continues to colour the most ordinary emotion, | and tens of thousands are few; but the ornias the common things of earth look all lovelier thologist knows the seasons when death is in imbibed light, even after the serene moon that least afflictive-he is merciful in his wisdom had yielded it is no more visible in her place! -for the spirit of knowledge is gentle-and Most gentle are such transitions in the calm thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," of nature and of the heart; all true poetry is reconcile him to the fluttering and ruffled plufull of them; and in music how pleasant are mage blood-stained by death. 'Tis hard, for they or how affecting! Those alternations of example, to be obliged to shoot a Zenaida tears and smiles, of fervent aspirations and of dove! Yet a Zenaida dove must die for Auduquiet thoughts! The organ and the Eolian bon's Illustrations. How many has he loved harp! As the one has ceased pealing praise, in life, and tenderly preserved! And how we can list the other whispering it-nor feels many more pigeons of all sorts, cooked in all the soul any loss of emotion in the change- styles, have you devoured-ay twenty for his still true to itself and its wondrous nature-one-you being a glutton and epicure in the just as it is so when from the sunset clouds it turns its eyes to admire the beauty of a dewdrop or an insect's wing. his own abstemious lips. same inhuman form, and he being contented at all times with the plainest fare-a salad perhaps of water-cresses plucked from a spring in Now, we hear many of our readers crying the forest glade, or a bit of pemmican, or a waout against the barbarity of confining the free fer of portable soup melted in the pot of some denizens of the air in wire or wicker Cages. squatter-and shared with the admiring chilGentle readers, do, we pray, keep your com-dren before a drop has been permitted to touch passion for other objects. Or, if you are disposed to be argumentative with us, let us just walk down-stairs to the larder, and tell the public truly what we there behold-three brace of partridges, two ditto of moorfowl, a cock pheasant, poor fellow,—a man and his wife of the aquatic or duck kind, and a woodcock, vainly presenting his long Christmas bill"Some sleeping kill'dAll murder'd.” The intelligent author of the "Treatise on British Birds" does not condescend to justify the right we claim to encage them; but he shows his genuine humanity in instructing us how to render happy and healthful their imprisonment. He says very prettily, "What are town gardens and shrubberies in squares, but an attempt to ruralize the city? So strong is the desire in man to participate in country pleasures, that he tries to bring some of them even to his room. Plants and birds are sought after with avidity, and cherished with delight. With flowers he endeavours to make his apart and fields, as he listens to the wild sweet melody of his little captives. Those who keep and take an interest in song-birds, are often at a loss how to treat their little warblers during illness, or to prepare the proper food best suited to their various constitutions; but that knowledge is absolutely necessary to preserve these little creatures in health; for want of it, young amateurs and bird-fanciers have often seen, with regret, many of their favourite birds perish." Why, you are indeed a most logical reasoner, and a most considerate Christian, when you launch out into an invective against the cruelty exhibited in our Cages. Let us leave this den of murder, and have a glass of our home-ments resemble a garden; and thinks of groves made frontignac in our own Sanctum. Come, come, sir-look on this newly-married couple of CANARIES. The architecture of their nest is certainly not of the florid order, but my Lady Yellowlees sits on it a well-satisfied bride. Come back in a day or two, and you will see her nursing triplets. Meanwhile, hear the ear-piercing fife of the bridegroom!-Where will you find a set of happier people, unless perhaps it be in our parlour, or our library, or our nursery? For, to tell you the truth, there | is a cage or two almost every room of the Now, here we confess is a good physician. house. Where is the cruelty-here, or in your | In Edinburgh we understand there are about blood-stained larder? But you must eat, you reply. We answer-not necessarily birds. The question is about birds-cruelty to birds; and were that sagacious old wild-goose, whom one single moment of heedlessness brought last Wednesday to your hospitable board, at this moment alive, to bear a part in our conversation, can you dream that, with all your ingenuity and eloquence, you could persuade him-the now defunct and dissected that you had been under the painful necessity of eating him with stuffing and apple-sauce? five hundred medical practitioners on the human race-and we have dog-doctors and horsedoctors, who come out in numbers-but we have no bird-doctors. Yet often, too often, when the whole house rings, from garret to cellar, with the cries of children teething, or in the hooping-cough, the little linnet sits silent on his perch, a moping bunch of feathers, and then falls down dead, when his lilting life might have been saved by the simplest medicinal food skilfully administered. Surely if we have physicians to attend our treadmills, and regulate the diet and day's work of merciless ruffians, we should not suffer our innocent and useful prisoners thus to die unattended. Why do not the Ladies of Edinburgh form themselves into a Society for this purpose? It is not in nature that an ornithologist should be cruel-he is most humane. Mere skin-stuffers are not ornithologists-and we have known more than one of that tribe who would have had no scruple in strangling their own mothers, or reputed fathers. Yet if your Not one of all the philosophers in the world true ornithologist cannot catch a poor dear has been able to tell us what is happiness. bird alive, he must kill it—and leave you to Sterne's Starling is weakly supposed to have weep for its death. There must be a few vic-been miserable. Probably he was one of the tims out of myriads of millions—and thousands most contented birds in the universe. Does confinement-the closest, most unaccompanied | ing themselves, so it seems, with drawing up, confinement-make one of ourselves unhappy? Is the shoemaker, sitting with his head on his knees, in a hole in the wall from morning to night, in any respect to be pitied? Is the solitary orphan, that sits all day sewing in a garret, while the old woman for whom she works is out washing, an object of compassion? or the widow of fourscore, hurkling over the embers, with a stump of a pipe in her toothless mouth? Is it so sad a thing indeed to be alone? or to have one's motions circumscribed within the narrowest imaginable limits? Nonsense all! by small enginery, their food and drink, which soon sickens, however, on their stomachs, till, with ruffled plumage, they are often found in the morning lying on their backs, with clenched feet, and neck bent as if twisted, on the scribbled sand, stone-dead. There you saw pale youths--boys almost like girls, so delicate looked they in that hot infected air which ventilate it as you will, is never felt to breathe on the face like the fresh air of liberty—once bold and bright midshipmen in frigate or firstrater, and saved by being picked up by the boats of the ship that had sunk her by one Then, gentle reader, were you ever in a double-shotted broadside, or sent her in one Highland shieling? Often since you read our explosion splintering into the sky, and splashRecreations. It is built of turf, and is literallying into the sea, in less than a minute the thunalive; for the beautiful heather is blooming, der silent, and the fiery shower over and gone wild-flowers and walls and roof are one sound-there you saw such lads as these, who used of bees. The industrious little creatures must almost to weep if they got not duly the dearhave come several long miles for their balmy desired letter from sister or sweetheart, and spoil. There is but one human creature in when they did duly get it, opened it with tremthat shieling, but he is not at all solitary. He bling fingers, and even then let drop some nano more wearies of that lonesome place than tural tears-there we saw them leaping and do the sunbeams or the shadows. To himself dancing, with gross gesticulations and horrid alone he chaunts his old Gaelic songs, or oaths obscene, with grim outcasts from nature, frames wild ditties of his own to the raven or whose mustached mouths were rank with sin the red-deer. Months thus pass on; and he and pollution-monsters for whom hell was descends again to the lower country. Perhaps yawning-their mortal mire already possessed he goes to the wars-fights-bleeds-and re- with a demon. There, wretched, wo-begone, turns to Badenoch or Lochaber; and once and wearied out with recklessness and despemore, blending in his imagination the battles ration, many wooed Chance and Fortune, who of his own regiment, in Egypt, Spain, or Flan- they hoped might yet listen to their prayersders, with the deeds done of yore by Ossian and kept rattling the dice-cursing them that sung, sits contented by the door of the same gave the indulgence-even in their cells of shieling, restored and beautified, in which he punishment for disobedience or mutiny. There had dreamt away the summers of his youth. you saw some, who in the crowded courts What has become-we wonder-of Dart-"sat apart retired,"-bringing the practised moor Prison? During that long war its huge skill that once supported, or the native genius and hideous bulk was filled with Frenchmen- that once adorned life, to bear on beautiful aycontrivances and fancies elaborately executed with meanest instruments, till they rivalled or outdid the work of art assisted by all the ministries of science. And thus won they a poor pittance wherewithal to purchase some little comfort or luxury, or ornament to their per sons; for vanity had not forsaken some in thei rusty squalor, and they sought to please her, their mistress or their bride. There you saw accomplished men conjuring before their eyes, on the paper or the canvas, to feed the long ings of their souls, the lights and the shadows of the dear days that far away were beautifying some sacred spot of "la belle France"-perhaps some festal scene, for love in sorrow is still true to remembered joy-where once with youths and maidens "Men of all climes-attach'd to none-were there;" -a desperate race-robbers and reavers, and ruffians and rapers, and pirates and murderers mingled with the heroes who, fired by freedom, had fought for the land of lilies, with its vinevales and "hills of sweet myrtle"-doomed to die in captivity, immured in that doleful mansion on the sullen moor. There thousands pined and wore away and wasted-and when not another groan remained within the bones of their breasts, they gave up the ghost. Young heroes prematurely old in baffled passionslife's best and strongest passions, that scorned to go to sleep but in the sleep of death. These died in their golden prime. With them went down into unpitied and unhonoured gravesfor pity and honour dwell not in houses so haunted-veterans in their iron age-some self-smitten with ghastly wounds that let life finally bubble out of sinewy neck or shaggy bosom-or the poison-bowl convulsed their giant limbs unto unquivering rest. Yet there you saw a wild strange tumult of troubled happiness-which, as you looked into his heart, was transfigured into misery. Their volatile spirits fluttered in their cage, like birds that seem not to hate nor to be happy in confinement, but, hanging by beak or claws, to be often playing with the glittering wires-to be amus "They led the dance beside the murmuring Loire." There you heard-and hushed then was all the hubbub-some clear silver voice, sweet almost as woman's, yet full of manhood in its depths, singing to the gay guitar, touched, though the musician was of the best and noblest blood of France, with a master's hand, "La belle Gabrielle!" And there might be seen, in the so litude of their own abstractions, men with minds that had sounded the profounds of science, and, seemingly undisturbed by all that clamour, pursuing the mysteries of lines and numbers-conversing with the harmonious and lofty stars of heaven, deaf to all the discord and despair of earth. Or religious still even more than they-for those were mental, these spiritual-you beheld there men, whose heads before their time were becoming gray, meditating on their own souls, and in holy hope and humble trust in their Redeemer, if not yet prepared, perpetually preparing themselves for the world to come! SECOND CANTICLE. THE GOLDEN EAGLE leads the van of our Birds of Prey—and there she sits in her usual carriage when in a state of rest. Her hunger and her thirst have been appeased-her wings are folded up in a dignified tranquillity-her talons, grasping a leafless branch, are almost hidden by the feathers of her breast-her sleepless eye has lost something of its ferocity-and the Royal Bird is almost serene in her solitary state on the cliff. The gorcock unalarmed crows among the moors and mosses-the blackbird whistles in the birken shaw-and the cony erects his ears at the mouth of his burrow, and whisks away frolicsome among the whins or heather. There is no index to the hour-neither light nor shadow-no cloud. But from the composed aspect of the Bird, we may suppose it to be the hush of evening after a day of successful foray. The imps in the eyrie have been fed, and their hungry cry will not be heard till the dawn. The mother has there taken up her watchful rest, till in darkness she may glide up to her brood-the sire is somewhere sitting within her view among the rocks—a sentinel whose eye, and ear, and nostril are true, in exquisite fineness of sense, to their trust, and on whom rarely, and as if by a miracle, can steal the adventurous shepherd or huntsman, to wreak vengeance with his rifle on the spoiler of sheep-walk and forest-chase. To return to Birds in Cages;-they are, when well, uniformly as happy as the day is long. What else could oblige them, whether they will or no, to burst out into song-to hop about so pleased and pert-to play such fantastic tricks, like so many whirligigs-to sleep so soundly, and to awake into a small, shrill, compressed twitter of joy at the dawn of light? So utterly mistaken was Sterne, and all the other sentimentalists, that his Starling, who he absurdly opined was wishing to get out, would not have stirred a peg had the door of his cage been flung wide open, but would have pecked like a very game-cock at the hand inserted to give him his liberty. Depend upon it that Starling had not the slightest idea of what he was saying; and had he been up to the meaning of his words, would have been shocked at his ungrateful folly. Look at Canaries, and Chaffinches, and Bullfinches, and "the rest," how they amuse themselves for a while flitting about the room, and then, finding how dull a thing it is to be citizens of the world, bounce up to their cages, and shut the door from the inside, glad to be once more at home. Begin to whistle or sing yourself, and forthwith you Yet sometimes it chanceth that the yellow have a duet or a trio. We can imagine no lustre of her keen, wild, fierce eye is veiled, more perfectly tranquil and cheerful life than even in daylight, by the film of sleep. Perhaps that of a Goldfinch in a cage in spring, with sickness has been at the heart of the dejected his wife and his children. All his social af- bird, or fever wasted her wing. The sun may fections are cultivated to the utmost. He have smitten her, or the storm driven her possesses many accomplishments unknown to against a rock. Then hunger and thirsthis brethren among the trees;-he has never which, in pride of plumage she scorned, and known what it is to want a meal in times of which only made her fiercer on the edge of her the greatest scarcity; and he admires the unfed eyrie, as she whetted her beak on the beautiful frost-work on the windows, when flint-stone, and clutched the strong heatherthousands of his feathered friends are buried stalks in her talons, as if she were anticipating in the snow, or, what is almost as bad, baked prey-quell her courage, and in famine she up into pies, and devoured by a large supper-eyes afar off the fowls she is unable to pursue, party of both sexes, who fortify their flummery and with one stroke strike to earth. Her flight and flirtation by such viands, and, remorseless, is heavier and heavier each succeeding dayswallow dozens upon dozens of the warblers of the woods. she ventures not to cross the great glens with or without lochs-but flaps her way from rock Ay, ay, Mr. Goldy! you are wondering what to rock, lower and lower down along the same we are now doing, and speculating upon the mountain-side-and finally, draw.. by her scribbler with arch eyes and elevated crest, as weakness into dangerous descent, he is disif you would know the subject of his lucubra- covered at gray dawn far below the region of tions. What the wiser or better wouldst thou snow, assailed and insulted by the meanest be of human knowledge? Sometimes that carrion; till a bullet whizzing through her little heart of thine goes pit-a-pat, when a great heart, down she topples, and soon is despatchugly, staring contributor thrusts his inquisi- ed by blows from the rifle-butt, the shepherd tive nose within the wires-or when a strange stretching out his foe's carcass on the sward, cat glides round and round the room, fascinat-eight feet from wing tip to wing tip, with leg ing thee with the glare of his fierce fixed eyes; thick as his own wrist, and foot broad as his but what is all that to the woes of an Editor?own hand. Yes, sweet simpleton! do you not know that But behold the Golden Eagle, as she has we are the Editor of Blackwood's Magazine-pounced, and is exulting over her prey! With Christopher North! Yes, indeed, we are that her head drawn back between the crescent of very man that selfsame much-calumniated her uplifted wings, which she will not fold tili man-monster and Ogre. There, there!-perch that prey be devoured, eye glaring cruel joy, on our shoulder, and let us laugh together at neck-plumage bristling, tail-feathers fan-spread, the whole world. and talons driven through the victim's entrails and heart-there she is new-lighted on the ledge of a precipice, and fancy hears her yell and its echo. Beak and talons, all her life long, have had a stain of blood, for the murderess observes no Sabbath, and seldom dips them in loch or sea, except when dashing down suddenly among the terrified water-fowl from her watch-tower in the sky. The weekold fawn had left the doe's side but for a momentary race along the edge of the coppice; a rustle and a shadow-and the burden is borne off to the cliffs of Benevis. In an instant the small animal is dead-after a short exultation torn into pieces, and by eagles and eaglets devoured, its unswallowed or undigested bones mingle with those of many other creatures, encumbering the eyrie, and strewed around it over the bloody platform on which the young demons crawl forth to enjoy the sunshine. chapter might be introduced, setting forth how he and other youngsters of the Blood Royal were wont to take an occasional game at HighJinks, or tourney in air lists, the champions on opposite sides flying from the Perthshire and from the Argyleshire mountains, and encountering with a clash in the azure common, six thousand feet high. But the fever of love burned in his blood, and flying to the mountains of another continent, in obedience to the yell of an old oral tradition, he wooed and won his virgin bride-a monstrous beauty, widerwinged than himself, to kill or caress, and bearing the proof of her noble nativity in the radiant Iris that belongs in perfection of fierceness but to the Sun-starers, and in them is found, unimpaired by cloudiest clime, over the uttermost parts of the earth. The bridegroom and his bride, during the honey-moon, slept on Oh for the Life of an Eagle written by him- the naked rock-till they had built their eyrie self! It would outsell the Confessions even beneath its cliff-canopy on the mountain-brow. of the English Opium-Eater. Proudly would When the bride was "as Eagles wish to be he, or she, write of birth and parentage. On who love their lords"-devoted unto her was the rock of ages he first opened his eyes to the the bridegroom, even as the cushat murmuring sun, in noble instinct affronting and outstaring to his brooding mate in the central pine-grove the light. The Great Glen of Scotland-hath of a forest. Tenderly did he drop from his it not been the inheritance of his ancestors for talons, close beside her beak, the delicate spring many thousand years? No polluting mixture lamb, or the too early leveret, owing to the of ignoble blood, from intermarriages of neces- hurried and imprudent marriage of its parents sity or convenience with kite, buzzard, hawk, before March, buried in a living tomb on or falcon. No, the Golden Eagle of Glen-Fal- April's closing day. Through all thy glens, loch, surnamed the Sun-starers, have formed Albin! hadst thou reason to mourn, at the alliances with the Golden Eagles of Cruachan, bursting of the shells that Queen-bird had been Benlawers, Shehallion, and Lochnagair-the cherishing beneath her bosom. Aloft in heaven. Lightning-Glints, the Flood-fallers, the Storm-wheeled the Royal Pair, from rising to setting wheelers, the Cloud-cleavers, ever since the sun. Among the bright-blooming heather they deluge. The education of the autobiographer espied the tartan'd shepherd, or hunter creephad not been intrusted to a private tutor. Pa- ing like a lizard, and from behind the vain rental eyes, beaks, and talons, provided sus- shadow of a rock watching with his rifle the tenance for his infant frame; and in that capa- flight he would fain see shorn of its beams. cious eyrie, year after year repaired by dry The flocks were thinned-and the bleating of branches from the desert, parental advice was desolate dams among the woolly people heard yelled into him, meet for the expansion of his from many a brae. Poison was strewn over instinct, as wide and wonderful as the reason the glens for their destruction, but the Eagle, of earth-crawling man. What a noble natu- like the lion, preys not on carcasses; and the ralist did he, in a single session at the College shepherd dogs howled in agony over the carof the Cliff, become! Of the customs, and rion in which they devoured death Ha! was habits, and haunts of all inferior creatures, he not that a day of triumph to the Sun-starers of speedily made himself master—ours included. Cruachan, when sky-hunting in couples, far Nor was his knowledge confined to theory, but down on the greensward before the ruined reduced to daily practice. He kept himself in gateway of Kilchurn Castle, they saw, left all constant training-taking a flight of a couple to himself in the sunshine, the infant heir of of hundred miles before breakfast-paying a the Campbell of Breadalbane, the child of the forenoon visit to the farthest of the Hebride Lord of Glenorchy and all its streams! Four Isles, and returning to dinner in Glenco. In talons in an instant were in his heart. Too one day he has flown to Norway on a visit to late were the outcries from all the turrets; his uncle by the mother's side, and returned ere the castle-gates were flung open, the golden the next to comfort his paternal uncle, lying head of the royal babe was lying in gore, in sick at the Head of the Cambrian Dee. He the Eyrie on the iron ramparts of Ben Slarive soon learned to despise himself for having once-his blue eyes dug out-his rosy cheeks torn yelled for food, when food was none; and to and his brains dropping from beaks that sit or sail, on rock or through ether, athirst and an hungered, but mute. The virtues of patience, endurance, and fortitude, have become with him, in strict accordance with the Aristotelian Moral Philosophy-habits. A Peripatetic Philosopher he could hardly be called -properly speaking, he belongs to the Solar School-an airy sect, who take very high ground, indulge in lofty flights, and are often Lost in the clouds. Now and then a light for revelled yelling within the skull !-Such are a few hints for "Some Passages in the Life of the Golden Eagle, written by Himself,"-in one volume crown octavo-Blackwoods, Edinburgh and London. O heavens and earth!-forests and barnyards! what a difference with a distinction between a GOLDEN EAGLE and a GREEN GOOSE! There, all neck and bottom, splay-footed, and hissing in miserable imitation of a serpent, lolling from side to side, up and down like an | of men on earth shooting eagles with their ill-trimmed punt, the downy gosling waddles mouths; because the thing is impossible, even through the green mire, and, imagining that had their mouthpieces had percussion-locksKing George the Fourth is meditating mischief had they been crammed with ammunition to against him, cackles angrily as he plunges the muzzle. Had a stray sparrow been flutinto the pond. No swan that "on still St. tering in the air, he would certainly have got Mary's lake floats double, swan and shadow," a fright, and probably a fall-nor would there so proud as he! He prides himself on being have been any hope for a tom-tit. But an a gander, and never forgets the lesson instilled eagle-an eagle ever so many thousand feet into him by his parents, soon as he chipt the aloft-poo, poo!—he would merely have muted shell in the nest among the nettles, that his on the roaring multitude, and given Sardanaancestors saved the Roman Capitol. In pro- palus an additional epaulette. Why, had a cess of time, in company with swine, he grazes string of wild-geese at the time been warping on the common, and insults the Egyptians in their way on the wind, they would merely have their roving camp. Then comes the season shot the wedge firmer and sharper into the air, of plucking-and this very pen bears testi- and answered the earth-born shout with an mony to his tortures. Out into the houseless air-born gabble-clangour to clangour. Where winter is he driven—and, if he escapes being were Mr. Atherstone's powers of ratiocination, frozen into a lump of fat ice, he is crammed and all his acoustics? Two shouts slew an till his liver swells into a four-pounder-his eagle. What became of all the other denizens cerebellum is cut by the cruel knife of a phre- of air-especially crows, ravens, and vultures, nological cook, and his remains buried with a who, seeing two millions of men, must have cerement of apple sauce in the paunches of come flocking against a day of battle? Every apoplectic aldermen, eating against each other mother's son of them must have gone to pot. at a civic feast! Such are a few hints for Then what scrambling among the allied troops! "Some Passages in the Life of a Green And what was one eagle doing by himself "upGoose," written by himself-in foolscap oc- by yonder?" Was he the only eagle in Assytavo-published by Quack and Co., Ludgate ria-the secular bird of ages? Who was Lane, and sold by all booksellers in town and looking at him, first a speck-then falteringcountry. then fluttering and wildly screaming-then plump down like a stone? Mr. Atherstone talks as if he saw it. In the circumstances he had no business with his "sunny eye growing dark." That is entering too much into the medical, or rather anatomical symptoms of his apoplexy, and would be better for a medical journal than an epic poem. But to be done with it-two shouts that slew an eagle a mile up the sky, must have cracked all the tympana of the two million shouters. The entire army must have become as deaf as a post. Nay, Sardanapalus himself, on the mount, must have been blown into the air as by the explosion of a range of gunpowdermills; the campaign taken a new turn; and a revolution been brought about, of which, at this distance of place and time, it is not easy for us to conjecture what might have been the fundamental features on which it would have hinged-and thus an entirely new aspect given to all the histories of the world. Poor poets must not meddle with eagles. In the Fall of Nineveh, Mr. Atherstone describes a grand review of his army by Sardanapalus. Two million men are put into motion by the moving of the Assyrian flag-staff in the hand of the king, who takes his station on a mount conspicuous to all the army. This flag-staff, though "tall as a mast"-Mr. Atherstone does not venture to go off to say with Milton, "hewn on Norwegian hills," or "of some tall ammiral," though the readers' minds supply the deficiency—this mast was, we are told, for “two strong men a task " but it must have been so for twenty. To have had the least chance of being all at once seen by two million of men, it could not have been less than fifty feet high-and if Sardanapalus waved the royal standard of Assyria round his head, Samson or O'Doherty must have been a joke to him. However, we shall suppose he did; and what was the result? Such shouts arose that the solid walls of Nineveh were shook, "and the firm ground made tremble." But this was not all. "At his height, A speck scarce visible, the eagle heard, What think ye of that, John Audubon, Charles Bonaparte, J. Prideaux Selby, James Wilson, Sir William Jardine, and ye other European and American ornithologists? Pray, Mr. Atherstone, did you ever see an eagle-a speck in the sky? Never again suffer yourself, oh, dear sir! to believe old women's tales zas. He was What is said about the lion, is to our minds equally picturesque and absurd. among the "far-off hills." How far, pray? Twenty miles? If so then, without a silver ear-trumpet he could not have heard the huzIf the far-off hills were so near Nineveh as to allow the lion to hear the huzzas even in his sleep, the epithet "far-off" should be altered, and the lion himself brought from the interior. But we cannot believe that lions were permitted to live in dens within ear-shot of Nineveh. Nimrod had taught them "never to come there no more"-and Semiramis looked sharp after the suburbs. But, not to insist unduly upon a mere matter of police, is it the nature of lions, lying in their dens among faroff hills, to start up from their sleep, and "breathe hot roarings out" in fierce reply to the shouts of armies? All stuff! Mr. Atherstone shows off his knowledge of natural his |