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 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, living, appeal so strongly to the aesthetic feelings in us and is not so universal a favourite. This, too, will doubtless come in time. Speaking for myself, and going back to the former subject, little as I like to see men feeding on larks, rather would I see larks killed and eaten than thrust into cages. For in captivity they do not "sweeten" my life, as the Maidenhead guidebook writer would say, with their shrill, piercing cries for liberty, but they "sing me mad." Just as in some minds this bird's music--a sound which above all others typifies the exuberant life and joy of nature to the soul--cannot be separated from the cooked and dished-up melodist, so that they turn with horror from such meat, so I cannot separate this bird, nor any bird, from the bird's wild life of liberty, and the marvellous faculty of flight which is the bird's attribute. To see so wild and aerial a creature in a cage jars my whole system, and is a sight hateful and unnatural, an outrage on our universal mother. This feeling about birds in captivity, which I have attempted to describe, and which, I repeat, is not sentimentality, as that word is ordinarily understood, has been so vividly rendered in an ode to "The Skylarks" by Sir Rennell Rodd, that the reader will probably feel grateful to me for quoting a portion of it in this place, especially as the volume in which it appears--_Feda, with Other Poems_--is, I imagine, not very widely known: