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described as the feeling for nature, which is not universal. Thus, one man will dine with zest on a pheasant, partridge, or quail, but would be choked by a lark; while another man will eat pheasant and lark with equal pleasure. Both may be good, honest, moral men; only one has that something which the other lacks. In one the soul responds to the skylark's music "singing at heaven's gate," in the other not; to one the roasted lark is merely a savoury morsel; the other, be he never so hungry, cannot dissociate the bird on the dish from that heavenly melody which registered a sensation in his brain, to be thereafter reproduced at will, together with the revived emotion. It is a curious question, and is no nearer to a settlement when one of these two I have described turns round and calls his neighbour a gross feeder, a worshipper of his belly, a soulless and brutish man; and when the other answers "pooh-pooh" and goes on complacently devouring larks with great gusto, until he is himself devoured of death.
To those with whom I am in sympathy in this matter, who love to listen to and are yearly invigorated by the skylark's music, and whose souls
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are yearly sickened at the slaughter of their loved songsters, I would humbly suggest that there is a simpler, more practical means of ending this dispute, which has surely lasted long enough. It goes without saying that this bird's music is eminently pleasing to most persons, that even as the sunshine is sweet and pleasant to behold, its silvery aerial sounds rained down so abundantly from heaven are delightful and exhilarating to all of us, or at all events, to so large a majority that the minority are not entitled to consideration. One person in five thousand, or perhaps in ten thousand, might be found to say that the lark singing in blue heaven affords him no pleasure. This being so, and ours being a democratic country in which the will or desire of the many is or may be made the law of the land, it is surely only right and reasonable that lovers of lark's flesh should be prevented from gratifying their taste at the cost of the destruction of so loved a bird, that they should be made to content themselves with woodcock, and snipe on toast, and golden plover, and grouse and blackcock, and any other bird of delicate flavor which does not,
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living, appeal so strongly to the aesthetic feelings in us and is not so universal a favourite.