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led Tas room is an emblem very apt to set forth some an as the robin pretty of note, colour, and carriage.

I bove a ver get low ir professors that are sincere; and jeun II sce with them, and to be in their company, as if dine ma the good mats crumbs. They pretend also, that therefore they frequen the hose of the godly and the appointments of the Lord; mr memens, the rim, they catch and gobble up spiders, de na migury and swallow down sin like water.

I scarsa brd ke the wren- the viewless wren,” as Tarisvart als n-should be a bird of necromancy;" yet such is the mose. It's even more curious that the poets should avoid witressing to the fan Berd ink-lore is full of wren superstitions: how be obalmed the kingship of all the birds by a fraud;1 how the devil once entered in s mle body; how a lovely but wicked siren used its form to decry men to their destruction; and how it is a good Credokte

The wren, the wren, the king of all birds,
St. Stephen's dry was caught in the furze.
Sing holy, sing ay, sing ivy, sing holly,
A drog just to drink to scare melancholy.

And hunted be is to this day in many parts of England as a pious practice. Per contra, the wren is the object of the robin's affections, and as such receives from the bird of the ruddy breast a reflective sanctity.

Malisons, malisons, mair than ten,

Who harries the queen of heaven's wren.

And as everybody knows

The robin and the wren

Are God Almighty's cock and hen.

Yet neither in the one aspect nor the other do the poets refer to the popular little subject of rustic tradition, "the tiny woodland dwarf." With them it is "the soft wrens" who "light rustling among the leaves and twigs"

Their pretty gossip spread,

Or join in random roundelays;

"the busy wren," and "the wren with his little quill.”

But, perhaps, the sweetest stanza is that of Jean Ingelow's, herself the sweetest of singers :

It was decided in a parliament of the birds that the one that flew highest hould be their king. The wren hid itself on the eagle's back, and when the eagle 1 flown the highest the wren fluttered a little higher still.

With head beneath her wing,

A little wren was sleeping,

So near, I had found it an easy thing
To steal her for my keeping..

Could anything be more perfectly in sympathy with the wren?

The woodpecker has an abundance of tradition in the past and folk-lore in the present, but except for a solitary allusion to Picus in one of Hood's poems, and Montgomery's reference to the life of toil to which it was condemned by our Lord, the mythical antecedents and current superstitions of "the Taffie" are never referred to. Indeed, in all the range of English poetry, from Chaucer to Wordsworth, it would be difficult to collect as many as ten references to this picturesque and poetical bird, and I believe impossible to collect twelve.

The legend of the owl being once a baker's daughter, is sometimes transferred in folk-lore to the woodpecker, and Montgomery's line

Thus am I ever labouring for my bread-

refers to the punishment inflicted on the baker's daughter by our Saviour, in consequence of her having refused Him and His disciples food.

Then our Lord waxed wroth and said, "Since you loved me so little as to grudge me a morsel of food, you shall have this punishment: you shall become a bird and seek your food between bark and bole, and never get a drop to drink save when it rains." He had scarce said the last words before she was turned into a great black woodpecker, or Gertrude's bird, and flew from her kneadingtrough right up the chimney. And till this very day you may see her flying about, with her red mutch on her head, and her body all black, because of the soot in the chimney; and so she hacks and taps away at the trees for her food, and whistles when rain is coming, for she is ever athirst, and then she looks for a drop to cool her tongue.

One of the six "orders" into which naturalists divide the birds would comprise "the waders," and the first "family" of this order are the plover folk. Of these the poets recognise four species-the oyster-catcher and the dotterel, the grey plover and the lapwing.

The oyster-catcher, under its name of "sea-pie," occurs once in Mallet, who takes the liberty of making the bird "warble"; and the dotterel, unless Wordsworth really meant a "sand-lark" when he uses the name (for sand-lark is a provincial name for the dotterel) and says it "chants a joyous song," is only referred to by Drayton, who, after remarking that it makes a dainty dish, goes on to say

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The pray arice common to this be, and specially conspicious in the lapwing of pretending to be disabled so as to tempt enemies away from the nest inds Sequent reference in the poets. Thomson, with that truly awill disregard of nature that occasionally "shags") his verse, perpetrates the following:

Around the bead

Of wandering swain the willte-winged plover wheels
Her sounding fight, and then directly on

The long excursion skims the level lawn,

To tempt him from her nest.

After this, how beautifully do Shenstone's lines read:—

The plover fondly tries

To lure the peasant from her nest,
And fluttering on with anxious cries,
Too plainly shows her tortured breast.

O let him, conscious of her care,

Pity her pains and learn to spare!

The plover is a type of inconstancy, and in Scotland is held to
One of this poet's peculiar poeticisms.

be ill-omened; and several Scotch poets refer to it in this sense. Thus Burns

and Scott

Thou green-crested lapwing, thy screaming forbear;

Obsequies sung by the grey plover flying.

Grahame and Leyden are more precise, and give the traditional reason for the bird's ill repute :

But, though the pitying sun withdraws his light,
The lapwing's clamorous hoop attends their flight,
Pursues their steps, where'er the wanderers go,
Till the shrill scream betrays them to the foe.
Poor bird where'er the roaming swain intrudes
On thy bleak heaths and desert solitudes

He curses still thy scream, thy clamorous tongue,
And crushes with his foot thy moulting young.

Ill-omened bird, oft in the times
When monarch owned in sceptre but the name,

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Bird of woe! even to the tomb thy victims by thy wing
Were haunted; o'er the bier thy direful cry

Was heard.

Ill-omened bird,

She never will forget, never forget,

Thy dismal soughing wing, and doleful cry.

In the south of Scotland the lapwing is still looked upon as an unlucky bird. Mr. Chatto, in his "Rambles in Northumberland and the Scottish Border," refers to "the persecution to which the Covenanters were exposed in the reign of Charles II. and his bigoted successor;" and, quoting Dr. Leyden, alludes to the tradition that "they were frequently discovered to their pursuers by the flight and screaming of the lapwing." Hence the fact of this bird being regarded as unlucky in Scotland.1

Spenser's "Thracian king lamenting sore" is, of course, a reference to Tereus, who, in some Englished versions of the myth, was turned into a lapwing and not into a hoopoe. The same confusion of these two birds occurs in the Bible, where for "hoopoe should be read "lapwing.”

PHIL. ROBINSON.

English Folk Lore, by T. F. Thiselton Dyer.

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A MODERN SYBARITE.

LTHOUGH few readers of the present day would echo Lord Byron's enthusiastic praise of "Vathek," and most would find in its incidents and descriptions as much of the absurd and bombastic as of the terrible and sublime, it must always be conceded a high place among the imaginative works of its class, and acknowledged to be an excellent imitation of the extravagances of Eastern fiction. But, it may be asked, who does read "Vathek" nowadays? Most people have heard of the Hall of Eblis, and many have read the famous description in some book of extracts, but of the adventures of the impious Caliph with the beautiful Nouronihar, and his wicked mother Carathis, once almost as familiar as the story of “Aladdin” or the "Forty Thieves," there is nearly universal ignorance. "Vathek " is now ranged among that peculiar class of solitary fictions-solitary in that you never hear their authors' names associated with any other work, such as Moore's "Zeluco," Croly's "Salathiel," Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein," Hope's "Anastasius"-which enjoyed exceptional popularity in their time, and have now become merely titles and nothing more. The sensation which "Vathek" excited was due probably as much to the extraordinary wealth of its author, his mode of life, and the mysterious interest which surrounded him, as to any literary merit it could claim.

The Beckfords were English settlers in the West Indies at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The great-grandfather of the author of "Vathek" was Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica, and his grandfather was President of the Council in that island; his father, although born in Jamaica, was educated at Westminster, having been sent over to England at the age of fourteen. Being enormously wealthy, he soon became a prominent personage. In 1747 he entered Parliament, and ranged himself on the side of the elder Pitt. Between 1762 and 1770 he was thrice Lord Mayor of London; indeed, William Beckford, as all readers of the history of this period know, was a very celebrated man in his day; he spoke out boldly against the introduction of Hessian and Hanoverian troops, and he bearded George III. for some discourtesy the King showed to a deputation

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