Loves Meinie | Page 4

Falco silvarum, apivorus, Honey Buzzard; and
so on; and the naturalists of Vienna, Paris, and London should confirm
the names of known creatures, in conclave, once every half-century,
and let them so stand for the next fifty years.
8. In the meantime, you yourselves, or, to speak more generally, the
young rising scholars of England,--all of you who care for life as well
as literature, and for spirit,--even the poor souls of birds,--as well as
lettering of their classes in books,--you, with all care, should cherish
the old Saxon-English and Norman-French names of birds, and
ascertain them with the most affectionate research--never despising
even the rudest or most provincial forms: all of them will, some day or
other, give you clue to historical points of interest. Take, for example,
the common English name of this low-flying falcon, the most tamable
and affectionate of his tribe, and therefore, I suppose, fastest vanishing
from field and wood, the buzzard. That name comes from the Latin
"buteo," still retained by the ornithologists; but, in its original form,
valueless, to you. But when you get it comfortably corrupted into
Provençal "Busac," (whence gradually the French busard, and our
buzzard,) you get from it the delightful compound "busacador," "adorer
of buzzards"--meaning, generally, a sporting person; and then you have
Dante's Bertrand de Born, the first troubadour of war, bearing witness
to you how the love of mere hunting and falconry was already, in his
day, degrading the military classes, and, so far from being a necessary
adjunct of the noble disposition of lover or soldier, was, even to
contempt, showing itself separate from both.
"Le ric home, cassador, M'enneion, e'l buzacador. Parlan de volada,
d'austor, Ne jamais, d'armas, ni d'amor."
The rich man, the chaser, Tires me to death; and the adorer of buzzards.
They talk of covey and hawk, And never of arms, nor of love.
"Cassador," of course, afterwards becomes "chasseur," and "austor"
"vautour." But after you have read this, and familiarized your ear with

the old word, how differently Milton's phrase will ring to you,--"Those
who thought no better of the Living God than of a buzzard idol,"--and
how literal it becomes, when we think of the actual difference between
a member of Parliament in Milton's time, and the Busacador of
to-day;--and all this freshness and value in the reading, observe, come
of your keeping the word which great men have used for the bird,
instead of letting the anatomists blunder out a new one from their Latin
dictionaries.
9. There are not so many namable varieties, I just now said, of robin as
of falcon; but this is somewhat inaccurately stated. Those thirteen birds
represented a very large proportion of the entire group of the birds of
prey, which in my sevenfold classification I recommended you to call
universally, "hawks." The robin is only one of the far greater multitude
of small birds which live almost indiscriminately on grain or insects,
and which I recommended you to call generally "sparrows"; but of the
robin itself, there are two important European varieties--one
red-breasted, and the other blue-breasted.
10. You probably, some of you, never heard of the blue-breast; very
few, certainly, have seen one alive, and, if alive, certainly not wild in
England.
Here is a picture of it, daintily done,[7] and you can see the pretty blue
shield on its breast, perhaps, at this distance. Vain shield, if ever the
fair little thing is wretched enough to set foot on English ground! I find
the last that was seen was shot at Margate so long ago as 1842,--and
there seems to be no official record of any visit before that, since Mr.
Thomas Embledon shot one on Newcastle town moor in 1816. But this
rarity of visit to us is strange; other birds have no such clear objection
to being shot, and really seem to come to England expressly for the
purpose. And yet this blue-bird--(one can't say "blue robin"--I think we
shall have to call him "bluet," like the cornflower)--stays in Sweden,
where it sings so sweetly that it is called "a hundred tongues."
[7] Mr. Gould's, in his "Birds of Great Britain."
11. That, then, is the utmost which the lords of land, and masters of

science, do for us in their watch upon our feathered suppliants. One
kills them, the other writes classifying epitaphs.
We have next to ask what the poets, painters, and monks have done.
The poets--among whom I affectionately and reverently class the sweet
singers of the nursery, mothers and nurses--have done much; very
nearly all that I care for your thinking of. The painters and monks, the
one being so greatly under the influence of the other, we may for the
present class together; and may almost sum their contributions to
ornithology in saying that they