bin
as of falcon; but this is somewhat inaccurately stated. Those thirteen
birds represented a very large proportion of the entire group of the
birds of prey, which in my sevenfold classification I recommended 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 alive, and, if alive, certainly not wild
in England.

Here is a picture of it, daintily done,[7] 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 record of any visit before
that, since Mr. Thomas Embledon shot one on Newcastle town moor in
1816. But this rarity of visit to us is 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"--I 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."

[7] Mr. Gould's, in his "Birds of Great Britain."

11. That, then, is the utmost which the lords of land, and masters of
science, do for us in their watch upon our feathered suppliants. 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
ornithology 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.

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 you were to
take from it, I say, the power of pu