What! shall not a single hare, or pheasant, or partridge, or plover, or even a solitary grouse, be spared from the swoop of this destroying kite? Not one. Richard Griffiths Welford, Esquire, Barrister-at-law, has undertaken to rouse the nation from its deadly trance. Yet a few years, and no more shall the crow of the gorcock be heard on the purple heath, or the belling of the deer in the forest, or the call of the landrail in the field. No longer shall we watch at evening the roe gliding from the thicket, or the hare dancing across the lawn. They have committed a crime in a free-tradeland--battened incontinently upon corn and turnips--and, therefore, they must all die! Grain, although our ports are to be opened, has now become a sacred thing, and is henceforward to be dedicated to the use of man alone. Therefore we are not without apprehension that the sparrows must die too, and the thrushes and blackbirds--for they make sad havoc in our dear utilitarian's garden--and the larks, and the rooks, and the pigeons. Voiceless now must be our groves in the green livery of spring. There shall be no more chirping, or twittering, or philandering among the branches--no cooing or amorous dalliance, or pairing on the once happy eve of St Valentine. All the _fauna_ of Britain--all the melodists of the woods--must die! In one vast pie must they be baked, covered in with a monumental crust of triumphant flour, through which their little claws may appear supplicantly peering upwards, as if to implore some mercy for the surviving stragglers of their race. But stragglers there cannot be many. Timber, according to our patriotic Welford, is, "next to game, the farmer's chief enemy!" What miserable idiots our infatuated ancestors must have been! They thought that by planting they were conferring a boon upon their country; and in Scotland in particular they strove most anxiously to redeem the national reproach. But they were utterly wrong: Welford has said it. Timber is a nuisance--a sort of vegetable vermin, we suppose--so down must go Dodona and her oaks; and the pride of the forests be laid for ever low. Nothing in all broad England--and we fear also with us--must hereafter overtop the fields of wheat except the hedgerows! Timber is inimical to the farmer; therefore, free be the winds to blow from the German ocean to the Atlantic, without encountering the resistance of a single forest--no more tossing of the branches or swaying of the stems--or any thing save the steeples, fast falling in an age of reason into decay, the bulk of some monstrous workhouse, as dingy and cheerless as a prison, and the pert myriads of chimney-stalks of the League belching forth, in the face of heaven, their columns of smoke and of pollution! Happy England, when these things shall come to pass, and not a tree or a bush be left as a shelter for the universal vermin! No--not quite universal, for a respite will doubtless be given to the persecuted