have deprived the peacock of some of its splendour. Thomson, clearing up former mistakes, sings with equal truth and fancy,

- the peacock spreads

His every coloured glory to the sun,
And swims in radiant majesty along.

And the description is accurate; because the long feathers that compose the bird's peculiar embellishment grow up the back.

Occasionally, however, the faithfulness of Milton is very startling, particularly in those slight circumstances of zoology, in which poetical footsteps are most likely to be caught tripping. It will be remembered, that he represents Satan entering the Garden under the form of a bird:

up he flew, and on the tree of life

Sat like a cormorant, devising death
To them that lived.

Bishop Stanley remarks that the poet could not have clothed the Tempter in a more appropriate shape, as the appearance of the cormorant is unearthly and alarming;-he notices "his slouching form, his wet and vapid wings dangling from his side to catch the breeze, while his weird, haggard, wildly-staring emerald-green eyes scowl about in all directions." Nor was the pictorial fitness of the form obtained at any expense of zoological

accuracy; for, though chiefly found among water scenery, the cormorant often perches on trees. A serrated claw of the middle toe, which distinguishes it from the pelican, enables it to cling to branches.

It has been said that all poets, ancient and modern, Shakspere alone being excepted, assign to the owl a melancholy epithet. Gray's "moping owl does to the moon complain" Thomson shows "assiduous in her bower the wailing owl" -Shakspere gives the true portrait, when he makes Lennox say, after the murder of Duncan

The obscure bird clamour'd the livelong night;

for the owl sleeps and hisses in the day, and at night hunts and screeches. "Hooting" is not its general mode of expression-not its vernacular. The mountain - owl flies at night, whooping when perched. A friend of Mr. White, in Hampshire, tried all the owls in his neighbourhood with a pitch-pipe, of the sort used for tuning harpsichords, and found them to hoot in B flat. But taste or capacity varies in the family, for the owls of Selborne range between G flat, F sharp, B flat, and A flat. The inquiring naturalist, who has given fame to that charming village, once heard two owls hooting at each other in dif

ferent keys-two Arcadians indeed. Beattie, in four of the most natural lines of English poetry, has indicated the flight and disposition of the owl, leaving on the reader's mind, at the same time, the solemn sentiment of the landscape:

Where the scared owl, on pinions grey,

Breaks from the rustling boughs;
And down the lone vale sails away,
To more profound repose.

The errors in Thomson's zoology have already been remarked, and other examples might be given, as in the description of the woodlark singing in copses; because its custom is to warble on the wing-not soaring, but circling round its mate.

For the most part, however, his pencil catches every colour and movement of bird or beast. How happy is the picture of the rock-pigeon:

beneath yon spreading ash,

Hung o'er the steep, whence, borne on liquid wing,
The sounding culver shoots.

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The motion of the pigeon in full sweep gives a very remarkable sound. But the picturesque word, 'shoots," had been already applied to the dove's flight by Dryden, in his exquisite translation of the lines in Virgil:

At first she flutters; but at length she springs
To smoother flight, and shoots upon her wings.

This imitative harmony was sure to win the musical ear of Coleridge, from whose poetry many exquisite specimens might be selected Take the following :

Beat its straight path along the dusky air
Homewards, I blest it! deeming its black wing,
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had crossed the mighty orb's dilated glory,

While thou stood'st gazing; or when all was still,
Flew creeking o'er thy head.

The poet tells us that, some months after writing this line, he found Bartram describing the same peculiarity in the Savanna crane: "When these birds move their wings in flight, their strokes are slow, moderate, and regular; and even when at a considerable distance or high above us, we plainly hear the quill feathers; their shafts and webs upon one another creek, as the joints or working of a vessel in a tempestuous sea."

MAY 6th.-I find Archdeacon Hare commending, with measureless praise, the genius of Mr. Landor. The judgment of Coleridge comes nearer to my taste:-"What is it that Mr. Landor wants to make him a poet? His powers are certainly very considerable, but he seems totally deficient in that modifying faculty, which compresses several units into one whole. His poems,

taken as wholes, are unintelligible; you have eminences excessively bright, and all the ground around and beneath them in darkness. Besides which, he has never learned, with all his energy, to write simple and lucid English." This is a fair estimate of Gebir and the Imaginary Conversations. Of every great author in prose or verse the motion, within certain variations, is uniform. When the singing robe is put off, the dweller of Olympus may still be known by his walk. It is not so with Mr. Landor. He glitters in purple, or hobbles in rags; is either a prince or a mendicant on Parnassus. He altogether reverses his own character of writers who are to circulate through ages to come; who, once "above the heads of contemporaries, rise slowly and waveringly, then regularly and erectly, then rapidly and majestically, till the vision strains and aches as it pursues them in their ethereal elevation.” This is precisely what Mr. Landor does not perform. Now and then he disengages himself from the lumber that clogs him, and begins to ascend. For a moment, he goes up bravely, higher and higher, flashing abroad fair colours in the sunlight, and catching glimpses of towered cities, crowded rivers, and spreading forests: we gaze after his flight with wonder. But before we can