whether 
 peacocks and parrots have musical ears, seems 
 to me not properly debateable unless with due 
 respect to the quality of their voices. It is 
 curious, considering how much, one way or
 
 142 love's meinie. 
 
 another, we are amused or pleased by the 
 chatter and song of birds, that you will 
 scarcely find in any ornithic manual more 
 than a sentence, if so much, about their 
 hearing; and I have not myself, at this 
 moment, the least idea where a nightingale's 
 ears are! But see Appendix, p. 215. 
 
 I retain, therefore, my dodecahedric form of 
 catechism as sufficiently clear ; and without 
 binding myself to follow the order of it in 
 strictness, if there be motive for discursory 
 remark, it will certainly prevent my leaving 
 any bird insufficiently distinguished, and 
 enable me to arrange the collected state- 
 ments about it in the most easily compared 
 order. 
 
 115. We will try it at once on this second 
 variety of the Titania, of which I find nothing 
 of much interest in my books, and have nothing 
 discursive myself to say. 
 
 1. Country. Arctic mostly ; seen off" Green- 
 land, in lat. 68°, swimming among icebergs 
 three or four miles from shore. Abundant 
 in Siberia, and as far south as the Caspian. 
 Migratory in Europe as far as Italy, yet 
 always rare. (Do a few only, more intelligently
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I43 
 
 curious than the rest, or for the sake of their 
 health, travel ?) 
 
 , 2. Food. Small thin-skinned Crustacea, and 
 aquatic surface-insects. 
 
 3. Form and flight. Stout, for a sea-bird ; 
 and they don't care to fly, preferring to swim 
 out of danger. Body 7 to 8 inches long ; 
 wings, from carpal joint to end, 4f, — say 5. 
 These quarters of inches, are absurd pretences 
 to generalize what varies in every bird. 8 
 inches long, by 10 across the wings open, is 
 near enough. In future, the brief notification 
 8x 10, 5 X 7, or the like, will enough express 
 a bird's inches, unless it possess decorative 
 appendage of tail, which must be noted 
 separately. 
 
 4. Foot. Chesnut-leaved in front toes, the 
 lobes slightly serrated on the edges. Hind 
 toe without membrane. Colour of foot, alwa3's 
 black. 
 
 5. Beak. Long, slender, straight. (How 
 long ? Drawn as about a fifth of the bird's 
 length — say an inch, or a little over.) Upper 
 mandible slightly curved down at the point. 
 In Titania arctica, the beak is longer and more 
 slender.
 
 144 love's meinie. 
 
 6. Voice. A sharp, short cry, not conceived 
 by me enough to spell any likeness of it. 
 
 7. Temper. Gentle, passing into stupid, (it 
 seems to me) ; one, in meditative travel, lets 
 itself be knocked down by a gardener with his 
 spade. 
 
 8. Nest. Little said of it, the bird breeding 
 chiefly in the North. Among marshes, it is 
 of weeds and grass ; but among icebergs, of 
 what ? 
 
 9. Eggs. Pear-shape; narrow ends to- 
 gether in nest ; never more than four. 
 
 10. Brood. No account of. 
 
 11. Feathers. Mostly grey, passing into 
 brown in summer, varied with white on 
 margin. Reddish chesnut or bay bodice — 
 well oiled or varnished. 
 
 12. Uses. Fortunately, at present, un- 
 known. 
 
 V. 
 
 RALLUS AQUATICUS. WATER-RAIL. 
 
 ii6. Thus far, we have got for re- 
 presentatives of our dabchick group, eight 
 species of little birds — namely, two Torrent- 
 ouzels, three Lily-ouzels, one Grebe, and two
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. 1 45 
 
 Titanias. And these we associate, observe, 
 .not for any specialty of feature in them, but 
 ._for common character, habit, and size ; so 
 that, if perchance a child playing by any 
 stream, or on the sea-sands, perceives a 
 companionable bird dabbling in an equally 
 childish and pleasant manner, he may not 
 have to look through half a dozen volumes of 
 ornithology to find it ; but may be pretty sure 
 it has been one of these eight. And having 
 once fastened the characters of these well in 
 his mind, he may with ease remember that the 
 little grebe is the least of a family of chesnut- 
 leaf-footed, and sharp-billed creatures, which 
 yet in size, colour, and diving power, go 
 necessarily among Ducks, and cannot be 
 classed with Dabblers ; though it must be 
 always as distinctly kept in mind that a duck 
 proper has a flat beak, and a fully webbed 
 foot. 
 
 Again, he may recollect that with these leaf- 
 footed ducks of the calm and fresh waters, 
 must be associated the leaf- footed or fringe- 
 footed ducks of the sea ; — * phalaropes,' which 
 by their short wings connect themselves with 
 
 many clumsy marine creatures, on their way 
 
 K
 
 146 love's meinie. 
 
 to become seals instead of birds ; and that I 
 have kept the two Httle Titanias out of this 
 class, not merely for their niceness, but because 
 they are not short-winged in any vulgar degree, 
 but seem to have wings about as long as a 
 sand-piper's ; — and indeed I had put the purple 
 sand-piper, Arquatella maritima, with them, in 
 my own folio; only as the Arquatella's feet 
 are not chesnutty, she had better go with her 
 own kind in our notes on them. 
 
 117. But there are yet two birds, which I 
 think well to put with our eight dabchicks, 
 though they are much larger than any of 
 them, — partly because of their disposition, and 
 partly because of their plumage, — the water- 
 rail, and water-hen. Modern science, with 
 instinctive horror of all that is pretty to see, 
 or easy to remember, entirely rejects the 
 plumage, as any element or noticeable condi- 
 tion of bird-kinds ; nor have I ever 3'-et tried 
 to make it one myself; yet there are certain 
 qualities of downiness in ducks, fluffiness in 
 owls, spottiness in thrushes, patchiness in pies, 
 bronzed or rusty lustre in cocks, and pearly 
 iridescence in doves, which I believe may 
 be aptly brought into connection with other
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. 1 47 
 
 defining characters ; and when we find an 
 entirely similar disposition of plumage, and 
 ,-nearly the same form, in two birds, I do not 
 think that mere difference in size should far 
 separate them. 
 
 Bewick, accordingly, calls the water-rail the 
 
 * Brook-ouzel,' and puts it between the little 
 crake and the water-ouzel ; but he does not 
 say a word of its living by brooks, — only * in 
 low wet places.' Buffon, however, takes it 
 with the land-rail ; Gould and Yarrell put it 
 between the little crake and water-hen. 
 Gould's description of it is by no means clear 
 to me : — he first says it is, in action, as much 
 " like a rat as a bird ; " then that it " bounds 
 like a ball," (before the nose of the spaniel); 
 and lastly, in the next sentence, speaks of it 
 as " this latJiASke bird " ! It is as large as 
 a bantam, but can run, like the Allegretta, on 
 floating leaves ; itself, weighing about four 
 ounces and a half (Bewick), and rarely uses 
 the wing, flying very slowly. I imagine the 
 
 * lath-like ' must mean, like the more frequent 
 epithet 'compressed,' that the bird's body is 
 vertically thin, so as to go easily between 
 close reeds.
 
 148 love's meinie. 
 
 118. We will try our twelve questions 
 
 again. 
 
 1. Country. Equally numerous in every 
 part of Europe, in Africa, India, China, and 
 Japan ; yet hardly anybody seems to have 
 seen it. Living, however, " near the peren- 
 nial fountains " (wherever those may be ; — 
 it sounds like the garden of Eden !) " during 
 the greater part of the winter, the birds pass 
 Malta in spring and autumn, and have been 
 seen fift}^ leagues at sea off the coast of 
 Portugal " (Buffon) ; but where coming from, 
 or going to, is not told. Tunis is the most 
 southerly place named by Yarrell. 
 
 2. Food. Anything small enough to be 
 swallowed, that lives in mud or water. 
 
 3. Form and flight. I am puzzled, as afore- 
 said, between its likeness to a ball, and a lath. 
 Flies heavily and unwillingly, hanging its legs 
 down. 
 
 4. Foot. Long-toed and flexile. 
 
 5. Beak. Sharp and strong, some inch and 
 a half long, showing distinctly the scimitar- 
 curve of a gull's, near the point. 
 
 6. Voice. No account of. 
 
 7. Temper. Quite easily tameable, though
 
 in. THE DABCHICKS. 1 49 
 
 naturally shy Feeds out of the hand in a 
 '* day or- two, if fed regularly in confinement. 
 
 8. Nest. " Slight, of leaves and strips of 
 flags," (Gould); "of sedge and grass, rarely 
 found," (Yarrell). Size not told. 
 
 9. Eggs. Eight or nine ! cream-white, with 
 rosy yolk ! ! rather larger than a blackbird's ! ! ! 
 
 10. Brood. Velvet black, with white bills ; 
 hunting with the utmost activity from the 
 minute they are hatched. 
 
 11. Feathers. Brown on the back, a 
 beautiful warm ash grey on the breast, 
 and under the wings transverse stripes of 
 very dark grey and white. The disposition 
 of pattern is almost exactly the same as in 
 the Allegretta. 
 
 12. Uses. By many thought delicious 
 eating. (Bewick.) The fact is, or seems 
 to me, that this entire group of marsh birds 
 is meant to become to us the domestic 
 poultry of marshy land ; and I imagine that 
 by proper irrigation and care, many districts 
 of otherwise useless bog and sand, might be 
 made more profitable to us than many fishing- 
 grounds.
 
 150 love's meinie. 
 
 VI. 
 
 PULLA AQUATICA. WATER-HEN. 
 
 {Gallimila Chloropus. — Pentiant, Bewick, Gould, and 
 Yarrcll. ) 
 
 119. 'Green-footed little cock, or hen/ that 
 is to say, in English ; only observe, if you call 
 the Fringe-foot a Phalarope, you ought in 
 consistency to call the Green-foot a Chlorope. 
 Their feet are not only notable for green- 
 ness, but for size : they are very ugly, having 
 the awkward and ill-used look of the feet of 
 Scratchers, while a trace of beginning mem- 
 brane connects them with the fringe-foots. 
 
 Their proper name would be Marsh-cock, 
 which would enough distinguish them from the 
 true Moor-cock or Black-cock. ' Moat-cock ' 
 would be prettier, and characteristic ; for in 
 the old English days they used to live much in 
 the moats of manor-houses ; mine is the name 
 nearest to the familiar one ; only note there is 
 no proper feminine of ' pullus,' and I use the 
 adjective ' pulla ' to express the dark colour. 
 
 It is a ^dixV-broivn bird, according to the 
 coloured pictures — xxow grey, BufFon says, with 
 white stripes of little order on the bodice, 
 clumsy feet and bill, but makes up for all
 
 Ill, THE DABCHICKS. I 5 I 
 
 ungainliness by its gentle and intelligent 
 mind; -and seems meant for a useful posses- 
 *sion to mankind all over the world, for it lives 
 in Siberia and New Zealand ; in Senegal 
 and Jamaica ; in Scotland, Switzerland, and 
 Prussia ; in Corfu, Crete, and Trebizond ; in 
 Canada, and at the Cape. I find no account 
 of its migrations, and one would think that a 
 bii'd which usually flies " dip, dip, dipping 
 with its toes, and leaving a track along the 
 water like that of a stone at 'ducks and 
 drakes ' " (Yarrell), would not willingly ad- 
 venture itself on the Atlantic. It must have 
 a kind of human facility in adapting itself 
 to climate, as it has human domesticity of 
 temper, with curious fineness of sagacity and 
 sympathies in taste. A family of them, petted 
 by a clergyman's wife, were constantly adding 
 materials to their nest, and " made real havoc 
 in the flower-garden, — for though straw and 
 leaves are their chief ingredients, they seem to 
 have an eye for beauty, and the old hen has 
 been seen surrounded with a brilliant wreath 
 of scarlet anemones." Thus Bishop Stanley, 
 whose account of the bird is full of interesting 
 particulars. This eesthetic water-hen, with
 
 I 5 2 love's meinie. 
 
 her husband, hved at Cheadle, in Staffordshire, 
 in the rectory moat, for several seasons, 
 "always however leaving it in the spring," 
 (for Scotland, supposably ?) : being constantly 
 fed, the pair became quite tame, built their 
 nest in a thorn-bush covered with ivy which 
 had fallen into the water; and "when the 
 young are a few days old, the old ones bring 
 them up close to the drawing-room window, 
 where they are regularly fed with wheat ; and, 
 as the lady of the house pays them the 
 greatest attention, they have learned to look up 
 to her as their natural protectress and friend ; 
 so much so, that one bird in particular, which 
 was much persecuted by the rest, would, when 
 attacked, fly to her for refuge ; and whenever 
 she calls, the whole flock, as tame as barn-door 
 fowls, quit the water, and assemble round her, 
 to the number of seventeen. (November, 1833.) 
 
 120. " They have also made other friends in 
 the dogs belonging to the family, approaching 
 them without fear, though hurrying off with 
 great alarm on the appearance of a strange dog. 
 
 " The position of the water, together with the 
 familiarity of these birds, has afforded many 
 interesting particulars respecting their habits.
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I 5 3 
 
 " They have three broods in a season — the 
 first early in April; and they begin to lay 
 -again when the first hatch is about a fortnight 
 old. ,They lay eight or nine eggs, and sit 
 about three weeks, — the cock alternately with 
 the hen. The nest in the thorn-bush is placed 
 usually so high above the surface of the water, 
 they cannot climb into it again ; but, as a sub- 
 stitute, within an hour after they leave the nest, 
 the cock bird builds a larger and more roomy 
 nest for them, with sedges, at the water's edge, 
 which they can enter or retire from at pleasure. 
 For about a month they are fed by the old birds, 
 but soon become very active in taking flies 
 and water-insects. Immediately on the second 
 hatch coming out, the young ones of the 
 first hatch assist the old ones in feeding and 
 hovering over them, leading them out in de- 
 tached parties, and making additional nests 
 for them, similar to their own, on the brink of 
 the moat. 
 
 " But it is not only in their instinctive 
 attachments and habits that they merit notice ; 
 the following anecdote proves that they are 
 gifted with a sense of observation approaching 
 to something very like reasoning faculties.
 
 154 love's meinie. 
 
 "At a gentleman's house in Staffordshire, 
 the pheasants are fed out of one of those 
 boxes described in page 287, the Hd of which 
 rises with the pressure of the pheasant standing 
 on the rail in front of the box, A water-hen 
 observing this, went and stood upon the rail 
 as soon as the pheasant had quitted it ; but 
 the weight of the bird being insufficient to 
 raise the lid of the box, so as to enable it to get 
 at the corn, the water-hen kept jumping on the 
 rail to give additional impetus to its weight : 
 this partially succeeded, but not to the satis- 
 faction of the sagacious bird. Accordingly it 
 went off, and soon returning with a bird of its 
 own species, the united weight of the two had 
 the desired effect, and the successful pair en- 
 joyed the benefit of their ingenuity. 
 
 "We can vouch for the truth of this 
 singular instance of penetration, on the autho- 
 rity of the owner of the place where it occurred, 
 and who witnessed the fact." 
 
 121. But although in these sagacities, and 
 teachablenesses, the bird has much in common 
 with land poultry, it seems not a link between 
 these and water-fowl ; but to be properly 
 placed by the ornithologists between the rail
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I 5 5 
 
 and ^he coot : this latter being the largest of 
 the fringefoots, singularly dark in colour, and 
 called ' fulica ' (sooty), or, with insistance, 
 * fulica ^tra ' (black sooty), or even ' fulica 
 aterrima ' (blackest sooty). * Coot ' is said by 
 Johnson to be Dutch ; and that it became 
 ' cotee ' in French ; but I cannot find cotee 
 in my French dictionary. In the meantime, 
 puttrng the coot and water-hen aside for future 
 better knowledge, we may be content with the 
 pentagonal group of our dabchicks — passing 
 at each angle into another tribe, thus, — (if 
 people must classify, they at least should also 
 viaf). Take the Ouzel, Allegret, Grebe, Fairy, 
 and Rail, and, only giving the Fairy her Latin 
 name, write their fourpenny-worth of initial 
 letters (groat) roimd a pentagon set on its 
 base, putting the Ouzel at the top angle, — so. 
 
 Ouzel. 
 
 Rail. C R ■'^ / Allegret. 
 
 Grebe. Titania.
 
 I 5 6 love's meinie. 
 
 Then, the Ouzels pass up into Blackbirds, the 
 Rails to the left into Woodcocks, the AUegrets 
 to the right into Plovers, the Grebes, down 
 left, into Ducks, and the Titanias, down right, 
 into Gulls. And tliere^s a bit of pentagonal 
 Darwinism for you, if you like it, and learn it, 
 which will be really good for something in the 
 end, or the five ends. 
 
 122. And for the bliss of classification pure, 
 with no ends of any sort or any number, 
 referring my reader to the works of orni- 
 thologists in general, and for what small 
 portion of them he may afterwards care to 
 consult, to my Appendix, I will end this 
 lecture, and this volume, with the refreshment 
 for us of a piece of perfect English and exqui- 
 site wit, falling into verse, — the Chorus of the 
 Birds, in Mr. Courthope's Paradise of them, — 
 a book lov'ely, and often faultless, in most of 
 its execution, but little skilled or attractive in 
 plan, and too thoughtful to be understood 
 without such notes as a good author will not 
 write on his own work ; partly because he has 
 not time, and partly because he always feels 
 that if people won't look for his meaning, 
 they should not be told it. My own special
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I57 
 
 function, on the contrary, is, and always has 
 been, that of the Interpreter only, in the 
 ' j^ilgrim's Progress ; ' and I trust that Mr. 
 Courthope will therefore forgive my arranging 
 his long cadence of continuous line so as to 
 come symmetrically into my own page, (thus 
 also enforcing, for the inattentive, the rhymes 
 which he is too easily proud to insist on,) and 
 my division of the whole chorus into equal 
 strophe and antistrophe of six lines each, in 
 which, counting from the last line of the 
 stanza, the reader can easily catch the word to 
 which my note refers. 
 
 123. \YE wish to declare, 
 
 How the birds of the air 
 All high institutions designed, 
 And, holding in awe 
 
 Art, Science, and Law, 
 6 Delivered the same to mankind. 
 
 To begin with ; of old 
 
 Man went naked, and cold, 
 Whenever it pelted or froze, 
 Till we showed him how feathers 
 
 Were proof against weathers, 
 12 With that, he bethought him of hose. 
 
 Line 9. Pelted, said of hail, not rain. Felt by naked- 
 ness, in a more severe manner than mere rain. 
 
 II. 'Weathers,' i.e., both weathers — hail and cold: the
 
 I 5 8 love's meinie. 
 
 And next, it was plain, 
 
 That he, in the rain, 
 Was forced to sit dripping and bhnd. 
 While the Reed-warbler swung 
 In a nest, with her young 
 i8 Deep sheltered, and warm, from the wind. 
 
 So our homes in the boughs 
 
 Made him think of the House ; 
 And the Swallow, to help him invent, 
 Revealed the best way 
 
 To economize clay, 
 24 And bricks to combine with cement. 
 
 armour of the feathers against hail ; the down of them 
 against cold. See account of Feather-mail in ' Laws of 
 Fesole,' chap, vi., p. 77, with the first and fifth plates, and 
 Figure 15. 
 
 15. Blind. By the beating of the rain in his face. In 
 hail, there is real danger and bruising, if the hail be worth 
 calling so, for the whole body ; while in rain, if it be rain 
 also worth calling rain, the great plague is the beating and 
 drenching in the face. 
 
 16. Swung. Opposed to ' sit ' in previous line. The 
 human creature, though it sate steady on this unshakeable 
 earth, had no house over its head. The bird, that lived on 
 the tremblingest and weakest of bending things, had her 
 nest on it, in which even her infinitely tender brood were 
 deep sheltered and warm, from tlie -wind. It is impossible 
 to find a lovelier instance of pure poetical antithesis. 
 
 20. House. Again antithetic to the perfect word ' Home ' 
 in the line before. A house is exactly, and only, half-way to 
 a ' home.' Man had not yet got so far as even that ! and had 
 lost, the chorus satirically imply, even the power of getting 
 the other half, ever, since his " She gave me of the tree." 
 
 24. Bricks. The first bad inversion permitted, for "to
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I 59 
 
 The knowledge withal 
 
 Of the Carpenter's awl, 
 Is drawn from the Nuthatch's bill ; 
 And the Sand-Martin's pains 
 
 In the hazel-clad lanes 
 30 ""Instructed the Mason to drill. 
 
 Is there one of the Arts, 
 
 More dear to men's hearts ? 
 
 To the bird's inspiration they owe it ; 
 
 For the Nightingale first 
 
 Sweet music rehearsed, 
 36 Prima-Donna, Composer, and Poet. 
 
 The Owl's dark retreats 
 
 Showed sages the sweets 
 
 Of brooding, to spin, or unravel 
 
 Fine webs in one's brain, 
 
 Philosophical — vain ; 
 42 The Swallows, — the pleasures of travel. 
 
 combine bricks with cement." In my Swallow lecture I 
 had no time to go into the question of her building materials ; 
 the point is, however, touched upon in the Appendix (pp. 
 194, 198, and note). 
 
 30. 'Drill,' for 'quarry out,' 'tunnel,' etc., the best 
 general term available. 
 
 36. Composer of the music ; Poet of the meaning. 
 
 Compare, and think over, the Bullfinch's nest, etc., § 48 to 
 61 of • Eagle's Nest.' 
 
 In modern music the meaning is, I believe, by the re- 
 puted masters omitted. 
 
 39. To Spin, or «<«ravel. Synthesis and analysis, in the 
 vulgar Greek slang.
 
 i6o love's meinie. 
 
 Who chirped in such strain 
 
 Of Greece, Italy, Spain, 
 
 And Egypt, that men, when they heard, 
 
 Were mad to fly forth, 
 
 From their nests in the North, 
 48 And follow— the tail of the Bird. 
 
 Besides, it is true, 
 
 To our wisdom is due 
 The knowledge of Sciences all ; 
 And chiefly, those rare 
 
 Metaphysics of Air 
 54 Men ' Meteorology ' call, 
 
 And men, in their words. 
 
 Acknowledge the Birds' 
 
 46. Mad. Compare Byron of the English in his clay. 
 "A parcel of staring boobies who go about gaping and 
 wishing to be at once cheap and magnificent. A man is 
 a fool now, who travels in France or Italy, till that tribe of 
 wretches be swept home again. In two or three years, the 
 first rush will be over, and the Continent will be roomy and 
 agreeable." (Life, vol. ii., p. 319.) For sketches of the 
 English of seventeen years later, at the same spots (Wengern 
 Alp and Interlachen), see, if you can see, in any library, 
 public or private, at Geneva, Topffer's ' Excursions dans 
 les Alpes, 1832.' Douzieme, Treizieme, and Quatorzieme 
 Journee. 
 
 48. The Tail, Mr. Courthope does not condescend to 
 italicize his pun ; but a swallow-tailed and adder-tongued 
 pun like this must be paused upon. Compare Mr. Murray's 
 Tale of the Town of Lucca, to be seen between the arrival 
 of one train and the departure of the next, — nothing there 
 but twelve churches and a cathedral, — mostly of the tenth 
 to ihirteenlh century.
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. l6l 
 
 Erudition in weather and star ; 
 For they say, '"Twill be dry, — 
 '' The Swallow is high," 
 
 •.' 60 Or, " Rain, for the Chough is afar." 
 
 ^'Twas the Rooks who taught men 
 Vast pamphlets to pen 
 Upon social compact and law, 
 And Parliaments hold. 
 
 As themselves did of old, 
 66 Exclaiming ' Hear, Hear,' for ' Caw, Caw.' 
 
 6or Afar. I did not know of this weather sign ; nor, I 
 suppose, did the Duke of Hamilton's keeper, who shot the 
 last pair of Choughs on Arran in 1863. (' Birds of the West 
 of Scotland,' p. 165.) I trust the climate has wept for them ; 
 certainly our Coniston clouds grow heavier, in these last years. 
 
 63. Social. Rightly sung by the Birds in three syllables ; 
 but the lagging of the previous line (probably intentional, 
 but not pleasant,) makes the lightness of this one a little 
 dangerous for a clumsy reader. The 'i-al' of 'social' does 
 not fill the line as two full short syllables, else the preceding 
 word should have been written '■on,' not 'upon.' The five 
 syllables, rightly given, just take the time of two iambs ; 
 but there are readers rude enough to accent the ' on ' of upon, 
 and take * social ' for two short syllables. 
 
 64. Hold. Short for 'to hold'— but it is a licentious 
 construction, so also, in next line, 'themselves' for 'they 
 themselves.' The stanza is on the whole the worst in the 
 poem, its irony and essential force being much dimmed by 
 obscure expression, and even slightly staggering continuity 
 of thought. The Rooks may be properly supposed to have 
 taught men to dispute, but not to write. The Swallow 
 teaches building, literally, and the Owl moping, literally ; 
 but the Rook does not teach pamphleteering literally. And 
 the ' of old ' is redundant, for rhyme's sake, since Rooks hold 
 parliaments now as much-as ever they did. 
 
 L
 
 1 62 love's meinie. 
 
 And whence arose Love ? 
 
 Go, ask of the Dove, 
 
 Or behold how the Titmouse, unresting, 
 Still early and late 
 Ever sings by his mate, 
 72 To lighten her labours of nesting. 
 
 Their bonds never gall, 
 
 Though the leaves shoot, and fall, 
 And the seasons roll round in their course. 
 For their marriage, each year, 
 
 Grows more lovely and dear ; 
 78 And they know not decrees of Divorce. 
 
 That these things are truth 
 
 We have learned from our youth, 
 For our hearts to our customs incline. 
 As the rivers that roll 
 
 From, the fount of our soul, 
 84 Immortal, unchanging, divine. 
 
 Man, simple and old, 
 
 In his ages of gold. 
 Derived from our teaching true light, 
 And deemed it his praise 
 
 In his ancestors' ways 
 90 To govern his footsteps aright. 
 
 76. Each year. I doubt the fact ; and too sadly suspect 
 that birds take different mates. What a question to have to 
 ask at this time of day and year ! 
 
 82. Rivers. Read slowly. The 'customs' are rivers 
 that 'go on for ever' flowing from the fount of the soul. 
 The Heart drinks of them, as of waterbrooks.
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. 1 63 
 
 But the fountain of woes, 
 
 Philosophy, rose ; 
 And, what between reason and whim, 
 He has sphntered our rules 
 
 Into sections and schools, 
 96 ^ So the world is made bitter, for him. 
 
 But the birds, since on earth 
 
 They discovered the worth 
 Of their souls, and resolved with a vow 
 No custom to change, 
 ^ For a new, or a strange, 
 
 102 Have attained unto Paradise, now. 
 
 '■> 
 
 124. I could willingly enlarge on these last 
 two stanzas, but think my duty will be better 
 done to the poet if I quote, for conclusion, 
 two lighter pieces of his verse, which will 
 require no comment, and are closer to our 
 present purpose. The first, — the lament of 
 the French Cook in purgatory, — has, for once, 
 
 92. Philosophy. The author should at least have given 
 a note or two to explain the sense in which he uses words so 
 wide as this. The philosophy which hegins in pride, and 
 concludes in malice, is indeed a fountain — though not the 
 fountain — of woes, to mankind. But true philosophy, such 
 as Fenelon's or Sir Thomas More's, is a well of peace. 
 
 98. Worth. Again, it is not clearly told us what the 
 author means by the worth of a bird's soul, nor ho\^' the birds 
 learned it. The reader is left to discern, and collect for 
 himself — with patience such as not one in a thousand now- 
 a-days possesses, the opposition between the " fount of our 
 soul" (line 83) and fountain of philosophy.
 
 164 love's meinie. 
 
 a note by the author, giving M. Soyer's 
 authority for the items of the great dish, — 
 " symbol of philanthropy, served at York during 
 the great commemorative banquet after the first 
 exhibition." The commemorative soul of the 
 tormented Chef — always making a dish like it, 
 of M^hich nobody ever eats — sings thus : — 
 
 " Do you veesh 
 To hear before you taste, of de hundred-guinea deesh ? 
 Has it not been sung by every knife and fork, 
 ' L' extravagance culinaire k 1' Alderman,' at York ? 
 Vy, ven I came here, eighteen Octobers seence, 
 I dis deesh was making for your Royal Preence, 
 Ven half de leeving world, cooking all de others, 
 Swore an oath hereafter, to be men and brothers. 
 All de leetle Songsters in de voods dat build. 
 Hopped into the kitchen asking to be kill'd ; 
 All who in de open furrows find de seeds. 
 Or de mountain berries, all de farmyard breeds, — 
 Ha — I see de knife, vile de deesh it shapens, 
 Vith les petits noix, of four-and-twenty capons, 
 Dere vere dindons, fatted poulets, fowls in plenty. 
 Five times nine of partridges, and of pheasants twenty ; 
 Ten grouse, that should have had as many covers, 
 All in dis one deesh, with six preety plovers. 
 Forty woodcocks, plump, and heavy in the scales. 
 Pigeons dree good dozens, six-and-dirty quails, 
 Ortulans, ma foi, and a century of snipes, 
 But de preetiest of dem all was twice tree dozen pipes 
 Of de melodious larks, vich each did clap the ving. 
 And veeshed de pie vas open, dat dey all might sing ! "
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I 65 
 
 / 
 
 1'25. There are stiff bits of prosody in 
 ^ these verses, — one or two, indeed, quite un- 
 -'manageable, — but we must remember that 
 Frencti . metre will not read into ours. The 
 last piece I wall give flows very differently. 
 It is in express imitation of Scott — but no 
 nobler model could be chosen ; and how much 
 better for minor poets sometimes to write in 
 another's manner, than always to imitate their 
 own. 
 
 This chant is sung by the soul of the Fran- 
 cesca of the Bird-ordained purgatory; whose 
 torment is to be dressed only in falling snow, 
 each flake striking cold to her heart as it falls, 
 — but such lace investiture costing, not a cruel 
 price per yard in souls of women, nor a mortal 
 price in souls of birds. 
 
 Her ' snow-mantled shadow ' sings : 
 
 " Alas, my heart ! No grief so great 
 As thinking on a happy state 
 In misery. Ah, dear is power 
 To female hearts ! Oh, blissful hour 
 When I51anche and Flavia, joined with me, 
 Tri-feminine Directory, 
 Dispensed in latitudes below 
 The laws of flounce and furbelow ; 
 And held on bird and beast debate, 
 What lives should die to serve our state!
 
 1 66 love's meinie. 
 
 We changed our statutes with the moon, 
 
 And oft in January or June, 
 
 At deep midnight, we would prescribe 
 
 Some furry kind, or feathered tribe. 
 
 At morn, we sent the mandate forth ; 
 
 Then rose the hunters of the North : 
 
 And all the trappers of the West 
 
 Bowed at our feminine behest. 
 
 Died every seal that dared to rise 
 
 To his round air-hole in the ice ; 
 
 Died each Siberian fox and hare 
 
 And ermine trapt in snow-built snare. 
 
 For us the English fowler set 
 
 The ambush of his whirling net ; 
 
 And by green Rothers reedy side 
 
 The blue kingfisher flashed and died. 
 
 His life for us the seamew gave 
 
 High upon Orkney's lonely wave ; 
 
 Nor was our queenly power unknown 
 
 In Iceland or by Amazon ; 
 
 For where the brown duck stripped her breast 
 
 For her dear eggs and windy nest, 
 
 Three times her bitter spoil was won 
 
 For woman ; and when all was done, 
 
 She called her snow-white piteous drake, 
 
 Who plucked his bosom for our sake." 
 
 1 26. " See ' Hartwig's Polar World ' for the 
 manner of taking Eiderdown." — Once more, 
 we have thus much of author's note, but 
 edition and page not specified, which, how- 
 ever, I am fortunately able to supply. Mr.
 
 Ill THE DABCHICKS. 1 67 
 
 Hartwig's miscellany being a favourite — what 
 can I call it, sand-hill? — of my own, out of which 
 -fevery now and then, in a rasorial manner, I 
 can scratch some savoury or useful contents ; 
 — one or two, it may be remembered, I col- 
 lected for the behoof of the Bishop of Man- 
 chester, on this very subject, {Contemporary 
 Review^ Feb. 1880); and some of Mr. Hart- 
 wig's half-sandy, half-soppy, poHtical opinions, 
 are offered to the consideration of the British 
 workman in the last extant number of * Fors.' 
 Touching eider ducks, I find in his fifth 
 chapter — on Iceland — he quotes the following 
 account, by Mr. Shepherd, of the shore of the 
 island of ' Isafjardarjup ' — a word which seems 
 to contain in itself an introduction to Icelandic 
 literature : — 
 
 1 27. " The ducks and their nests were every- 
 where, in a manner that was quite alarming. 
 Great brown ducks sat upon their nests in 
 masses, and at every step started up from 
 under our feet. It was with difficulty that we 
 avoided treading on some of the nests. The 
 island being but three-quarters of a mile in 
 width, the opposite shore was soon reached. 
 On the coast was a wall built of large stones.
 
 1 68 love's meinie. 
 
 just above the high-water level, about three 
 feet in height, and of considerable thickness. 
 At the bottom, on both sides of it, alternate 
 stones had been left out, so as to form a series 
 of square compartments for the ducks to make 
 their nests in. Almost every compartment 
 was occupied ; and, as we walked along the 
 shore, a long line of ducks flew out one after 
 another. The surface of the water also was 
 perfectly white with drakes, who welcomed 
 their brown wives with loud and clamorous 
 cooing. When we arrived at the farmhouse, 
 we were cordially welcomed by its mistress. 
 The house itself was a great marvel. The 
 earthen wall that surrounded it and the window 
 embrasures were occupied by ducks. On the 
 ground, the house was fringed with ducks. 
 On the turf-slopes of the roof we could see 
 ducks ; and a duck sat in the scraper. 
 
 "A grassy bank close by had been cut into 
 square patches like a chess-board, (a square of 
 turf of about eighteen inches being removed, 
 and a hollow made,) and all were filled with 
 ducks. A windmill was infested, and so were 
 all the outhouses, mounds, rocks, and crevices. 
 The ducks were everywhere. Many of them
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS, I 69 
 
 were so tame that we could stroke them on 
 their nests ; and the good lady told us that 
 .there was scarcely a duck on the island which 
 would not allow her to take its eggs without 
 flight or fear." 
 
 128. But upon the back of the canvas, as it 
 were, of this pleasant picture — on the back of 
 the leaf, in his book, p. 65, — this description 
 being given in p. 66, — Doctor Hartwig tells 
 us, in his own peculiar soppy and sandy way 
 — half tearful, half Dr3'asdusty, (or may not 
 we say — it sounds more Icelandic — ' Dry-as- 
 sawdusty,') these less cheerful facts. ** The 
 eiderdown is easily collected, as the birds are 
 quite tame. The female having laid five or 
 six pale greenish-olive eggs, in a nest thickly 
 lined with her beautiful down, the collectors, 
 after carefully removing the bird, rob the nest 
 of its contents ; after which they replace her. 
 She then begins to lay afresh — though this 
 time only three or four eggs, — and again has 
 recourse to the down on her body. But her 
 greedy persecutors once more rifle her nest, 
 and oblige her to line it for the third time. 
 Now, however, her own stock of down is 
 exhausted, and with a plaintive voice she
 
 I 70 love's meinie. 
 
 calls her mate to her assistance, who willingly 
 plucks the soft feathers from his breast to 
 supply the deficienc3^ If the cruel robbery 
 be again repeated, which in former times was 
 frequently the case, the poor eider-duck aban- 
 dons the spot, never to return, and seeks for a 
 new home where she may indulge her maternal 
 instinct undisturbed by the avarice of man." 
 
 129. Now, as I have above told you, these 
 two statements are given on the two sides of 
 the same leaf; and the reader must make what 
 he may of them. Setting the best of my own 
 poor wits at them, it seems to me that the 
 merciless abstraction of down is indeed the 
 usual custom of the inhabitants and visitors ; 
 but that the 'good lady,' referred to by Mr. 
 Shepherd, manages things differently ; and in 
 consequence we are presently farther told of 
 her, (bottom of p. 65,) that "when she first 
 became possessor of the island, the produce of 
 down from the ducks was not more than fifteen 
 pounds weight in the year; but under her 
 careful nurture of twenty years it had risen 
 to nearly one hundred pounds annually. It 
 requires about one pound and a half to make 
 a coverlet for a single bed, and the down is
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I7I 
 
 worth from twelve to fifteen shillings per 
 pound. Most of the eggs are taken and 
 pickled for winter consumption, one or two 
 only being left to hatch." 
 
 But here, again, pulverulent Dr. Hartwig 
 leaves us untold who * consumes ' all these 
 pickled eggs of the cooing and downy-breasted 
 creatures ; (you observe, in passing, that an 
 eider duck coos instead of quacking, and must 
 be a sort of Sea-Dove,) or what addition their 
 price makes to the good old lady's feather- 
 nesting income of, as I calculate it, sixty to 
 seventy-five pounds a year, — all her twenty 
 years of skill and humanity and moderate 
 plucking having got no farther than that. 
 And not feeling myself able, on these im- 
 perfect data, to offer any recommendations to 
 the Icelandic government touching the duck 
 trade, I must end my present chapter with a 
 rough generalization of results. For a be- 
 ginning of which, the time having too clearly 
 and sadly come for me, as I have said in my 
 preface, to knit up, as far as I may, the loose 
 threads and straws of my ravelled life's work, 
 I reprint in this place the second paragraph of 
 the chapter on Vital Beauty in the second
 
 I 7 2 LOVE S MEINIE. 
 
 volume of * Modern Painters,' premising, how- 
 ever, some few necessary words. 
 
 130. I intended never to have reprinted the 
 second volume of * Modern Painters ' ; first, 
 because it is written in affected imitation of 
 Hooker, and not in my own proper style ; 
 and, secondly, yet chiefly, because I did not 
 think the analytic study of which it mainly 
 consists, in the least likely to be intelligible to 
 the general student, or, therefore, profitable to 
 him. But I find now that the ' general student ' 
 has plunged himself into such abysses, not of 
 analytic, but of dissolytic, — dialytic — or even 
 diarrhoeic — lies, belonging to the sooty and 
 sensual elements of his London and Paris life, 
 that, however imperfectly or dimly done, the 
 higher analysis of that early work of mine 
 ought at least to be put within his reach ; and 
 the fact, somehow, enforced upon him, that there 
 were people before lie lived, who knew what 
 'aesthesis ' meant, though they did not think that 
 pigs' flavouring of pigs'-wash was ennobled by 
 giving it that Greek name : and that there were 
 also people before his time who knew what vital 
 beauty meant, though they did not seek it either 
 in the model-room, or the Pare aux Cerfs.
 
 HI. THE DABCHICKS. I73 
 
 Therefore, I will republish (D.V.) the ana- 
 lytic parts of the second volume of ' Modern 
 Eainters ' as they were written, but with 
 perhaps an additional note or two, and the 
 omission of the passages concerning Evan- 
 gelical or other religious matters, in which I 
 have found out my mistakes. 
 
 131. To be able to hunt for these mistakes, 
 and -crow over them, in the original volume, 
 will always give that volume its orthodox 
 value in sale catalogues, so that I shall swindle 
 nobody who has already bought the book by 
 bringing down its price upon them. Nor will 
 the new edition be a cheap one — even if I 
 ever get it out, which is by no means certain. 
 Here, however, at once, is the paragraph 
 above referred to, quite one of the most impor- 
 tant in the book. The reader should know, 
 preparatorily, that for what is now called 
 'aesthesis,' / always used, and still use, the 
 English word ' sensation ' — as, for instance, 
 the sensation of cold or heat, and of their 
 differences ; — of the flavour of mutton and 
 beef, and their differences ; — of a peacock's 
 and a lark's cry, and their differences ; — of the 
 redness in a blush, and in rouge, and their
 
 1/4 love's meinie. 
 
 differences ; — of the whiteness in snow, and in 
 almond-paste, and their differences ; — of the 
 blackness and brightness of night and day, or 
 of smoke and gashght, and their differences, 
 etc., etc. But for the Perception of Beauty, I 
 always used Plato's word, which is the proper 
 word in Greek, and the only possible single 
 word that can be used in any other language 
 by any man who understands the subject, — 
 'Theoria,' — the Germans only having a term 
 parallel to it, ' Anschauung,' assumed to be its 
 equivalent in p. 22 of the old edition of 
 ' Modern Painters,' but which is not its real 
 equivalent, for Anschauung does not (I believe) 
 include bodily sensation, whereas Plato's 
 Theoria does, so far as is necessary; and 
 mine, somewhat more than Plato's. "The 
 first perfection," (then I say, in this so long in 
 coming paragraph) of the theoretic faculty, 
 " is the kindness and unselfish fulness of heart, 
 which receives the utmost amount of pleasure 
 from the happiness of all things. Of which in 
 high degree the heart of man is incapable ; 
 neither what intense enjoyment the angels may 
 have in all that they see of things that move 
 and live, and in the part they take in the
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I 7 5 
 
 shedding of God's kindness upon them, can 
 \^e know or conceive : only in proportion 
 as we draw near to God, and are made in 
 measure Hke unto Him, can we increase this 
 our possession of charity, of which the entire 
 essence is in God only. But even the ordi- 
 nary exercise of this faculty implies a condition 
 of the whole moral being in some measure 
 right and healthy, and to the entire exercise of 
 it there is necessary the entire perfection of 
 the Christian character; for he who loves not 
 God, nor his brother, cannot love the grass 
 beneath his feet, and the creatures which live 
 not for his uses, filling those spaces in the 
 universe which he needs not ; while, on the 
 other hand, none can love God, nor his human 
 brother, without loving all things which his 
 Father loves ; nor without looking upon them, 
 every one, as in that respect his brethren also, 
 and perhaps worthier than he, if, in the under 
 concords they have to fill, their part be touched 
 more truly. It is good to read of that kindness 
 and humbleness of S. Francis of Assisi, who 
 never spoke to bird or cicala, nor even to wolf 
 and beast of prey, but as his brother; and so 
 we find are moved the minds of all good and
 
 176 love's MEINIE. 
 
 mighty men, as in the lesson that we have 
 from the mariner of Coleridge, and yet more 
 truly and rightly taught in the Hartleap 
 Well :— 
 
 ' Never to blend our pleasure, or our pride, 
 With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.' 
 
 And again in the White Doe of Rylstone, with 
 the added teaching, that anguish of our own 
 
 ' Is tempered and allayed by sympathies, 
 Aloft ascending, and descending deep, 
 Even to the inferior kinds ; ' 
 
 SO that I know not of anything more destructive 
 of the whole theoretic faculty, not to say of 
 the Christian character and human intellect, 
 than those accursed sports, in which man makes 
 of himself, cat, tiger, serpent, ch^todon, and 
 alligator in one; and gathers into one con- 
 tinuance of cruelty, for his amusement, all the 
 devices that brutes sparingly, and at intervals, 
 use against each other for their necessities." 
 
 132. So much I had perceived, and said, you 
 observe, good reader, concerning S. Francis of 
 Assisi, and his sermons, when I was only five- 
 and-twenty, — little thinking at that day how, 
 Evangelical-bred as I was, I should ever come
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. 1 77 
 
 to write a lecture for the first School of Art in 
 Oxford in the Sacristan's cell at Assisi,* or 
 ever — among such poor treasures as I have of 
 friends' reliquaries — I should fondly keep a 
 little ' pinch ' of his cloak. 
 
 Rough cloak of hair, it is, still at Assisi ; 
 concerning which, and the general use of 
 camels' hair, or sackcloth, or briars and thorns, 
 in the middle ages, together with seal-skins 
 (not badgers'), and rams' skins dyed gules, by 
 the Jews, and the Crusaders, as compared with 
 the use of the two furs. Ermine and Vair, and 
 their final result in the operations of the 
 Hudson's Bay Company, much casual notice 
 will be found in my former work. And now, 
 this is the sum of it all, so far as I can shortly 
 write it. 
 
 There is no possibility of explaining the 
 system of life in this world, on any principle 
 of conqueringly Divine benevolence. That 
 piece of bold impiety, if it be so, I have always 
 asserted in my well-considered books, — I con- 
 sidering it, on the contrary, the only really 
 pious thing to say, namely, that the world is 
 
 * See 'Ariadne Florentina,' chap, v., § 164; compare 
 ' Fors,' Letter V. 
 
 M
 
 178 love's meinie. 
 
 under a curse, which we may, if we will, 
 gradually remove, by doing as we are bid, 
 and believing what we are told ; and when we 
 are told, for instance, in the best book we 
 have about our own old history, that "unto 
 Adam also, and to his wife, did the Lord God 
 make coats of skins, and clothed them," we 
 are to accept it as the best thing to be done 
 under the circumstances, and to wear, if we 
 can get them, wolf skin, or cow skin, or 
 beaver's, or ermine's ; but not therefore to 
 confuse God with the Hudson's Bay Company, 
 nor to hunt foxes for their brushes instead of 
 their skins, or think the poor little black tails 
 of a Siberian weasel on a judge's shoulders 
 may constitute him therefore a Minos in 
 matters of retributive justice, or an ^acus in 
 distributive, who can at once determine how 
 many millions a Railroad Company are to 
 make the public pay for not granting them 
 their exclusive business by telegraph. 
 
 133. And every hour of my life, since that 
 paragraph of ' Modern Painters ' was written, 
 has increased, I disdain to say my feeling, but 
 say, with fearless decision, my knowledge, of 
 the bitterness of the curse, which the habits of
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I 79 
 
 hunting and ' la chasse ' have brought upon 
 ^the so-called upper classes of England and 
 . France ; until, from knights and gentlemen, 
 they have sunk into jockeys, speculators, 
 usurers, butchers by battue ; and, the English 
 especially, now, as a political bod}', into what 
 I have called them in the opening chapter 
 of 'The Bible of Amiens,' — "the scurviest 
 louts that ever fouled God's earth with their 
 carcases." 
 
 The language appears to be violent. It 
 is simply brief, and accurate. But I never 
 meant it to remain without justification, and I 
 will give the justification here at once. 
 
 Take your Johnson, and look out the ad- 
 jective Scurvy, in its higher or figurative sense. 
 
 You find the first quotation he gives is from 
 * Measure for Measure,' spoken of the Duke, in 
 monk's disguise : 
 
 " I know him for a man divine and holy ; 
 Not scurvy, nor a temporary meddler." 
 
 In which passage, Shakspeare, who never 
 uses words in vain, nor with a grain less than 
 their full weight, opposes the divineness of 
 men, or their walking with God, to the scurvi- 
 ness of men, or their wallowing with swine ;
 
 I 80 love's meinie. 
 
 and again, he opposes the holiness of men, — in 
 the sense of " Holy — harmless, undefiled," and 
 more than that, helpful or healthful in action 
 — to the harmful and filthy action of temporary 
 meddlers, such as the hanging of seventeen 
 priests before breakfast, and our profitable 
 military successes, in such a prolonged piece 
 of 'temporary meddling' as the Crimean 
 war. 
 
 134. But, secondly, if you look down John- 
 son's column, you will find his last quotation 
 is not in the higher or figurative, but the 
 lower and literal sense, from Swift, to the 
 effect that " it would be convenient to prevent 
 the excess of drink, with that scurvy custom 
 of taking tobacco." And you will also find, 
 if you ever have the sense or courage to look 
 the facts of modern history in the face, that 
 those two itches, for the pot and the pipe, 
 have been the roots of every other demoraliza- 
 tion of the filthiest and literally ' scurviest ' 
 sort among a// classes ; — the dirty pack of 
 cards; the church pavement running with 
 human saliva, — (I have seen the spittings in 
 ponds half an inch deep, in the choir of 
 Rouen cathedral); and the entirely infernal
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I 8 I 
 
 atmosphere of th^ common cafes and gambling- 
 houses of European festivity, infecting every 
 ' condition of what they call ' ^sthesis/ left in 
 the bodies of men, until they cannot be happy 
 with the pines and pansies of the Alps, until 
 they have mixed tobacco smoke with the scent 
 of them ; and the whole concluding in the 
 endurance — or even enjoyment — of the most 
 sc^ualid conditions of filth in our capital cities, 
 that have ever been yet recorded, among the 
 disgraces of mankind. 
 
 135. But, thirdly, Johnson's central quota- 
 tion is again from ' Measure for Measure ' : — 
 
 " He spoke scurvy and pyovokiiig terms against 
 your honour." 
 
 The debates in the English House of Com- 
 mons, for the last half-century, having consisted 
 virtually of nothing else ! 
 
 I next take the word ' lout,' of which Johnson 
 gives two derivations for our choice : it is 
 either the past participle of * to lower, or make 
 low ; ' a lowed person, (as our House of 
 Lords under the direction of railway com- 
 panies and public-house keepers) ; or else — 
 and more strictly I believe in etymology — a 
 form of the Gcrnian 'leute,' 'common people.'
 
 1 82 love's MEINlE. 
 
 In either case, its proper classical English 
 sense is given by Johnson as " a mean, awk- 
 ward fellow; a bumpkin, a clown." 
 
 Now I surely cannot refer to any general 
 representation of British society more accept- 
 able to, and acknowledged by, that society, 
 than the finished and admirably composed 
 drawings of Du Maurier in Punch which 
 have become every week more and more con- 
 sistent, keen, and comprehensive, during the 
 issues of the last two years. 
 
 I take three of them, as quite trustworthy 
 pictures, and the best our present arts of 
 delineation could produce, of the three Etats, 
 or representative orders, of the British nation 
 of our day. 
 
 Of the Working class, take the type given 
 in Lady Clara Robinson's garden tea party, 
 p. 174, vol. 79. 
 
 Of the Mercantile class, Mr. Smith, in his 
 drawing-room after dinner, p. 222, vol. 80. 
 
 And of the Noblesse, the first five gentle- 
 men on the right (spectator's right) of the line, 
 in the ball at Stilton House, (July 3rd, 1880). 
 
 136. Of the manner or state of lout, to 
 which our manufacturing prosperity has
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. 1 83 
 
 reduced its artisan, as represented in the fii'st 
 of these frescos, I do not think it needful to 
 speak here ; neither of the level of sublime 
 temperament and unselfish heroism to which 
 the dangers of commercial enterprise have 
 exalted Mr. Smith. But the five consecutive 
 heads in the third fresco are a very notable 
 piece of English history, representing the 
 polished and more or less lustrous type of 
 lout ; which is indeed a kind of rolled shingle 
 of former English noblesse capable of nothing 
 now in the way of resistance to Atlantic 
 liberalism, except of getting itself swept up 
 into ugly harbour bars, and troublesome shoals 
 in the tideway. 
 
 And observe also, that of the three types of 
 lout, whose combined chorus and tripudiation 
 leads the present British Constitution its 
 devil's dance, this last and smoothest type is 
 also the dullest. Your operative lout, cannot 
 indeed hold his cup of coffee with a grace, or 
 possess himself of a biscuit from Lady Clara's 
 salver without embarrassment ; but, in his 
 own mill, he can at least make a needle with- 
 out an eye, or a nail without a head, or a knife 
 that won't cut, or something of that sort, with
 
 184 love's meinie. 
 
 dexterity. Also, the middle class, or Smithian 
 lout, at least manages his stockbroking or 
 marketing with decision and cunning ; knows 
 something by eye or touch of his wares, and 
 something of the characters of the men he has 
 to deal with. But the Ducal or Marquisian 
 lout has no knowledge of anything under 
 the sun, except what sort of horse's quarters 
 will carry his own, farther weighted with 
 that smooth block or pebble of a pow ; and 
 no faculty under the sun of doing anything, 
 except cutting down the trees his fathers 
 planted for him, and selling the lands his 
 fathers won. 
 
 137. That is indeed the final result of hunt- 
 ing and horseracing on the British landlord. 
 Of its result on the British soldier, perhaps 
 the figures of Lord George Sackville at the 
 battle of Minden, and of Lord Raglan at the 
 battle of Alma, (who in the first part of the 
 battle did not know where he was, and in 
 the second plumed himself on being where 
 he had no business to be,) are as illustrative 
 as any I could name ; but the darkest of all, 
 to my own thinking, are the various person- 
 ages, civil and military, who have conducted
 
 III. THE DABCHICKS. I85 
 
 the Caffre war to its last successes, of blowing 
 women ^nd children to death with dynamite, 
 -and harrying the lands of entirely innocent 
 peasantry, because they would not betray 
 their defeated king. 
 
 138. Of the due and noble relations be- 
 tween man and his companion creatures, the 
 horse, dog, and falcon, enough has been said 
 in -my former writings — unintelligible enough 
 to a chivalry which passes six months of 
 its annual life in Rotten Row, and spends 
 the rents of its Cumberland Hills in building 
 furnaces round Furness Abbey; but which 
 careful students either of past knighthood, or 
 of future Christianity, will find securely and 
 always true. For the relations between man 
 and his beast of burden, whether the burden 
 be himself or his goods, become beautiful 
 and honourable, just in the degree that both 
 creatures are useful to the rest of mankind, 
 whether in war or peace. The Greeks gave 
 the highest symbol of them in the bridling 
 of Pegasus for Bellerophon by Athena; and 
 from that myth you may go down to modern 
 times — understanding, according to your own 
 sense and dignity, what all prophecy, poetry,
 
 I 86 love's MEINIE. 
 
 history, have told you — of the horse whose 
 neck is clothed with thunder, or the ox who 
 treadeth out the corn — of Joseph's chariot, or 
 of Elijah's— of Achilles and Xanthus— Her- 
 minius and Black Auster — down to Scott 
 and Brown Adam — or Dandie Dinmont and 
 Dumple. That pastoral one, is, of all, the 
 most enduring. I hear the proudest tribe of 
 Arabia Felix is now reduced by poverty and 
 civilization to sell its last well-bred horse; 
 and that we send out our cavalry regiments 
 to repetitions of the charge at Balaclava, 
 without horses at all ; those that they can 
 pick up wherever they land being good 
 enough for such mihtary operations. But 
 the cart-horse will remain, when the charger 
 and hunter are no more; and with a wiser 
 master. 
 
 " I'll buy him, for the dogs shall never 
 Set tooth upon a friend so true ; 
 He'll not Hve long ; but I for ever 
 Shall know I gave the beast his due. 
 
 Ready as bird to meet the morn 
 Were all his efforts at the plough ; 
 Then the mill-brook— with hay or corn, 
 Good creature ! how he'd spatter through.
 
 in. THE DABCHICKS. I 87 
 
 I left him in the shafts behind, 
 * His fellows all unhook'd and gone ; 
 ._' HLe neigh'd, and deemed the thing unkind ; 
 Then, starting, drew the load alone. 
 '■<'■ ^ * * * 
 
 Half choked with joy, with love, and pride. 
 He now with dainty clover fed him ; 
 Now took a short, triumphant ride, 
 And then again got down, and led him." 
 
 139. Where Paris has had to lead /ler 
 horses, we know; and where London had 
 better lead hers, than let her people die of 
 starvation. But I have not lost my hope that 
 there are yet in England Bewicks and Bloom- 
 fields, who may teach their children — and earn 
 for their cattle — better ways of fronting, and 
 of waiting for, Death. 
 
 Nor are the uses of the inferior creatures to 
 us less consistent with their happiness. To 
 all that live. Death must come. The manner 
 of it, and the time, are for the human Master 
 of them, and of the earth, to determine — not 
 to his pleasure, but to his duty and his need. 
 
 In sacrifice, or for his food, or for his 
 clothing, it is lawful for him to slay animals ; 
 but not to delight in slaying any that are help- 
 less. If he choose, for discipline and trial of
 
 I 8 8 LOVERS MEINIE. 
 
 courage, to leave the boar in Calydon, the 
 wolf in Taurus, the tiger in Bengal, or the 
 wild bull in Aragon, there is forest and moun- 
 tain wide enough for them : but the inhabited 
 world in sea and land should be one vast 
 unwalled park and treasure lake, in which its 
 flocks of sheep, or deer, or fowl, or fish, should 
 be tended and dealt with, as best may mul- 
 tiply the life of all Love's Meinie, in strength, 
 and use, and peace.
 
 ' APPENDIX 
 
 T40. This part of the book will, I hope, be 
 continuous with the text of it, containing 
 henceforward, in each number, the nomencla- 
 ture hitherto used for the birds described in 
 it, and the Author's reason for his choice or 
 change of names. In the present number, 
 it supplies also the nomenclature required for 
 the two preceding ones, and thus finishes the 
 first volume. 
 
 The names given first, in capitals, for each 
 bird, are those which the Author will in future 
 give it, and proposes for use in elementary 
 teaching. They will consist only of a plain 
 Latin specific name, with one, or at the most 
 two, Latin epithets ; and the simplest popular 
 English name, if there be one ; if not, the 
 English name will usually be the direct 
 translation of the Latin one. 
 
 Then in order will follow — 
 
 \. Linnaeus's name, marked L.
 
 1 90 love's meinie. 
 
 II. Buffon's name, marked F, the F standing 
 also for ' French ' when any popular French 
 name is given with BufFon's. 
 
 III. The German popular name, marked T 
 (Teutonic), for I want the G for Mr. Gould ; 
 and this T will include authoritative German 
 scientific names also. 
 
 IV. The Italian popular name, if one exists, 
 to give the connection with old Latin, marked I. 
 
 V. Mr. Gould's name, G ; Yarrell's, Y, Dress- 
 ler's, D ; and Gesner's, Ges, being added, if 
 different. 
 
 VI. Bewick's, B. 
 
 VII. Shakspeare's and Chaucer's, if I know 
 them ; and general references, such as may be 
 needful. 
 
 The Appendix will thus contain the names 
 of all the birds I am able to think or learn 
 anything about, as I can set down what I 
 think or learn ; and with no other attempt at 
 order than the slight grouping of convenience : 
 but the numbers of the species examined will 
 be consecutive, so that L. M. 25, — Love's 
 Meinie, Number twenty-five, — or whatever 
 the number may be, will at once identify any 
 bird in the system of the St. George's schools.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 191 
 
 The following note by the Author has in 
 previous editions faced the first page of 
 Lecture III., with the exception of the Nos. 
 i.-vii., which are now added by the Editor 
 for the sake of completeness. 
 
 Names of the birds noticed, according to the Author's system, 
 with reference to the sections of the text and the 
 Appendix in which the reader will find their more 
 melodious scientific nomenclature : — 
 
 Sect. Sect. 
 
 I. 
 
 Rutila Faviiliaris. 
 
 Robin Redbreast Text i seqq. App. 141 
 
 II. 
 
 Hirundo Dcmcstica. 
 
 House Swallotu 
 
 , 41 seqq. , 
 
 , 142 
 
 III. 
 
 Hirundo Monastica. 
 
 Martlet 
 
 , — , 
 
 , 14s 
 
 IV. 
 
 Hirujido Riparia. 
 
 Bank Martlet 
 
 , — , 
 
 . 144 
 
 V. 
 
 Hirundo Sagitta. 
 
 Swift 
 
 , 64 
 
 . 145 
 
 VI. 
 
 Hirundo Alpina. 
 
 A Ipine Swift 
 
 J ) 
 
 , 146 
 
 VII. 
 
 Nociua Europica. 
 
 Night-jar of Europe 
 
 » 5 
 
 1 147 
 
 l^III. 
 
 Mernla Fontiitjjt. 
 
 Torrent Ouzel 
 
 , 89 
 
 , 148 
 
 IX. 
 
 A llegretta Kyinphcea 
 
 Lily Ouzel 
 
 , 93 
 
 , 149 
 
 IX.A 
 
 A llegretta Macnlata 
 
 Spotted Alhgrct 
 
 , 96 
 
 . 149 
 
 IX. B. 
 
 A llegretta Stellaris. 
 
 Starry A llegrct 
 
 , 97 . 
 
 , 149 
 
 IX.c 
 
 Allegretta Mimita. 
 
 Tiny A llegrct 
 
 , 98 
 
 > 149 
 
 X. 
 
 Trepida Stagnaruvt. 
 
 Little Grebe 
 
 , 100 , 
 
 , 150 
 
 XI. 
 
 Titania Arctica. 
 
 Arctic Fairy 
 
 , III 
 
 , 151 
 
 XI.A 
 
 . Titania Inconstans. 
 
 Changeful Fairy 
 
 , "4 
 
 J 151 
 
 XII. 
 
 Ralliis Aqnaticus. 
 
 Water Rail 
 
 ,116 
 
 1 152 
 
 XII.A 
 
 . Pulla Aquatica. 
 
 Water Hen 
 
 . 133 
 
 > 153 
 
 I. 
 
 141. RUTILA FAMILIARIS. 
 REDBREAST. 
 
 Motacilla Rubecula. L. 
 Rouge-Gorge. F. 
 
 ROBIN
 
 192 love's meinie, 
 
 Roth-breustlein. — Wald-roetele. — Winter- 
 
 roetele. — Roth-kehlschen. T. 
 Petti-rosso. I. 
 
 Erythacus Rubecula. G. Rubecula Erythacus. 
 
 Ges. 
 Erythaca Rube- 
 cula. Y. 
 Rubecula Famili- 
 aris. D. 
 Ruddock. B. 
 
 Ruddock, in Cymbeline ; tame Ruddocke, in 
 Assembly of Fowles ; full robin-redebreast, in 
 the Court of Love : 
 
 " The second lesson, Robin Redebreast sang." 
 
 It is rightly classed by F. and Y. with the 
 Warblers. Gould strangely puts it with his 
 rock-birds, ' saxicolinae,' — in which, however, 
 he also includes the sedge warbler. 
 
 The true Robin is properly a wood-bird ; 
 the Swedish blue-throated one lives in marshes 
 and arable fields. I have never seen a robin 
 in really wild mountain ground. 
 
 There is only one European species of 
 the redbreasted Robin. Gould names two 
 Japanese ones.
 
 APPENDIX. 193 
 
 II. 
 
 ' 142.- JHIRUNDO DOMESTICA. HOUSE 
 w' • SWALLOW. 
 
 Hirundo Rustica. L. 
 Hirondelle Domestique. F. 
 Schwalbe. T. Swala, Swedish, and Saxon, 
 whence our Swallow: but compare Lecture II., 
 
 §44- 
 
 Rondine Comune. I. (note Rondme, the 
 
 Swallow; Rondine, the Swift). 
 
 Hirundo Rustica. G. and Y. 
 
 Chimney-Swallow. B. 
 
 HI. 
 
 143. HIRUNDO MONASTICA. MARTLET. 
 
 Hirundo Urbica. L. 
 
 Hirondelle de Fenetre. F. 
 
 Kirch-schwalbe. (Church-Swallow.) T. 
 
 Balestruccio. I. 
 
 Chelidon Urbica. D. and G. 
 
 Hirundo Urbica. Martin. Y. 
 
 Martlet, Martinet, or Window-Swallow, Y. 
 
 I cannot get at the root of this word, 
 
 ' Martlet,' which is the really classical and 
 
 N
 
 194 love's meinie. 
 
 authoritative English one. I have called it 
 Monastica, in translation of Shakspeare's 
 " temple-haunting." The main idea about 
 this bird, among people who have any ideas, 
 seems to be that it haunts and builds among 
 grander masses or clefts of wall than the 
 common Swallow. Thus the Germans, besides 
 Church-Swallow, call it wall, — rock, — roof, — 
 or window, swallow, and Mur-Spyren, or 
 Munster Spyren. (Wall-walker? Minster- 
 walker ?) But by the people who have no 
 ideas, the names ' town ' and ' country,' 
 ' urbica ' and * rustica,' have been accepted 
 as indicating the practical result, that a bird 
 which likes walls will live in towns, and one 
 which is content with eaves may remain in 
 farms and villages, and under their straw- 
 built sheds. 
 
 My name, Monastica, is farther justified by 
 the Dominican severity of the bird's dress, 
 dark grey-blue and white only; while the 
 Domestica has a red cap and light brown 
 bodice, and much longer tail. As far as I 
 remember, the bird I know best is the 
 Monastica. I have seen it in happiest flocks 
 in all-monastic Abbeville, playing over the
 
 APPENDIX. 195 
 
 Somme in morning sunlight, dashing deep 
 tlirough the water at every stoop, like a hard- 
 ijast stone. 
 
 IV. 
 
 144. HIRUNDO RIPARIA. BANK MARTLET. 
 
 Hirundo Riparia. L. 
 
 Hirondelle de Rivage. F. 
 
 Rhein-schwalbe, (Rhine- Swallow,) — ufer- 
 schwalbe, (Shore - Swallow,) — erd - schwalbe, 
 (Earth-Swallow). T. 
 
 Topino. (The mouse-colour.) — Rondine de 
 riva. I. 
 
 Cotyle Riparia. G. Hirundo Riparia. Y. 
 
 Bank-Martin. B, 
 
 The Italian name, 'Topino,' is a good 
 familiar one, the bird being scarcely larger 
 than a mouse, and " the head, neck, breast, 
 and back of a mouse-colour." (B.) It is the 
 smallest of the Swallow tribe, and shortest 
 of wing; accordingly, I find Spallanzani's 
 experiment on the rate of swallow-flight was, 
 for greater certainty and severity, made with 
 this apparently feeblest of its kind : — a marked 
 Topino, brought from its nest at Pavia to 
 Milan, (fifteen miles,) flew back to Pavia in
 
 196 love's meinie. 
 
 thirteen minutes. I imagine a Swift would at 
 least have doubled this rate of flight, and that 
 we may safely take a hundred miles an hour 
 as an average of swallow-speed. This, how- 
 ever, is less by three-fifths than Michelet's 
 estimate. See above, Lecture II., § 48. 
 
 I have substituted ' bank ' for ' sand ' in the 
 English name, since all the six quoted 
 authorities give it this epithet in Latin or 
 French, and Bewick in English. Also, it may 
 be well thus to distinguish it from birds of the 
 sea-shore. 
 
 V. 
 
 145. HIRUNDO SAGITTA. SWIFT. 
 
 Hirundo Apus. L. 
 
 Martinet Noir. F. 
 
 Geyr-schwalbe. (Vulture-Swallow.) T. 
 
 Rondone. (Plural, Rondini.) I. 
 
 Cypselus Apus. G. and Y. 
 
 Swift, Black Martin, or Deviling. B. 
 
 I think it will be often well to admit the 
 license of using a substantive for epithet, (as 
 one says rock-bird or sea-bird, and not 'rocky,' 
 or * marine,') in Latin as well as in English.
 
 APPENDIX. 197 
 
 We thus greatly increase our power, and assist 
 the brevity of nomenclature ; and we gain the 
 "convenience of using the second term by itself, 
 when we wish to do so, more naturally. Thus, 
 one may shortly speak of * The Sagitta ' (when 
 one is on a scientific point where ' Swift ' would 
 be indecorous !) more easily than one could 
 speak of ' The Stridula,' or ' The Velox,' if we 
 gave the bird either of those epithets. I think 
 this of Sagitta is the most descriptive one could 
 well find ; only the reader is always to recollect 
 that arrow-birds must be more heavy in the 
 head or shaft than arrow-weapons, and fly 
 more in the manner oif rifle-shot than bow-shot. 
 See Lecture II., §§ 46, ^y^ yi, in which last 
 paragraph, however, I have to correct the 
 careless statement, that in the sailing flight, 
 without stroke, of the larger falcons, their 
 weight ever acts like the string of a kite. 
 Their weight acts simpl}' as the weight of a 
 kite acts, and no otherwise. (Compare § 65.) 
 The impulsive force in sailing can be given 
 only by the tail feathers, like that of a darting 
 trout by the tail fin. I do not think any ex- 
 cuse necessary for my rejection of the name 
 which seems most to have established itself
 
 198 love's MEINIE. 
 
 lately, ' Cypselus Apus/ ' Footless Capsule.' 
 It is not footless, and there is no sense in calling 
 a bird a capsule because it lives in a hole, 
 (which the Swift does not). The Greeks had 
 a double idea in the word, which it is not the 
 least necessary to keep; and Aristotle's cypselus 
 is not the swift, but the bank-martlet — " they 
 bring up their young in cells made out of clay, 
 long in the entrance." The swift being pre- 
 cisely the one of the Hirundines which does 
 not make its nest of clay, but of miscellaneous 
 straws, threads, and shreds of any adaptable 
 rubbish, which it can snatch from the ground 
 as it stoops on the wing,* or pilfer from any 
 half-ruined nests of other birds. 
 
 ' Cotyle ' is only a synonym for Cypselus, 
 enabling ornithologists to become farther unin- 
 telligible. We will be troubled no more either 
 
 * "I have in different times and places opened ten or 
 twelve swifts' nests ; in all of them I found the same materials, 
 and these consisting of a great variety of substances — stalks 
 of corn, dry grass, moss, hemp, bits of cord, threads of silk 
 and linen, the tip of an ermine's tail, small shreds of gauze, 
 of muslin and other light stuffs, the feathers of domestic birds, 
 charcoal, — in short, whatever they can find in the sweepings 
 of towns." — Buffon. 
 
 Belon asserts (Buffon does not venture to guarantee the 
 assertion), that "they will descry a fly at the distance of a 
 quarter of a league " !
 
 APPENDIX. 1 99 
 
 with cotyles or capsules, but recollect simply 
 that Hirundo, 'x^e\LS(ov, swallow, schwalbe, 
 "and hirondelle, are in each language the suf- 
 ficing single words for the entire Hirundine 
 race. 
 
 VI. 
 
 146. HIRUNDO ALPINA. ALPINE SWIFT. 
 
 Hirundo Melba. L. 
 
 Le grand Martinet a Ventre Blanc. F. 
 
 Cypselus Melba. G. 
 
 Cypselus Alpinus. Y. 
 
 Alpine Swift,— White-bellied Swift. Y. 
 
 Not in Bewick. 
 
 I cannot find its German name. The 
 Italians compare it with the sea-swallow, 
 which is a gull. What ' Melba ' means, or 
 ever meant, I have no conception. 
 
 The bird is the noblest of all the swallow 
 tribe — nearly as large as a hawk, and lives 
 high in air, nothing but rocks or cathedrals 
 serving it for nest. In France, seen only near 
 the Alps ; in Spain, among the mountains of 
 Aragon. " Almost every person who has had 
 an opportunity of observing this bird speaks
 
 200 love's meinie. 
 
 in terms of admiration of its vast powers of 
 flight ; it is not surprising, therefore, that an 
 individual should now and then wing its way 
 across the Channel to the British Islands, and 
 roam over our meads and fields until it is 
 shot." (G.) It is, I believe, the swallow of 
 the Bible, — abundant, though only a summer 
 migrant, in the Holy Land. I have never 
 seen it, that I know of, nor thought of it in 
 the lecture on the Swallow ; but give here the 
 complete series of Hirundines, of which some 
 notice may incidentally afterwards occur in 
 the text. 
 
 VII. 
 
 147. NOCTUA EUROP.EA. NIGHT-JAR 
 OF EUROPE. 
 
 Caprimulgus Europaeus. L. 
 L'Engoulevent. F. (Crapaud-volant, popu- 
 lar.) 
 Geissmelcher. — Nacht-schade. T. 
 Covaterra. I. 
 
 Caprimulgus Europaeus. G. and Y. 
 Night-jar. B. 
 
 Dorrhawk and Fern-owl, also given by 
 Bewick, are the most beautiful English names
 
 APPENDIX. 201 
 
 for this bird ; bqt as it is really neither a 
 '^hawk'iior an owl, though much mingled in 
 ' its ' manners of both, I keep the usual one, 
 Night-jar, euphonious for Night-Churr, from 
 its continuous note like the sound of a spin- 
 ning wheel. The idea of its sucking goats, 
 or any other milky creature, has long been 
 set at rest ; and science, intolerant of legends 
 in' which there is any use or beauty, cannot 
 be allowed to ratify in its dog or pig-Latin 
 those which are eternally vulgar and profit- 
 less. I had first thought of calling it Hirundo 
 Nocturna ; but this would be too broad 
 massing ; for although the creature is more 
 swallow than owl, living wholly on insects, 
 it must be properly held as a distinct species 
 from both. Owls cannot gape like con- 
 strictors ; nor have swallows whiskers or 
 beards, or combs to keep both in order with, 
 on their middle toes. This bird's cat-like 
 bristles at the base of the beak connect it 
 with the bearded Toucans, and so also the 
 toothed mandibles of the American cave- 
 dwelling variety. I shall not want the word 
 Noctua for the owls themselves, and it is a 
 pretty and simple one for this tribe, enabling
 
 202 love's meinie. 
 
 the local epithet ' European/ and other neces- 
 sary ones, of varieties, to be retained for the 
 second or specific term. Nacht-schade, Night- 
 loss, the popular German name, perhaps really 
 still refers to this supposed nocturnal thiev- 
 ing; or may have fallen euphonious from 
 Nacht-schwalbe, which in some places abides. 
 ' Crapaud-volant ' is ugly, but descriptive, the 
 brown speckling of the bird being indeed 
 toadlike, though wonderful and beautiful. 
 Bewick has put his utmost skill into it ; and 
 the cut, with the Bittern and White Owl, may 
 perhaps stand otherwise unrivalled by any of 
 his hand. 
 
 Gould's drawing of the bird on its ground 
 nest, or ground contentedly taken for nest, 
 among heath and scarlet-topped lichen, is 
 among the most beautiful in his book; and 
 there are four quite exquisite drawings by 
 Mr. Ford, of African varieties, in Dr. Smith's 
 zoology of South Africa. The one called by 
 the doctor Europaeus seems a greyer and more 
 graceful bird than ours. Natalensis wears a 
 most wonderful dark oak-leaf pattern of cloak. 
 Rufigena, I suppose, blushes herself separate 
 from Ruficollis of Gould? but these foreign
 
 APPENDIX. 203 
 
 varieties seem countless. I shall never have 
 time to examine them, but thought it not well 
 to end the titular list of the swallows without 
 notice of the position of this great tribe. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 148. MERULA FONTIUM. TORRENT-OUZEL. 
 
 'Sturnus Cinclus. L. 
 
 Merle d'Eau. F. 
 
 Bach-Amsel. T. 
 
 Merla Aquaiola. I. 
 
 Cinclus Aquaticus. G. and Y. 
 
 Water Ouzel. B. 
 
 Turdus Cinclus, Pennant ; Common Dipper, 
 Y. ; Didapper, Doucker, Water Crow, Water 
 Plot, B. ; Cincle Plongeur, Temminck ; Wasser 
 Trostel, Swiss. 
 
 The scientific full arrangement, according to 
 Yarrell, is thus : — 
 
 1. Order — INSESSORES. 
 
 2. Tribe — Dentirostrcs. 
 
 3. Genus — Merulidae. 
 
 4. Species — Cinclus. 
 
 5. Individual — Aquaticus.
 
 204 love's meinie. 
 
 You will please observe that some of the 
 scientific people call it a blackbird — some a 
 thrush — some a starling — and the rest a 
 Cincle, whatever that may be. It remains for 
 them now only to show how the Cincle has 
 been developed out of the Winkle, and the 
 Winkle out of the Quangle- Wangle. You 
 will note also that the Yorkshire and Durham 
 mind is balanced between the two views of its 
 being a crow or a magpie, I am content 
 myself to be in harmony with France and 
 Italy, in my ' Merula,' and with Germany in 
 my Torrent - Ouzel. Their * bach ' (as in 
 Staubbach, Giesbach, Reichenbach) being 
 essentially a mountain waterfall; and their 
 ' amsel,' as our Damsel, merely the Teutonic 
 form of the Demoiselle or Doniicilla — ' House- 
 Ouzel,' as it were, (said of a nice girl) — 
 Domicilla again being, I think, merely the 
 transposition of Ancilla Domini, — Behold, the 
 handmaid of the Lord : (see frontispiece to 
 third volume of ' Modern Painters ') which, if 
 young ladies in general were to embroider on 
 their girdles — though their dresses, fitting at 
 present ' as close as a glove ' (see descrip- 
 tion of modern American ideal in *A Fair
 
 APPENDIX. 205 
 
 Barbarian ') do not usually require girdles either 
 for their kej^s or their manners, — it would 
 probably be thought irreverent by modern 
 clerg3^men ; but if the demoiselle were none 
 the better for it, she could certainly be none 
 the worse. 
 
 149. ALLEGRETTA NYMPH^A. LTLY-OUZEL. 
 
 ^ Var. I (IX.A.) 
 
 ALLEGRETTA NYMPH.EA, MACULATA. 
 SPOTTED ALLEGRET. 
 
 Rallus Porzana. L. 
 
 Poule d'Eau Maronette. F. 
 
 Winkernell. T. 
 
 Porzana. I. 
 
 Zapornia Porzana. G. 
 
 Crex Porzana. Y. 
 
 Ortygometra Porzana. Steph. 
 
 Gallinula Maculata et Punctata. Brehmen. 
 
 Spotted Crake. B. 
 
 The 'Winkerncir is I believe provincial 
 (Alsace) ; so, Girardina, Milanese, and Girar- 
 dine, Picard. — I can make nothing whatever 
 of any of these names ; — Porzana, Bolognese 
 and Venetian, might perhaps mean Piggy-bird ;
 
 2o6 love's meinie. 
 
 and Ortygometra Porzana would then mean, 
 in serious English, the * Quail-sized Pig-bird.' 
 I am sorry not to be able to do better as 
 Interpreter for my scientific friends. 
 
 IX. B. 
 
 ALLEGRETTA NYMPH^A, STELLARIS. 
 STARRY ALLEGRET. 
 
 Not separated by Linnaeus, or Buffon, or 
 Bewick, nor by popular German or French 
 names, from the Marouette. 
 
 Crex Baillonii, Baillon's Crake. Y. 
 
 Porzana Pygmaea. G. 
 
 Gallinula Stellaris. Temminck. 
 
 IX.c. 
 
 ALLEGRETTA NYMPH^A, MINUTA. TINY 
 ALLEGRET. 
 
 Porzana Minuta, Olivaceous Crake. G. 
 Crex Pusilla, Little Crake. Y. 
 Poule d'Eau Poussin. Temminck. 
 Little Gallinule. B. 
 
 It never occurred to me, when I was writ- 
 ing of classical landscape, that * Poussin ' to a
 
 APPENDIX. 207 
 
 French ear conve^^ed the idea of 'chicken/ 
 or of the 3'oung of birds in general. (Is it 
 from 'pousser,'as iftheywereakind of budding 
 of bird ?) Everybody seems to agree in feeling 
 that this is a kind of wren among the dabchicks. 
 Bewick's name, ' Little Gallinule/ meaning of 
 course, if he knew it, the twice-over little Gal- 
 lina ; — and here again the question occurs to me 
 about its voice. Is it a twice-over little crow, 
 called a 'creak,' or anything like the Rail's 
 more provokingly continuous objurgation ? — 
 compare notes below on Rallus Aquaticus. I 
 find, with some alarm, in Buffon, that one 
 with a longer tail, the Cau-rale or Tail-rail of 
 Cayenne, is there called * Little Peacock of the 
 Roses ; ' but its cry is represented by the 
 liquid syllables ' Piolo,' while the black-spotted 
 one of the Society Islands — Magellan's 'Water- 
 quail ' — says ' Poo-a-nee,' and the Bidi-bidi of 
 Jamaica says ' Bidi-bidi.' 
 
 X. 
 150. TREPIDA STAGNARUM. LITTLE GREEK. 
 
 Colymbus Minor, L. 
 Le Castagneux. F. 
 Deutchcl. T.
 
 2o8 love's meinie. 
 
 Tropazarola? I. 
 Podiceps Minor. C. 
 Little Grebe. B. 
 
 The Yorkshire accents and changes of its 
 name are given by Bewick : Dobchick — small 
 doucker ; Dipper, or Didapper. 
 
 In Barbadoes — Two-penny chick. 
 
 It seems to me curious that without knowing 
 Buffon's name, which I have only looked up 
 now, ' the Chesnutty,' given from the brown 
 on its back, I should have, myself, always 
 called its foot 'chesnutty,' from the shape of 
 its lobes. 
 
 My 'Trepida' will do well enough, I think, 
 for a Latin rendering of Grebe, and will in- 
 clude the whole group of them, — ' stagnarum ' 
 remaining for this species only, and the others 
 being called Tippeted Trepids, or Muffed 
 Trepids, Eared Trepids or Majestic Trepids, 
 as I find out what they wear, and how they 
 behave. Grebe is used by Bufifon only for the 
 larger ones, and Castagneux for the smaller, 
 which is absurd enough, unless the smaller 
 are also the browner. 
 
 But I find in Buffon some interesting
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 209 
 
 particulars not given in my text — namely, 
 that the whole group differs from common 
 ._chicks, not only in the lobed feet, but in these 
 being set so far back, (becoming almost a 
 fish's tail indeed, rather than a bird's legs,) 
 that they are quite useless for walking, and 
 could support the bird only on land if it stood 
 upright: but that it "dashes through the 
 waves" (i.e., the larger varieties through sea 
 waves), and " runs on the surface " ? (i.e., the 
 smaller varieties on pools,) with surprising 
 rapidity; its motions are said to be never 
 quicker and brisker than when under water. 
 It pursues the fish to a very great depth, and 
 is often caught in fishermen's nets. It dives 
 deeper than the scoter duck, which is taken 
 only on beds of shell-fish left bare by the ebb- 
 tide ; while the Grebes are taken in the open 
 sea, often at more than twenty feet depth. 
 
 XI. 
 
 151. TITANIA ARCTICA. ARCTIC FAIRY. 
 
 Tringa Fulicaria. L. 
 
 (No French name given in my edition of 
 Buffbn !) 
 
 O
 
 2 1 o love's meinie. 
 
 No German, anywhere. 
 No Italian, anywhere. 
 
 But of suggestions by scientific authors, 
 here are enough to choose from : — 
 
 Lobipes Hyperboreus, G. Lobipes Hyper- 
 borea, Selby. Phalaropus Hyperboreus, Penn. 
 Phalarope Hyperbore, Temm. Phalaropus 
 Fulicaria, Mont. Phalaropus Fuscus, Bewick. 
 Phalaropus Rufescens, Briss. Red Coot-footed 
 Tringa, Edw. Red-necked Phalarope, Gould. 
 Lobe- foot, Selby. Cootfoot, Fleming. 
 
 I am a little shocked at my own choice of 
 name in this case, not quite pleasing my 
 imagination with the idea of a Coot-footed 
 Fairy. But since Athena herself thinks it 
 no disgrace to take for disguise the likeness 
 either of a sea-gull or a swallow, a sea-fairy 
 may certainly be thought of as condescending 
 to appear with a diving bird's foot ; and the 
 rather that, if one may judge by painters* 
 efforts to give us sight of Fairyland, the 
 general character of its inhabitants is more 
 that of earthly or marine goblins than aerial 
 ones. 
 
 Now this is strange ! At the last moment,
 
 APPENDIX. 2 I 1 
 
 I find this sentence in Gould's introduction : 
 "The generic terms Phalaropus and Lobi- 
 pes have been instituted for the fairy-like 
 phalaropes." 
 
 XI.A. 
 
 TITANIA INCONSTANS. CHANGEFUL 
 FAIRY. 
 
 Tringa Lobata. L. 
 
 Phalaropus Fulicarius (Grey Phalarope). G. 
 
 Phalaropus Lobatus. Latham. 
 
 " Phalarope with indented festoons," English 
 trans, of Buffon. — It is of no use to ring the 
 changes farther. 
 
 XII. 
 
 152. RALLUS AQUATICUS. WATER RAIL. 
 
 Rallus Aquaticus. L., G., Y. 
 
 Rale d'Eau. F. 
 
 Samet-Hennle — Velvet (silken ?) hen. Ges. 
 
 Schwartz-Wasser-Hennle. T. ? 
 
 Vagtel-Konge. Danish. 
 
 Porzana, or Forzana, at Venice. 
 
 Brook-Ouzel — Velvet Runner. B. 
 
 I take this group of foreign names from 
 Buffon, but question the German one, which
 
 212 love's meinie. 
 
 must belong to the Water Hen ; for the Rail 
 is not black, but prettily grey and spotted, 
 and I think Bufifon confuses the two birds, 
 as several popular names do. Thus, the 
 Velvet Hen also, I fancy, is the Water Hen ; 
 but Bewick's Velvet-Runner partly confirms it 
 to the Rail. I find nothing about velvet said 
 in describing the plumage. 
 
 I leave Linnaeus's for our Latin name, under 
 some protest. Rallus is a late Latin adjective, 
 meaning 'thin,' and if understood as 'Thin- 
 bird,' or ' Lath-like ' bird, would be reason- 
 able ; but if it stand, as it does practically, for 
 Raihng or Rattling bird, it is both bad Latin, 
 and, as far as I can make out, calumnious of 
 the usually quiet creature. 
 
 Note also, for a connected piece of scholar- 
 ship, that our English verb to * rail ' does not 
 properly mean to scold, or to abuse noisily ; it 
 is from ' railler,' and means to ' rally,' or jest 
 at, which is often a much wickeder thing to 
 do, if the matter be indeed no jest. 
 
 Note also of Samet or Samite, its derivation 
 from late Greek l^a/xtros, silken stuff woven of 
 six threads, of which I believe two were of 
 gold. The French oriflamme was of crimson
 
 APPENDIX. 2 I 3 
 
 samite, and I don't see why the French shouldn't 
 call this bird Poule de Sole, instead of by their 
 •-' present ugly name — more objectionable on all 
 grounds, of sense, scholarship, and feeling, 
 than the English one. But see the next 
 species. 
 
 153. XII.A. 
 
 PULLA AQUATICA. WATER HEN. 
 
 There seems so much confusion in the 
 minds, or at least the language, of ornitholo- 
 gists, between the Water Rail and Water 
 Hen, that I give this latter bird under the 
 number XII.A. rather than XIII., (which 
 would, besides, be an unlucky number to end 
 my Appendix with) ; and it would be very 
 nice, if at all possible or proper, to keep these 
 two larger dabchicks connected pleasantly 
 in school-girl minds by their costumes, and 
 call one 'Silken Runner,' and this, — which, 
 as said above, Gesner seems to mean, Velvet 
 Runner, or Velvet Hen. — Poule de Soie or 
 Poule de Velours ? I am getting a little 
 confused myself, however, I find at last, 
 between Poules, Poussins, Pullets, and Pullas ; 
 and must for the present leave the matter
 
 2 1 4 love's meinie. 
 
 to the reader's choice and fancy, till I get 
 some more birds looked at, and named : — 
 only, for a pretty end of my Appendix, here 
 are two bits of very precious letters, sent me 
 by friends who know birds better than most 
 scientific people, but have been too busy — 
 one in a ' Dorcas Society,' and the other in a 
 children's hospital — to write books, and only 
 now write these bits of letters on my special 
 petition. The member of the Dorcas Society 
 sends me this brief but final and satisfactory 
 answer to my above question about birds' 
 ears : — 
 
 "We talk and think of birds as essentially 
 musical and mimetic, or at least vocal and 
 noisy creatures ; and yet we seem to think 
 that although they have an ear, they have 
 no ears. Little or nothing is told us of the 
 structure of a bird's ear. We are now too 
 enlightened to believe in what we can't see; 
 and ears that are never pricked, or cocked, or 
 laid back, — that merely receive and learn, but 
 don't express, — that are organs, not features, 
 don't interest our philosophers now. 
 
 " If you blow gently on the feathers of the 
 side of a bird's head, a little above and behind
 
 APPENDIX. 2 I 5 
 
 the corner of the beak, a httle below and 
 behind the eye, the parted feathers will show 
 the listening place ; a little hole with convolu- 
 tions- of delicate skin turning inwards, very 
 much like what your own ear would be if you 
 had none, — I mean, if all of it that lies above 
 the level of the head had been removed, leaving 
 no trace. No one who looks at the little hole 
 could fail to see that it is an ear, highly orga- 
 nized — an ear for music ; at least, I found it so 
 among the finches I have examined ; I know 
 not if a simpler structure is evident in the ear 
 of a rook or a peacock. 
 
 " The feathers are so planted round a bird's 
 ears, that however ruffled or wet, they can't 
 get in — and possibly they conduct sound. 
 Birds have no need of ears with a moveable 
 cowl over them, to turn and twist for the 
 catching of stray sounds, as foxes have, and 
 hares, and other four-footed things ; for a bird 
 can turn his whole head so as to put his ear 
 wherever he pleases in the twinkling of an eye ; 
 and he has too many resources, whatever bird 
 he may be, of voice and gesture, to need any 
 power of ear-cocking to welcome his friends, 
 or ear-flattening to menace his foes.
 
 2 1 6 love's meinie, 
 
 " The long and the short of it is, that we 
 may as well take the trouble first to look for, 
 and then to look at, a bird's ear — having first 
 made the bird like us and trust us so much, 
 that he won't mind a human breath upon his 
 cheek, but will let us see behind the veil, into 
 the doorless corridor that lets music into the 
 bird-soul." 
 
 154. Next ; the physician (over whom, to get 
 the letter out of him, I had to use the authority 
 of a more than ordinarily imperious patient) 
 says,— 
 
 '* Now for the grebes lowering themselves 
 in water, (which Lucy said I was to tell you 
 about). The way in which they manage it, I 
 believe to be this. Most birds have under 
 their skins great air-passages which open into 
 the lungs, and which, when the bird is moving 
 quickly, and consequently devouring a great 
 deal of air, do, to a certain extent, the work of 
 supplementary lungs. They also lessen the 
 bird's specific gravity, which must be of some 
 help in flying. And in the gannet, which drops 
 into the sea from a great height after fish, 
 these air-bags lessen the shock on striking the 
 water. Now the grebes (and all diving-birds)
 
 APPENDIX. 2 I 7 
 
 which can svnm high up out of water when 
 the air-cushions are full, and so feel very 
 " little the cold of the water beneath them, 
 breathe out all spare air, and sink almost 
 out of sight when they wish to be less con- 
 spicuous ; — just as a balloon sinks when part 
 of the gas is let out. And I have often 
 watched the common divers and cormorants 
 too, when frightened, swimming about with 
 only head and neck out of water, and so 
 looking more like snakes than birds. 
 
 " Then about the Dippers : they ' fly ' to the 
 bottom of a stream, using their wings, just as 
 they would fly up into the air; and there is 
 the same difficulty in flying to the bottom of 
 the stream, and keeping there, as there would 
 be in flying up into the air, and keeping there, 
 — perhaps greater difficulty. 
 
 " They can never walk comfortably along 
 the bottom of a river, as they could on the 
 bank, though I know they are often talked of 
 as doing it. They too, no doubt, empty their 
 air-bags, to make going under water a little 
 less difficult." 
 
 155. This most valuable letter, for once, 
 leaves me a minute or two, disposed to ask a
 
 2 1 8 love's meinie. 
 
 question which would need the skinning of a 
 bird in a diagram to answer — about the " air- 
 passages, which are a kind of supplementary 
 lungs." Thinking better of it, and leaving the 
 bird to breathe in its own way, I do wish we 
 could get this Dipper question settled, — for 
 here we are all at sea — or at least at brook, 
 again, about it : and although in a book I 
 ought to have examined before — Mr. Robert 
 Gray's ' Birds of the West of Scotland,' which 
 contains a quantity of useful and amusing 
 things, and some plates remarkable for the 
 delicate and spirited action of birds in groups, 
 — although, I say, this unusually well-gathered 
 and well-written book has a nice little litho- 
 graph of two dippers, and says they are quite 
 universally distributed in Scotland, and called 
 ' Water Crows,' and in Gaelic ' Gobha dubh 
 nan allt,' (which I'm sure must mean something 
 nice, if one knew what,) and though it has a 
 lively account of the bird's ways out of the 
 water — says not a word of its ways in it ! 
 except that "dippers everywhere delight in 
 deep linns and brawling rapids, where their 
 interesting motions never fail to attract the 
 angler and bird-student ; " and this of their
 
 APPENDIX. 2 I 9 
 
 vorces : " In early, spring, the male birds may 
 be seen perched on some moss-covered stone, 
 -trilling their fine clear notes ; " and again : " I 
 have stood within a few yards of one at the 
 close of a blustering winter's day, and enjoyed 
 its charming music unobserved. The per- 
 former was sitting on a stake jutting from a 
 mill-pond in the midst of a cold and cheerless 
 Forfarshire moor, yet he joyously warbled his 
 evening hymn with a fulness which made me 
 forget the surrounding sterility." 
 
 Forget it not, thou, good reader ; but rather 
 remember it in your own hymns, and your 
 own prayers, that still — in Bonnie Scotland, 
 and Old England — the voices, almost lost, of 
 Brook, and Breeze, and Bird, may, by Love's 
 help, be yet to their lovers audible. Ainsi 
 soit il. 
 
 Brantwood, %th July, 1881.
 
 '^Z.-' 
 
 INDEX.
 
 **!:. 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 The reference is to the sectio7i only, ?iot to the page, except where 
 a bracketed ?inmber follows the ordinary one — thus, 112 (122), 
 where the second number is to the pages of former editions 
 of " Love's Meinie" the text of which was not sectiotied after 
 § 111, p. (121). 
 
 'A Fair Barbarian' (novel) referred to, 148 (182). 
 
 Abbeville, martlets at, 143 (173)- 
 
 Achilles, 138 (166). 
 
 Aesthesis, author uses 'sensation' for, 131 (155). 
 
 Allegrets, 93-99- 
 
 ,, various names for, 149 (182-84). 
 
 Alma, Lord Raglan at battle of, 137 (165). 
 American modern ideal and tight-iitting dress, 148 (182). 
 Andalusia, cave of Caripe, 55. See s. Humboldt. 
 Angels, importance of wings to our idea of, 11. 
 Anatomy, how far to be studied, 76 seq. 
 Animals, classification of, by their feet, 81. 
 ,, relations of, to men, 138 (165). 
 
 ,, to minister to man's duty, rather than his pleasure, 
 139 (167). 
 Arab horses, sale of, 138 (166). 
 Arctic Fairy (or phalarope, q.v,), iii. 
 its beak, 115 (127). 
 ,, ,, nature, 112 (121-2). 
 
 ,, ,, wanderings, 113 (123). 
 
 ,, whereabouts in England, ib. (ib.) 
 ,, various names for, 151 (186-7). 
 
 Aristophanes, birds, precise imagination of 37. 
 ,, quoted, on nightingale, 38. 
 
 223
 
 2 24 INDEX, 
 
 Aristotle, on the Cypselus, or martin, 145 (176). 
 Arquatella niaritima (purple sand-piper), 116 (129). 
 Ai't, decline of, traced in natural history, 13-14. 
 "Assembly of Fowles" referred to, 141 (171). 
 Assisi, author in sacristan's cell at, 132 (158). 
 Association of ideas, and euphony of words, 44. 
 Athena, bridling of Pegasus by, 138 (166). 
 Aunt Judy s Magazine (May 1881) referred to, 112 (122). 
 Author, (a) Generally: — 
 
 movements of, at Assisi, 132 (158). 
 • • I. >. Brantwood (9th June 1881), pre/. 
 
 (8th July 1881), e«fi?. 
 II .. ,, Lichfield, 33. 
 
 religion of early years, evangelical, 132 (158). 
 science, classification, and nomenclature, pre/. 
 (b) Books 0/:— 
 
 sometimes unintelligible, /re/. 
 titles, mysterious, pre/. 
 praises, but never blames wrongly, 65. 
 special function, to interpret great work, 122 (139). 
 style, labour needed to attain it, pre/. 
 ,, the gift admittedly his, ib. 
 ,, writes as if for oral delivery, i^. 
 Quoted or re/erred to : — 
 
 Ariadne Florentina, § 164 on S. Francis, 132 (158) n. 
 Bible of Amiens, on the English, 133 (160). 
 Eagle's Nest, pp. 51-61, 123 (141) n. 
 Fors Clavigera, on Dr. Hartwig, 126 (150). 
 
 ,, on author at Assisi, 132 (158) ;;. 
 
 Laws of Fesol^, vi. p. -jy, on feather-mail, 123 (140) n. 
 Love's Meinie, original p\a.n, pre/. 
 Modern Painters : — 
 
 Vol. ii. faults and value of, 130 (154). 
 ,, quoted at length, 131 (156). 
 why republished, 130 (154-5). 
 Vol. iii. frontispiece, 148 (182). 
 On the Old Road, Reply to the Bishop of Manchester, 
 
 Co7itemporary Review, Feb. 1880, 126 (150). 
 Proserpina, classification and nomenclature oi, pre/. 
 Authors, great, leave their meaning obscure, 122 (139).
 
 INDEX. 225 
 
 Baiixon, M., on the crake, 94, 97. 
 Balaclava, charge of, 138. (166). 
 Bat, swallaw connected with, 57. 
 . ,, ,, like to, 62. 
 
 ,, wing of, 69. 
 Beauty, inherited ideas of, 41. 
 
 ,, mechanical structure and, ib. 
 
 ,, nature of, ib. 
 Bellerophon, symbolism of, 138 (i65). 
 Bewick, any such men still left, 139 (167). 
 
 ,, nomenclature, 140 seq. (170 seq.). 
 
 ,, woodcuts, the best (bittern, night-jar, white owl), 147 
 (180). 
 
 ,,■ night -jar, his feather texture excellent, geometry poor, 
 100. 
 
 ,, vulgarity and want of detail in, 3. 
 
 Quoted o?t : — 
 little grebe, 104. 
 ouzel, or water-pyot, 89 
 
 ,, 91- 
 swallow's pace (silent as to it), 48, 
 water-crake, 96. 
 ,, ouzel, 100. 
 ,, rail, 117-18 (130-32). 
 See also 140 seq. (170 seq.), to end. 
 Bible, the :— 
 
 the best book about our old history, 132 (159). 
 
 Quoted : — 
 
 Gen. iii. 21. Unto Adam also . . . coats of skins, 132 (159). 
 
 Gen. 1. 9. Joseph's chariot, 138 (166). 
 
 Deut, XXV. 4. Ox who treadeth out the corn, 137 (i65). 
 
 2 Kings ii. 12. Elijah's chariot, 138 (166). 
 
 Job. xxxix. 19. Horse whose neck is clothed with thunder, 138 (166). 
 
 Malt. X. 31. Ye are of more value than many sparrows, i, 2. 
 
 Matt, xxiii. 37. How often would I have gathered . . . under My 
 
 wing, 73. 
 Luke i. 38. Behold the handmaid of the Lord, 148, 182. 
 
 Luke xi. 22. A stronger than he cometh, firef. 
 Luke xiv. 30. What this man began to build . . . /ire/. 
 Heb. vii. 26. Holy, harmless, and undcfiled, 133 (161).
 
 2 26 INDEX. 
 
 Birds,* anatomy of. 
 
 air cushions, 154 (193). 
 
 beaks of, their use, 20 seq. 
 
 ears and hearing of, 114 (126). 
 
 153 (190 92). 
 
 expression of, 86. 
 
 feeding often their main use, 83. 
 
 web feet, 83. 
 „ character of, 
 ,, courage of all, 21. 
 ,, classification of: — 
 
 author's pentagonal diagram, 121 (137-8). 
 
 British, general plan, 88. 
 
 by feet, scansores, rasores, 81-83. 
 
 ,, plumage or size, 117 (130). 
 ,, Greek feeling for, and modern, 38. 
 ,, habits, &c. , of: — 
 
 action under water, 154 (192-3). 
 
 diving, 108-10. 
 
 flight, 46 seq. 
 
 hopping, &c. , 26, 100. 
 
 mates, always the same? 123 n. (144) n. 
 
 migrations, 16. 
 
 nationality, 16. 
 
 perches of, 84. 
 ,, how to draw and paint : — 
 
 aim at showing their beauty, not our skill, 15. 
 
 method of, 86, 87. 
 ,, natural liistory of, its topics, 114 (125). 
 ,, nomenclature of, author's plan, 140 (169). 
 
 * See s. Allegret, Arctic Fairy, Eat, Blackbird, Bunting, Buzzard, 
 Changeful Fairy, Chicken, Chough, Cincle, Coot, Crake, Crossbill, 
 Crow, Crowfoot, Dabchick, Doorhawk, Duck, Eagle, Eiderduck, 
 Falcon, Fern-owl, Finch, Flamingo, Fly-catcher, Gannet, Goat-sucker, 
 Gobemouche, Goose, Grebe, Guillemot, Gull, Hawk, Hen, Heron, 
 Hirundo, Honey-buzzard, Jay, Kingfisher, Lark, Martin, Martlet, 
 Night-jar, Nightingale, Ouzel, Owl, Paradise, Parrot, Peacock, Phala- 
 rope. Pheasant, Phcenix, Picse, Pies, Plover, Popinjay, Puffin, Robin, 
 Ruddoch, Sandpiper, Sandrunner, Seagull, Sparrow, Stint, Stork, 
 Swallow, Swan, Swift, Thrush, Titania, Tit, Wagtail, Water-hen, 
 Water-rail, Water-ouzel, Wren.
 
 INDEX. 227 
 
 Biro's, sagacity of. untanied. See s. ]Vafc)--hen. 
 J ,, shooting of, 2, 4, 39, Sic. 
 ,, sociality of, 83. 
 
 ,, wonder what beakless, wingless men can do, 83. 
 Black Auster, 138 (166). 
 Blackbtm, 88. 
 
 ,, ouzel poetic for, 89, 148 (181). 
 
 Bloomfield, such men as, still left, 139 (167). 
 Bodice, of birds, 90. 
 
 Bond, Mr., on the phalarope or Arctic fairy, iii. 
 Borelli, on wings and flight, 65 ;?. 
 Brantwood, view irom, pi-ef. 
 Breughel, pictures of, 14. 
 
 Buffon's nomenclature for birds, 140 seq. (170 seq.). 
 quoted on the grebe, 150 (186). 
 
 ,, ouzel (merle d'eau), 89. 
 
 ,, swift's nest, 145 «., 176 ?i. 
 
 ,, water-hen, iig (133). 
 
 ,, water-rail, 117-18 (130-31). 
 
 Buntings, 88. 
 
 Banyan, Pilgrim's Progress, the interpreter, 122 (139). 
 Busacador, meaning of, 8. 
 Buzzard, etymology of, 8. 
 Byron, Life of, on tourists abroad, quoted, 123 71. (142) ;/. 
 
 Caffre War, 137 (165). 
 
 Card-playing, 134 (161). 
 
 Carlisle Nat. Hist. Society, monograph on the ouzel, 91. 
 
 Carlyle, on things 'going to water,' /;r/". 
 
 Sartor Resartus, epitaph on Zachdarm, 2 and 77. 
 Carpaccio, birds by, 87. 
 
 St. George baptizing princess, popinjay in, 37. 
 Cart-horse, 138 (166). 
 Castles, machicolated parapets of, 69. 
 Cavalry, modern English, horseless, 138 (166). 
 CeliViacy, for labourers, 39-40. 
 Changeful Fairy, 114 (124) seq. See s. Birds. 
 Chaucer, love of birds, 35 seq. 
 
 ,, use of 'ouzel,' 89. 
 
 ,, Romaunt of Rose, pre/., Lect. I. motto, 35 seq.
 
 2 2 8 INDEX. 
 
 Cheadle, water-hen at, 119 (113). 
 Chemisette of birds, 90. 
 Chickens, rasores, 83. 
 Chivalry, modern English, 138 (165). 
 Chough, beak of, 19. 
 
 ,, last pair seen in Arran, 123 (143) n 
 Cincle, or ouzel, 148 (181). 
 Coniston weather 123 (143) n. 
 Coot, 114 (124-5). 
 
 ,, etymology of, 121 (137). 
 Cornhill Magazine, article on artizans and marriage in, 39. 
 Cotyle. See s. Cypselus. 
 
 'Court of Love' or Robin Redebreast, 141 (171). 
 Courthope's Paradise of Birds referred to, 83 n. 
 
 ,, ,, ,, quoted, 122 seq. (138 seq.), 
 
 124-S, (146-49). 
 Crakes, 93-99. 
 Creepers, birds called, 88. 
 Crimean War, 133 (161). 
 Cross-bills, 88. 
 Crowfoot, 96. 
 Crows, 88. 
 
 Crystallization of metals, 60. 
 Cuvier on the piece order of birds, 55. 
 Cypselus on the swift, 145 (176). 
 
 DabCHICK, 88 seq. 
 
 ,, meaning and nature of, 89. 
 
 ,, And see Lecture IIL and Appendix passim. 
 Dancing, its place among the arts, 24. 
 Dante, Bertrand de Born, on field sports, 24. 
 Darwinism ridiculed (flatness of feathers), 29. 
 58 seq. 
 ,, quoted on species of man, 61. 
 Death, inevitable for man and beast, 139 (167). 
 Demoiselle, oiseau, and connected, 38, 89. 
 Derby, Lord, crest of, and destruction of trees by, 39. 
 Devils, importance of claws to our idea of, 11. 
 Dickens, Charles, solitary night-walks of, 18. 
 Dippers, action of, in water, 154-55 (193-94).
 
 INDEX. 229 
 
 Distance, bird's sight at a, 145 n. , 176 «. 
 Divers, the northern, Yarrell on, &c., 108-110. 
 Dog and water-hen, instance of friendship, 120 (135). 
 Dogwood, in Forfar and Sweden, 22. 
 
 ,, the ' spindle-tree,' 22. 
 Dolphin, motion of the, 62. 
 Donatello, remark to UcceUi, 12, 13. 
 Doorhawk or night-jar, 147 (178). 
 
 Dorcas Society, letter on birds from member of, 153 (190). 
 Dress, modern tight-fitting, 48 (182). 
 Dressier, Oscar, bird-lithographer, 87. 
 
 ,, ,, nomenclature, 140 seq., 170 seq. 
 
 Drink as a source of e\-il, 134 (i5i). 
 Dryas(sa\v)dust, 128 (151). 
 Du Maurier. See s. Punch. 
 Ducks, nature of, 84, 88. 
 Dunlin, Gould on the bird, loi. 
 Dunn, Mr. Robert, on northern diver, no. 
 Diirer, birds by, 87. 
 Dutch, ' still hfe and dead game ' pictures, 14. 
 
 E.\GLES, essential character of, 5. 
 flight of circling, 71. 
 ,, leap awkwardly, 26. 
 ,, names and kinds of, 5, 7. 
 Eartham river, ouzels on the, 92. 
 Eiderducks, coo, do not quack, 129 (153). 
 
 ,, down of, how taken, 126 (149), 128 (152). 
 
 Hartwig on, 127 seq. (150 seq.). 
 England, in time of Chaucer and now, 39. 
 politics in, 133 (160). 
 ,, tourists of, abroad, 123 (142) ;/. 
 Ermine, judicial, 132 (159). 
 Evolution, acceptance of, by public, 58. 
 ,, author's rejection of, 58 seq. 
 ,, what things are, not were, important, 63. 
 
 Falcon, claws of, 19. 
 
 ,, expression of brow and eyes, 86, 88. 
 ,, flight of, and the kite, 71, 145 (176). 
 ,, names of, 5, 7.
 
 2 30 INDEX. 
 
 Feathers, nature of, 28 seq. 
 , , parts of, 30 seq. 
 ,, swallow's wings, 72-3. 
 Feet, classification of birds by their, 81 seq. 
 Fenelon's philosophy, 123 71. (145) n. 
 Fern-owl or night-jar, 147 {178). 
 Finches, 88. 
 
 Fish, darting motion of, 47. 
 ,, motion of, 64. 
 ,, swallow's likeness to, 62. 
 Fissi-rostres, family of birds so called, 45. 
 Flamingo, Greek Phoenix, 18. 
 Flight of birds, its conditions, 46 seq. 
 
 ,, ,, large and small, 71. 
 
 ,, the problem of, 65 seq. and n. 
 Fly, swift motion of a, 42. 
 '' , , number of flies eaten by a swallow, 43. 
 Fly-catchers (swallow), motion of, 42. 
 Ford, Mr., drawings of South African birds, 147, 180. 
 Forfar, dogwood in, 22. 
 Form, analysis of, plan, profile, section, 31. 
 Francia, picture of animals for Duke of Urbino, 14. 
 Furness Abbey, ruin of its ruins, 138 (165). 
 Furs, use of, 132 (159). 
 
 Gambling, 134 (161). 
 
 Gannet, descent on water, 154 (193). 
 
 Geneva, Lake of, boats and sails on, 66. 
 
 Gesner's nomenclature of birds, 140 seq. (170 seq.). 
 
 Ghiberti's gates, birds on, 13-14. 
 
 Gibbons, Grinling, carving of birds, jj. 
 
 Girdles, embroidery of, proposed, 148 (182). 
 
 Goat-suckers, 88. 
 
 Gobemouche, 45. 
 
 Golden eagle, 7. 
 
 Goose, 88. 
 
 Gould, ' Birds of Great Britain,' 10. 
 
 ,, criticised, now he is dead, 87. 
 
 ,, nomenclature, 140 seq. (170 seq.).
 
 INDEX. 
 
 231 
 
 Gould, on the Alpine swallow, 146 (178). 
 
 black ouzel, 92. 
 
 little grebe, 103, 105. 
 
 night-jar (his best plate), 147 (180). 
 
 ouzel (plate), 91. 
 
 phalarope or Arctic fairy, iii. 
 fairy-like, 151 (187). 
 
 robin, 17, 24. 
 
 sandpiper and stint, loi. 
 
 starry allegret, 97. 
 
 swallow's pace, 48. 
 
 tiny allegret, 98. 
 
 water-crake (lily-ouzel), 96. 
 
 water-ouzel, 100. 
 
 water-rail, 117-18 (130, 132). 
 Gray, Robt., 'Birds of West Scotland' quoted on dipper, 155 
 
 (194)- 
 Grebe, in Paris shop window, 107. 
 
 ,, the little, loi, 103. 
 
 ,, ,, etymology, &c., 101-2. 
 
 feathers, 105-6. 
 
 food, driving, and motion, 106-108. 
 ,, the lobe-footed, lox. 
 
 ,, most easily domesticated of birds, 107. 
 
 ,, various names for, 150 (185). 
 Greek, a living language, fref. 
 
 ,, birds, aTpovOo%, ^oC^os, 2, 18. 
 
 ,, feeling for birds, 38. 
 Greenland, birds in, changeful fairy, 115 (127). 
 Guillemots, 102. 
 Gulls, 88. See s. Seagull. 
 
 H.\ND, painting of the, as expressive of character, 27. 
 Hartwig, Polar world referred to, 126 (149)- 
 
 quoted, 128 (151)- 
 Hatching water-hens, 120 (135). 
 Hawks, kinds and names of, 5, 7. 
 
 88. 
 Helps, Sir A. , animals and their masters, 
 ,, on bearing-reins, 3 n.
 
 232 INDEX. 
 
 Hen, feathers of the, 73. 
 
 Herminius, 138 (166). 
 
 Herodotus, on cinnamon swallows, 56. 
 
 Herons, 88. 
 
 Hirundo alpina, 146 (177). 
 
 ,, domestica, 142 (172). 
 
 ,, monastica, 143 (173). 
 riparia, 144 (173). 
 sagitta, 14s (175). 
 Holbein, bird painting of, jj, 87. 
 Homer, Odyssey, on the swallow, 79. 
 Honey-buzzard, 7. 
 
 Horse, man's relations to the, 138 (165 seq.). 
 Horseflesh, eating of, in Paris, 139 (167). See s. Cart-horse, 
 
 Helps. 
 House, home and, distinct, 123 n. (140) n. 
 Hudson's Bay Company, 132 (159). 
 Humboldt on Andalusian birds, 55. 
 Hunting, evil of, 133 (160), 137 (165), 139 (168). 
 
 Iceland, eider ducks in, 127 (150). 
 Impossible, few things are, no. 
 
 Jamaica, 'bidi-bidi' bird, 149 (184). 
 Jardine, SirW. , on the northern diver, 109. 
 Jays, 88. 
 Johnson on etymology of ouzel, 89. 
 
 ,, ,, meaning of scurvy, 133 seq. (160 seq.). 
 
 Kingfisher, beauty of the, 105. 
 
 L.ABOURER, life of, proposed by modern economy, 40. 
 Language, association of idea and euphony of words, 44. 
 
 ,, dead, meaning of term, pref. 
 
 Lark, the, 88. 
 
 Latin, a living language, pref. 
 
 Le Vaillant, book on jays and birds of Paradise, 87. 
 Lectures, author's books written in form of, pref. 
 Lesbia's sparrow, 17. 
 Lichfield, red brick houses of, 33.
 
 INDEX. 233 
 
 Linnaeus, his nomenclature for birds, 140 seq. (170 seq.). 
 ,, on robins' food, &c. , 22, 23. 
 * ,, on the Arctic fairy, III. 
 
 ,V ;.> ., -, gi"ebe, loi. 
 
 Lombardy, book on birds of, referred to, 87. 
 
 London, starvation in, 139 (167). 
 
 Loudon on dogwood berries, 22. 
 
 Lout, etymology, meaning, and types of, 135 seq. {162 seq.). 
 
 Luca della Robbia, fancy of, 13. 
 
 Lucca, amount to see at, 123 (142) n. 
 
 Man, different races of, 61. 
 
 Manchester, Bishop of, author's reply to Contemporary Review, 
 
 'February 1880, 126 (150). 
 Marouette, a meaningless word, 94, 96. 
 Marriage, the ' luxury ' of, 39-40. 
 Marshall, Mr. Victor (of Coniston), 113 (124). 
 Marshes, to be breeding-grounds for water birds, 118 (132). 
 Martin, sand and house, 64. 
 
 144 (174)- 
 Martlet, different names for, 143 (172). 
 
 ,, meaning of, ib. {ib.). 
 Meinie, etymology of, p}-ef. 
 Melanogaster, or black ouzel, 90. 
 Menial, etymology of, pref. 
 Merula fontium, or torrent-ouzel, 89. 
 Mesange, French for titmouse, 36. 
 Michelet, on air in birds' boxes, 109. 
 
 „ ,, swallow's grace, 48. 
 
 ,, ,, ' bird of return,' 51. 
 
 Milton, ' Paradise Lost," on the Creation, 3. 
 
 ,, ,, ,, ' buzzard idol,' 8. 
 
 ,, ,, ,, ' come and help it as you go,' 94. 
 
 Minden, battle of. Lord George Sackville at, 137 (165). 
 Monk, Coniston, 113 (124). 
 
 More, Sir Thomas, philosophy of, 123 ;/. (145) n. 
 Morris, on Arctic fairy, 113 (123). 
 
 ,, ,, little grebe and its nest, 104, 106. 
 
 ,, ,, ,, ,, diving, 108. 
 
 ,, ,, phalarope (etym.), iii 71.
 
 2 34 INDEX. 
 
 Murray's Guide, on Lucca, 123 n. (142) v. 
 Music, modern, meaningless, 123 «. (141) n. 
 
 Natural History, author's works on, pref. 
 
 , , , , Englishmen have done little in , 3. 
 
 ,, ,, mythology of animals, 35. 
 
 ,, ,, rareness of accui'acy in modern, 48 71. 
 
 Nest, floating, of grebes, 103-4. 
 Night-jar, 147 seq. (178 seq.). 
 
 ,, means 'churr,' 147 (179). 
 
 ,, story of its goat-sucking, ib. {ib.). 
 
 Nightingale, Aristophanes on, 38. 
 
 OiSE.\u, demoiselle connected with, 38. 
 Ornithology, modern, ridiculed, 4 seq. 
 
 ,, nomenclature of, 5, 7. 
 
 Ouzels, English, Swiss, and Norwegian, 90. 
 ,, fond of manufactories, 92. 
 
 M lily. 93-97- 
 
 torrent, 89, 148 (181). 
 ,, under water action, 91, 100. 
 Owl, swallow connected with, 57, 88. 
 ,, ,, resembles, 62. 
 
 Paolo degli Uccelll See s. Uccello. 
 Paradise, bird of, its tail, 64. 
 
 ,, 87. 
 Parliament, modern, and in Milton's time, 8 
 
 ,, ,, its 'scurvy talk,' 135 (162). 
 
 Parrot, beak and colour of, 82. 
 ,, history of, in Europe, 37. 
 ,, scansores or climbers, 82. 
 Passer, Latin for sparrow, 2, 17. 
 Peacock, all neck and tail, 30. 
 , , feather of, 34. 
 ,, tail of, its use, 64. 
 Pegasus, symbolism of, 138 (166). 
 Pettigrew, Dr., on the 'wing,' 65. 
 Phalarope, derivation of, in n.
 
 INDEX. 235 
 
 Phalarope, kind of sea-gull, loi. 
 names for, 151 (187-8). 
 ,, , wings of, 116 (129). See s. Arctic Fairy. 
 Pheasants, 88. 
 
 Philosophy, true, a well of peace, 123 n. (145) n. 
 Phoenix, Greek love of (flamingo), 18. 
 Picas, family of (birds), 55. 
 Pies (class of birds), 88. 
 Plover, 88, loi. 
 
 Plumage as a basis of classification, 117 (130). 
 Pollajuolo, Antonio, quail by (Vasari quoted), 13. 
 Popinjay in Chaucer, 37. 
 Porzana, water-hen, 94. 
 Paussin, meaning of name, 149 (184). 
 Puffin, 102. 
 Punch, Du Maurier's drawings : — 
 
 Lady Clara Robinson's party, 135. 
 
 Mr. Smith, 135. 
 
 Ball at Stilton House, 135. 
 as types of modern society, 135 seq. (163 seq.). 
 Prayer- Book quoted : — 
 
 'With angels and archangels,' (S:c. , So. 
 
 Racing, 133 (160). 
 
 ,, result of, on intellect, 137 (165). 
 Raglan, Lord, at Alma, 137 (165). 
 Rail, meaning of the verb ' to rail,' 152 (189). 
 Railway schemes control the House of Lords, 135 (162). 
 Rasores, family of birds, 83. 
 Red brick houses, 33. 
 Rein-bearing, disused, 3. 
 Religious imagination, 11. 
 
 Reynolds, Sir J., ' Lady Derby,' macaw in, 87 n. 
 Rhine, first church on the, 35. 
 Robin, a w<?cfl?-bird, 141 (171). 
 
 ,, class of the, 88. 
 colours of, 24, 33. 
 
 ,, ,, ,, a brickbat is brighter, ib., ib. 
 
 ,, ,, feathers, 19, 30 31. 
 
 ,, food, 22.
 
 236 INDEX. 
 
 Robin, kinds of, red and blue breast, 9-10. 
 
 migrations of, alone and at night, 18. 
 
 motion of, legs and claws, 24 seq. 
 
 mythology of, 35 seq. 
 
 names for, in different books, 6, 141 (171). 
 
 native country unknown, 16. 
 
 no marked place in literature, 17. 
 
 pugnacity, 23. 
 
 red or redebreast, 141 (171). 
 
 ouzel, 90. 
 Romaunt of the Rose, " M'enneion, e'l buzacador," 8. 
 
 See s. Chancer. 
 Rotten Row, 138 (165). 
 Rottingdean, Arctic fairy at, 113 (123). 
 Rouen, spitting in the cathedral ! 134 (161). 
 Ruddock on robin. See s. Robin, Shakspeare. 
 Rutila familiaris or robin, 141 (171). 
 
 Sackville, Lord George, at Minden, 137 (165). 
 Sail, lateen, the most beautiful, 65 seq. 
 ,, swallow's wing and, compared, 66. 
 Saint Bernard, his sermons, pref. 
 
 ,, Francis of Assisi, bit of his cloak, 132 (158). 
 
 , , , , , , sermons of, pref. 
 
 ,, George, schools of, bird nomenclature in, 140 (170). 
 
 ,, John, Mr., on the phalarope, iii. 
 Salmon, Mr., on the phalarope, 112 (122). 
 Samite, etymology of, 152 (189). 
 Sandpipers, 92, loi, 116 (129). 
 
 ,, runners, loi. 
 
 Scansores, family of, 82. 
 
 Science, author has never praised but one book of, 65. 
 ,, nomenclature of, /r^ 
 ,, rivalry among men of, 65 «. 
 Scott, Sir W., his horse Brown Adam, 138 (166). 
 
 , , , , Dandle Dinmont and Dumple, i5. (ii. ). 
 
 ,, ,, bird and bantling (Lord Derby's crest), 39. 
 
 Scurvy, meaning of, 133-4 (i^o seq.). 
 Seagull, flight of the, 71. 
 Seed, animals eating (birds and mice), 21.
 
 INDEX. 237 
 
 Sermon?, dull, and ' fissi-rostres ' people, 45. 
 Shakspeare, accurate use of words, 133 (161). 
 
 Quoted or referred to : — 
 
 Cymbeline, iv. 2, 'ruddock with charitable bill,' 141 
 
 (171). , , ^ 
 
 Macbeth, i. 6, ' temple-haunting martlet, 143(172). 
 
 Measure for Measure, ' not scurvy nor a temporary 
 meddler,' 133 (160). 
 ^^ ,, 'scurvy and provoking terms,' 
 
 135 (162). 
 Midsummer's Night Dream, ' ouzel-cock so black of hue,' 89. 
 Romeo and Juliet, Juliet, /re/. 
 
 Shepherd, Mr., on eider ducks, 127 (150). 
 
 Shooting, love of birds and, 2, 39, 113 {123-4). 
 
 Siberia, 'changeful fairy' in, 115 (127). 
 
 Similes of great writers pregnant with meaning, 44. 
 
 Sinbad, origin of the story, 56. 
 
 Smith, Dr., 'South African Zoology,' 147 (180). 
 
 Soldiers, types of modern English, 137 (165). 
 
 Songsters (birds), 88. 
 
 Sophocles, CEd. Col, on birds, 38. 
 
 Soyer, M., great dish of birds (1851), 124 (146). 
 
 Spallanzani, experiment on swallow's flight, 144 (174)- 
 
 Sparrows, 88. 
 
 Spenser, ' Hobbimol,' 35. 
 
 Spindle, to be of dogwood, 22. 
 
 Sport, 139, 168. See s. Hunting, Racing, Shooting. 
 
 Stanley, Bishop, on the grebe, 102, no. 
 
 Jacana, 99«. 
 
 water-hen, 119-20 (134 seq.). 
 
 Steam-engines, modern love of, 41. 
 Stint, song of the, 91. 
 ,, feet of the, loi. 
 Stork, 88. 
 Swallow, all wings, 30. 
 
 beauty of the, 41 seq. 
 Bible kind, 146 (178). 
 , , class of, 88. 
 
 connection with bat and owl, 57. 
 ,, ,, ,, dolphin and trout, 62.
 
 238 INDEX. 
 
 Swallow, derivation of the word, 44. 
 
 easily fatigued, 49. 
 
 flight of, its pace, 41, 42 seq., 46 seq. , 64 seq. , 71. See 
 below, s. IVitigs. 
 
 footless, and why, 52. 
 
 head of, 46. 
 
 kinds of, 64. 
 
 ministry to men of the, 80. 
 
 names of the, 142, 172. 
 
 nest of, of clay, 52-3. 
 ,, placed where, ib. 
 
 stay at home bird, 51. 
 
 tail of, its use, 64. 
 
 typical of what, 80. 
 
 voracity of, 43 seq. 
 
 wings of, 19, 72 seq. 
 Swans, 88. 
 
 Sweden, dogwood in, 22. 
 Swift, the, or swallow, 64, 145 (175). 
 Swift, Dean, on 'scurvy custom of taking tobacco,' 134 (161). 
 
 Telegraph monopoly, 132 (160). 
 
 Temminck, on the starry allegret, 97. 
 
 Theoria, author's use ofthe word in ' Modern Painters,' 131 (156). 
 
 Thrush, 88. 
 
 Titania arctica. See s. Arctic Fairy, Phalarope. 
 
 ,, inconstans. See s. Changeful Fai>y. 
 Titian, portraits of, i. 
 Tits, birds, 88. 
 
 Tobacco, vile custom of, basis of evil, 134 (161). 
 Topffer's Exciu'sion dans les Alpes, on English tourists, 123 n. 
 
 (142) n. 
 Transformation, spiritual and material, 63. 
 Trees, destruction of, in England, 39. 
 Trepida stagnarum. See s. Grebe [Little). 
 Tringa or phalarope. See s.v. and s. Air tic Fairy, 
 Trout, darting motion of a, 47, 62. 
 
 UCCELLO, birds of, 12. 
 
 „ Donatello's remark to, 13.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Vandyke, aristocracy in his day, i. 
 
 I. ,, ot'his portraits, i. 
 
 ,, picture of sons of Dul<e of Lennox, il>. 
 
 Vasari on Francia and Pollajuolo, 14. 
 * Velasquez, portraits of, i. 
 Virgil, qicoted : ' portici'ous vacuis stagna sonat, 44. 
 
 Wager (Sir Charles) on flock of swallows, 50. 
 
 Wagtail, motion of the, 25. 
 
 Water-birds (dippers, divers, duckers), 93. 
 
 100. 
 Water-hen, 119 (133), 160 (190). 
 
 ,, countries it inhabits, 119 (134). 
 
 ' ,, sagacity of, untamed, 120 (136-7). 
 
 Water-ouzel, author has never seen one alive, 92. 
 
 under-water actions, 108. See s. Oitsel. 
 Water-rail, 117 seq. (130 seq.). 
 ,, names of, 152 (188). 
 Weather, modern, 123 «. (143) m. 
 Web-footed birds, loi seq. 
 White's Letters from Selborne, 3. 
 
 ,, silent as to pace of swallow, 48. 
 ,, his brother, on the swallow, 49. 
 Wing, anatomy of the, 74 seq. 
 
 ,, claws and, devil and angel, 11. 
 ,, stroke of, in flight, 69-70. 
 Wooley, Mr., on the Arctic fairy, 112 (122). 
 Women, angelic expression of good, 11. 
 Woodpeckers, 88. 
 
 World, the, under a curse, 132 (159). 
 Worms, death of human and earth, 22. 
 
 ,, eating of, by robins, 22. 
 Wrens, 88. 
 
 XANTHUS, 138 (t66), 
 
 Yarrell, nomenclature for birds, 140 seq. , 170 seq. 
 ,, on the grebe's nest, 104. 
 
 ,, ,, lily ouzel or water-crake, 96. 
 
 239
 
 240 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Yarrell, on the little crake (tiny allegret), 98. 
 
 ,, ,, northern diver, 109-10. 
 
 ,, ,, swallow's flight, 48-49. 
 
 ,, ,, water-hen, 119 (134). 
 
 ,, ,, water-rail, 117-18 (130-32). 
 
 Yonge's ' History of Christian Names ' (robin), 35. 
 York, Arctic fairy at, 113 (123). 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Ca 
 Udinburgh and London 
 
 \
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 
 JAM 9 
 
 •t^ 
 
 
 
 ^'i 
 
 H 
 
 NT 
 
 1 ^."> 
 
 
 9^ 
 
 "^^ / 
 
 .N 
 
 Due Two vv'eck. ^roal U.ic 
 
 4 
 
 OANS 
 
 01 .^e. e:Dt 
 
 47584
 
 ^ ! 3 1158 00755 1616 
 
 V 
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 AA 000 378 009 5