ribing his
character by negations, we may say that he resembles Napoleon Buonaparte
much more than Joseph Hume or Alderman Wood. He is not moping--not
boding--not melancholy--not a drunkard--not blind--not stupid; as much
as it would be prudent to say of any man, whether editor or contributor,
in her Majesty's dominions.

We really have no patience with people who persist in all manner of
misconceptions regarding the character of birds. Birds often appear to
such persons, judging from, of, and by themselves, to be in mind and
manners the reverse of their real character. They judge the inner bird
by outward circumstances inaccurately observed. There is the owl. How
little do the people of England know of him--even of him the barn-door
and domestic owl--yea, even at this day--we had almost said the Poets!
Shakespeare, of course, and his freres, knew him to be a merry
fellow--quite a madcap--and so do now all the Lakers. But Cowper had his
doubts about it; and Gray, as every schoolboy knows, speaks of him like
an old wife. The force of folly can go no further, than to imagine an
owl complaining to the moon of being disturbed by people walking in a
country churchyard. And among all our present bardlings, the owl is
supposed to be constantly on the eve of suicide. If it were really so,
he ought in a Christian country to be pitied, not pelted, as he is sure
to be when accidentally seen in sunlight--for melancholy is a
misfortune, especially when hereditary and constitutional, as it is
popularly believed to be in the Black-billed Bubo, and certainly was in
Dr Johnson. In young masters and misses we can pardon any childishness;
but we cannot pardon the antipathy to the owl entertained by the manly
minds of grown-up English clodhoppers, ploughmen, and threshers. They
keep terriers to kill rats and mice in barns, and they shoot the owls,
any one of whom we would cheerfully back against the famous Billy. "The
very commonest observation teaches us," says the author of the "Gardens
of the Menagerie," "that they are in reality the best and most efficient
protectors of our cornfields and granaries from the devastating pillage
of the swarms of mice and other small _rodents_." Nay, by their constant
destruction of these petty but dangerous enemies, the owls, he says,
"earn an unquestionable title to be regarded as among the _most active
of the friends of man_; a title which only one or two among them
occasionally forfeit by their aggres