d of all the curious things about them, what seems most inexplicable
is their tameness. They have no mistrust, but eye you with an
intelligent, knowing look while bringing their young to feed within
half a dozen feet of you. They perch on the croquet-arches in the midst
of a noisy game. They sing directly over your head with the utmost
spirit and vivacity, hardly ceasing all the forenoon, and again
bursting out toward evening and maintaining their song until every
other bird's lay is hushed in the twilight. White of Selborne would
have delighted in such a freak on the part of these pretty gay
strangers, who have left secluded swampy haunts, the deep dells where
the blackberries twine and the daisies and clover blossom, for our
close-cut lawns and elm- and willow-shaded nooks.--A.T.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Alexander Pope. By Leslie Stephen. (English Men-of-Letters Series.) New
York: Harper & Brothers.

The interest of this series, which increases rather than diminishes--as
one might have feared would be the case--with each succeeding volume,
lies very much in the fact that the list of writers, almost as long and
varied as that of the subjects, is a representative one. It comprises
men who have won distinction in different departments--as novelists,
historians, scholars, scientific expounders--but who here meet in the
common field of biographical criticism and work together under the same
limitations and conditions. Hence their performances give us not so
much a measure of their individual powers as of the tone of thought and
intellectual depth of the class to which they belong. However diverse
their abilities and special fields of observation or research, their
general range of knowledge, methods of study and ideas of life are very
much the same. They are collectively "men of culture," as the writers
of Queen Anne's time were "wits," and it is the qualities associated
with that term, rather than any distinct gifts or characteristics, that
are here called into play. Mr. Trollope's _Thackeray_ was perhaps an
exception--a black spot on the otherwise immaculate whiteness. In a
different way the general effect would have been still more seriously
impaired if Mr. Ruskin's co-operation had been invited. The
outcroppings of a vulgar egotism might indicate a substratum necessary
to be taken into account, but it would have been a clear loss of labor
to follow the leadings of any eccentric vein. One might wonder at the