Note 7 — LETTER LI.

But the reverend naturalist will none of this. Sparrows indeed! are not five sold for two farthings? Shall any note be taken of them in our modern enlightened science? No; nor yet of the dainty little Bramble Finch, couched in her knotty hollow of birch trunk; though England, and mainland Europe, and Asia Minor, Persia, China, and Japan, all know the little Brambling;—and though in the desolate region of the Dovrefeldt,7 too high for the Chaffinch, she decorates the outer walls of her nest with flat pieces of lichen and other materials,—though she is attractive in her winter dress; and in her summer costume, “no pencil can do her justice,” clerical taste and propriety will none of her;—no, nor even of the dear little fellow who looks so much like the properest of clergymen himself, in the sprucest of white ties—the Stone-Chat,—preaching, or chattering, or chatting, from the highest twig of his furze-bush;—no, nor of the Fire-crested Wren, poised on long spray of larch with purple buds; nor even, though she, at least might, one would have thought, have provided some ‘fun’ for the ecclesiastical family, the long-tailed Tit, or Bottle-tit, with her own impatient family of six Bottle tits, every one with a black eye, as if to illustrate the sympathy of their nature with bottle-tits of the human species, and every one with its mouth open; and the nest, of their mother’s exquisite building, with the pale sides of the lichens always turned to the light, and 2,000 feathers used in its lining, and these, nothing to the amount of “invisible cobwebs” taken to attach the decorative pieces of lichen to the outside. All this is contemptible to my religious author; but he hunts Mr. Gould’s whole book through, to find the horriblest creature in it—the Butcher-bird! transfixing mice on the spines of the blackthorn, and tearing their flesh from them as they hang, ‘invariably breaking the skull,’ with farther parental direction of the youthful mind. “Do you see that great tit on a branch of this poplar? He is actually at work doing a bit of butchering on a small warbler. See how he is beating the poor little fellow about the head; he wants to get at his brains.” This—for one of his two plates, besides the frontispiece, of the back of his own head and its hat; with his two children ‘wanting to get at’—something in his hand—and his only remaining plate is of the heron, merely because it is big; for his miserable copyist has taken care to change every curve of the bird’s neck and body, so as to destroy every gracious character it has in Mr. Gould’s plate, to an extent so wonderful that I mean to impale the two together—on the stem of a blackthorn—in my Oxford schools.