That was last year; and this year, 1880, the thrushes are everywhere in this Connecticut village by the Sound. Their orange-and-tawny backs gleam in the sunshine from morning until night. There are numbers of them. Their manners are very marked. They have quite the air of conquerors. All the other birds yield them precedence, and they positively domineer over the pugnacious little English sparrow, who is content to keep in the background and watch his chance when feeding-time comes. And of all the curious things about them, what seems most inexplicable is their tameness. They have no mistrust, but eye you with an intelligent, knowing look while bringing their young to feed within half a dozen feet of you. They perch on the croquet-arches in the midst of a noisy game. They sing directly over your head with the utmost spirit and vivacity, hardly ceasing all the forenoon, and again bursting out toward evening and maintaining their song until every other bird's lay is hushed in the twilight. White of Selborne would have delighted in such a freak on the part of these pretty gay strangers, who have left secluded swampy haunts, the deep dells where the blackberries twine and the daisies and clover blossom, for our close-cut lawns and elm- and willow-shaded nooks.--A.T. LITERATURE OF THE DAY. Alexander Pope. By Leslie Stephen. (English Men-of-Letters Series.) New York: Harper & Brothers. The interest of this series, which increases rather than diminishes--as one might have feared would be the case--with each succeeding volume, lies very much in the fact that the list of writers, almost as long and varied as that of the subjects, is a representative one. It comprises men who have won distinction in different departments--as novelists, historians, scholars, scientific expounders--but who here meet in the common field of biographical criticism and work together under the same limitations and conditions. Hence their performances give us not so much a measure of their individual powers as of the tone of thought and intellectual depth of the class to which they belong. However diverse their abilities and special fields of observation or research, their general range of knowledge, methods of study and ideas of life are very much the same. They are collectively "men of culture," as the writers of Queen Anne's time were "wits," and it is the qualities associated with that term, rather than any distinct gifts or characteristics, that are here called into play. Mr. Trollope's _Thackeray_ was perhaps an exception--a black spot on the otherwise immaculate whiteness. In a different way the general effect would have been still more seriously impaired if Mr. Ruskin's co-operation had been invited. The outcroppings of a vulgar egotism might indicate a substratum necessary to be taken into account, but it would have been a clear loss of labor to follow the leadings of any eccentric vein. One might wonder at the absence of Mr.