fed he would watch the nursery door, which opened off the kitchen, until he got it ajar, when he would leap upon the dressing-table and spend a couple of hours in admiring himself in the looking-glass, preening his feathers and strutting about and kur-dooing to his alter ego with the most beauish, self-satisfied air imaginable, the poor bird being evidently under the impression that his own reflection was a Mademoiselle Ring-dove of irresistible attractions, and whom he persuaded himself he was on these occasions busily courting in the manner most approved of amongst the most fashionable circles of ring-dovedom. His death was a singular one. A large Aylesbury duck, with whom he used to have constant quarrels, he being invariably in fault and always the aggressor, got a hold of him one day near her ducking pond, and in a scuffle, which the ring-dove himself had causelessly provoked, dragged him into the water, and beat him with her wings until he was, like Ophelia, "drown'd, drown'd." We never see these very handsome wild birds, or hear their soft melodious cooing of summer eve from the neighbouring woods, but we think of Shenstone's beautiful lines-- "I have found out a gift for my fair: I have found where the wood-pigeons breed; But let me that plunder forbear, She will say 'twas a barbarous deed: For he ne'er could be true, she averr'd, Who could rob a poor bird of its young; And I lov'd her the more when I heard Such tenderness fall from her tongue. "I have heard her with sweetness unfold How that pity was due to a dove; That it ever attended the bold, And she called it the Sister of Love. But her words such a pleasure convey, So much I her accents adore, Let her speak, and whatever she say, Methinks I should love her the more." In the same poem--the Pastoral Ballad--occurs this exquisite verse:-- "When forced the fair nymph to forego, What anguish I felt at my heart! Yet I thought--but it might not be so-- 'Twas with pain she saw me depart. She gazed as I slowly withdrew; My path I could hardly discern: So sweetly she bade me adieu, I thought that she bade me return." But alas, and woe the while! William Shenstone of the Leasowes, with his many tuneful contemporaries, are forgotten, or at least unread, by the present generation, and the poetasters of our day claim Parnassus, its Castalian spring and Temple of Apollo, for their own! All we can is that in rê poetica the taste of an age tolerant of such an usurpation is little to be commended.