before him while he was drawing them, so that he saw them still in the very attitudes he had admired when they were free in the air, or on the bough; and, indeed, without such most ingenious apparatus of wires and threads as he employs, it was not in mortal man to have caught as he has done, and fixed them on paper, all the characteristic but evanescent varieties of their motion and their repose. His ingenuity is equal to his genius.

It may be useful to mention here the particulars of the plan of his work. The size is double-elephant folio-as Cuvier says, "qui approche des doubles planches de la Description (Denon's) de L'Egypte." The paper being of the finest quality-the engravings are, in every instance, of the exact dimensions of the drawings, which, without any exception, represent the birds, and other objects, of their natural size-the plates are coloured in the most careful manner from the original drawings-the work appears in numbers, of which five are published annually, each number consisting of five plates, and the price of each number is two guineas, payable on delivery. The first volume, consisting of one hundred plates, and representing ninety-nine species of birds, of many of which there are several figures, is now published, accompanied by the volume from which we have given the above interesting extracts; but which is also sold by itself, and cannot fail of finding a ready market. It is expected that other three volumes of equal size, will complete the work; and each volume of plates will, in like manner with the first, be accompanied with a volume of letterpress. These four volumes of letterpress will be most delightful reading to every body; and fit companions for those of Wilson, which we are happy to see are now in course of publication, in a cheap form, in Constable's Miscellany, under the superintendence of that eminent naturalist, Professor Jameson. In our next article on Audubon we shall speak of Wilson.

SECOND SURVEY.

AMONG the many million moods of our own mind, that come and go like rainbows, uniting heaven and earth by lovely lines of living lustre-alas! too evanescent-one has frequently visited us with soft and sweet solicitation to indite in a few wee bit bookies, in themselves a library of useful and entertaining, or, in other words, instructive and interesting knowledge-The Lives of the Naturalists.

Compare naturalists with any other sect, religious or irreligious, such as poets, philosophers, physicians, divines, admirals, generals, or worthies in general, civil or military, lay or clerical, and you will acknowledge that they are, peculiarly, a peculiar people, zealous in good works. Poets are perhaps not always very unamiable; but they are most of them oddities, and are too often unintelligible both in theory and practice. The acquired habit of em ploying a language such as no plain prose person in his seven senses might, could, would or should employ, were you to bribe him with a stamp-mastership, seems to have a strong, but, under the circumstances, neither a strange nor singular influence on the original constitution of their whole character. Let us not mince the matter-but say at once that many of them are inspired idiots, while too many drop the adjective, and are simply (it is all one in the Greek, diwrns) private gentlemen. Philosophers, again, are sad simpletons-especially such as have been afflicted with the metaphysics. It is their affair to study the human mind, as it exhibits itself to what is called the mental eye, which mental eye turns inwards, we are told, and narrowly inspects all the premises. The palace of the soul is unquestionably a building of much magnitude and magnifi cence; but the Cretan Labyrinth was a joke to it in inextricable intricacy; and though, when looking at it from without, and at some distance, you suppose it illuminated, like a large cottonmill in honour of the Glorious Unit, yet on entering it, either by vestibule or postern-gate, you find yourself in the predicament of the Jewish lawgiver on the going out of his candle-all the interior is dark as

Erebus. The mental eye, turn inwards as it may, sees not a single particle or article of any sort whatsoever, any more than in an unborn, or rather unconceived magazine, or other miscellaneous work. There is an unaccountable noise, very like the sea; and the poor phi losopher is afraid to set one foot before the other, lest he should walk over the edge of an abyss like that which, among the Peaks of Derbyshire, bears the name of an individual at once illustrious and obscure, but who, on the present occasion-for there are persons and places which we never mention 'fore ears polite-must, like most of our other contributors, remain anonymous. Nevertheless, though the truth should not always be spoken in plain and plump expression, it should always be written, figuratively or in apothegm; and therefore we say-Sages are Sumphs. Of physicians, thank heaven, we know nothing and none -except our family physician, who, we devoutly trust and pray, will long keep out of the Family Library, which treats but of the defunct. Their lives are all led in one long line of prescriptions; and though cholera morbus and other diseases are, on Burke's principlespain, danger, fear, and terror-exceedingly sublime, yet we take leave to think a colic more so than a dose of glaubers, and the patient on a bed, from which he has kicked sheets, blankets, and coverlet, and is writhing away like a wounded worm or a scotched serpent, out of all sight more impressive than the doctor, with his FEEfa-fum, sitting with all due composure on a quiet chair, where he expects the issue with repose." Of divines, thank heaven, we know even less, if that indeed be possible, than of physicians. A few of the old English ones, such as Jeremy Taylor and Isaac Barrow, were "the wale o' auld men;" and we shall ever venerate the memory of Dr. Macknight. But of the Lives of British Divines-and there are none else the less that is written the better-they are almost all so wearisomely worthyso fatiguingly free from those faults without which a man may be respectable, but can never hope to win our admiration. Therefore "dinna wauken sleepin' dougs," but let the clergy sleep and snore, and sermonize on in that peaceful privacy so engaging in the Christian life, whether

it be a life enlightened by Episcopalianism, redolent of Presbytery, or embued with dissent without dissension, a nonconformity conformable with all the laws of good citizenship, morality, and religion. With all admirals we have cultivated friendship since first we launched, on the mare parvum of a puddle pretending to be a pond, a boat of bark, with paper sails, drawing the eighth of an inch of water, tonnage one hundred wafers, and celebrated in the naval annals of Mearns, under the name of The Butterfly, for freight and passage apply to the King of the Fairies, in the holms of Humby, close by the Brigg of Yearn. Since that service, we have occasionally circumnavigated the globe, till, in fact, we began to get sick of doubling Cape Horn. The last great action, in which we more than assisted, was the attack on Algiers. We stood by the side of the gallant Mylne, in the form of a volunteer, and are ready to say that considerable execution was done on our quarter-deck, by the splinters of our crutch. We attribute our deafness to the noise we made in the world on that day, but we cannot lament the loss of a single sense-a sufficient number remain unimpaired-incurred in liberation of the Christian captives. Campbell's Lives of the Admirals is one of our vade-mecums, and so is the Naval Chronicle, which, from the necessary number of volumes, became, however, rather a heavy work. James's Naval History-we love to carry our head high even in sleep-we use as a pile of pillows on Clerk of Eldin's book about Breaking the Line (an old achievement), which has long been our bolster; and had we not got through so much of our longevity, we should cheerfully accept Mr. Murray's very handsome, indeed generous offer, of five thousand guineas, for a more philosophical and poetical and political history of the flag that has "braved a thousand years the battle and the breeze." But we reluctantly leave the glory of that great work to Basil Hall, than whom the British navy contains not a man better skilled in the science, not even excepting Marryat, both of pen and cutlass. He is a true son of a sea-gun. Generals, again, are our particular friends, "and that is sure a reason fair" not to write their biographies. Impartiality could not be reasonably expected

from a person not only on the crutch, but the staff. To that excellent periodical, then, the United Service Journal, we leave our "great commanders" alike of the battalion, light-bobs, and grenadiers-not forgetting the rifle-brigade, the bravest of the brave, and with all kind regards to Captain Kincaid, whose Memoirs of the Green-Glancers would inspire with valour a constitutional coward, had he even been suckled by a White Doe. Peace to the manes, and fame to the name of Sir Sidney Beckwith! A man, as Napier says, who was equal to any emergency, and more than once in Spain retrieved a disastrous day. As for Napier himself, his "Spanish Campaigns" are immortal. His famous passage about "the astonishing infantry," the fifteen hundred unwounded survivors of the six thousand British heroes, crowning the hill with fire, and dyeing it in blood, at Albuera, will be quoted as long as we are a military people, and that we trust will be till we fade away within the Millennium, (yet we devoutly hope afar off,) as the most spirit-stirring specimen, in any tongue, of the moral and physical sublime.

The sooner,

too, that J. G. P. R. James, (why not the whole alphabet at once?) the author of the History of Chivalry, and of those admirable romances, Richelieu, Darnley, De L'Orme, and Philip Augustus, lets us hear his trumpet the better-sounding its points of war, a reveille to the "Commanders" now sleeping in the dust-all their brows, before imagination's eyes, crowned and shadowed with unwithering laurels. Of worthies in general, civil and military, we have neither space nor time, business nor leisure, now to say one half of what they deserve-so we hand them over-and from him they will receive the best treatment—to Patrick Tytler, Esq., the ingenious, learned, and eloquent historian of Scotland, a country which contains, we verily believe, more worthies than all the rest of the world.

The gentle reader must be pleased to observe, that having announced our intention to show that Naturalists are the only people who deserve having their lives taken, we have been betrayed by the benignity of our nature into an animated panegyric on all other mortal men. This is so like us. We assume the appearance of the satirical—