moderate, a very decided republican, for, sober in mind as in apparel, he sets Ms face against such vain frivolities as the tumbling of pigeons, the meretricious dancing of peafowl, and the gaudt bedizenment of the minivets; holding that life is real, life is earnest, and, while worms are to be found beneath the grass, to be spent in serious work. To quote “ane aunciente clerke,” he “obtests against the chaunting of foolish litanies before the idols of one’s own conceit”; would “chase away all bewildering humors and fancies”; and would say with the clerke “that, though the cautelous tregœtour, or, as the men of France do call him, the jongleur, doth make a very pretty play with two or three balls which seem to live in the air, and which do not depart from him, yet I would rather, after our old English fashion, have the ball tossed from hand to hand, or that one should propulse the ball aginst the little guichet, while another should repel it with the batting staff. This I hold to be the fuller exercise.” The myna therefore views with some displeasure the dilettante hawking of bee-eaters and the leisurely deportment of the crow-pheasant, cannot be brought to see the utility of the luxurious hoopoe’s crest, and loses all patience with the koel-cuckoo for his idle habit of spending his forenoons in tuning his voice. For the patient kingfisher he entertains a moderate respect, and he holds in esteem the industrious woodpecker; but the scapegrace parrot is an abomination to him; and had he the power, the myna would altogether exterminate the race of humming-birds for their persistent trifling over lilies. Life with him is all work, and he makes it, as Souvestre says, “a legal process.” Of course he has a wife, and she celebrates each anniversary of spring by presenting him with a
