street and its
busy whirl of fashion to this placid meer of reflection is a contrast
almost too severe for some of the puling votaries of London gaiety:
yet the scene teems with deep-souled poetry. Some such feelings as
those so touchingly expressed in Lord Byron's Ode to Napoleon, on his
first exile, flit through the memory:--

Then haste thee to thy sullen isle,
And gaze upon the sea;
That element may meet thy smile,
It ne'er was ruled by thee!
Or trace with thine all idle hand
In loitering mood upon the sand
That earth is now as free.

Perhaps we ought not to mention an idea we sometimes entertain--that
our readers may imagine we are partial to Mr. Haydon, and that we pay
an undue share of attention to his works. The truth, however, is that
his pictures always work upon us with greater intensity than those of
any other living artist. Further, we know Mr. Haydon but by his works.
We are acquainted with the original of Pharaoh, in his great picture
of _the Plague_, but this association has nothing to do with our
admiration of Mr. Haydon's genius. One of the specimens--_Eucles_--will
not soon be absent from our mind's eye; and for days after we first saw
it, the sorrowful mother, and the ghastly, falling figure of the warrior,
haunted our imagination at every turn.

* * * * *

THE SELECTOR; AND LITERARY NOTICES OF _NEW WORKS_.

* * * * *

THE ARCHITECTURE OF BIRDS.

This is another volume of the delightful Zoological series of the
_Library of Entertaining Knowledge_. We have already a volume and a
half of Quadrupeds from the Menageries, a volume of the
Transformations of Insects, and another of their Architectural
Labours. The present, in well-chosen continuity of a novel plan of
illustrating the Animal economy, is devoted to "an examination of
Birds in the exercise of their mechanical arts of constructing Nests."
"This work," observes the ingenious Editor, "is the _business_ of
their lives--the duty which calls forth that wonderful ingenuity,
which no experience can teach, and which no human skill can rival."
The few introductory pages include a rapid sketch of the methods of
classifying Birds adopted by some of the most distinguished
naturalists, in which their characteristics are stripped of the jargon
of technicality and _hard words_: thus, "Diurnal" birds are explained
as "preying in the day-time;" "Piscivorous, fe