Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 edition. Excerpt: ...be none the wiser. His love for butterflies (which sometimes crops up in unexpected places) is shown by BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS the introduction of a fine Peacock, basking on the wall close to the nest.1 Passing over the Sacred Poetry (but commending it to the reader), we find in Eliza Cook's Poems a fine design illustrating the lines on the Ruins of Babylon, where an Eagle Owl screams at a couple of sleeping Jackals and arouses them. In the next we have the artist at his best. This represents a rookery in a fierce March gale. The birds (with which we are on a level), are rudely interrupted in their nesting, and balance themselves, swinging and swaying to and fro, while their plumage is roughened by the wind which drowns their "loud caw caw." This is not Wolf's only rookery, for (not to mention the little one in Johns' British Birds), he contributed a very pleasing version under the title of "Rebuilding," to The Illustrated London News for April 8, 1871; the operations, both in the mansion below and trees above, going on as peacefully as in the other version they are disturbed. One other book, Lyrics of Ancient Palestine, must be added to the short list I have given, for the sake 1 If we wish for a foil to the illustrations I have named we may find a very perfect one in the Montgomery, by W. Harvey; a good example of a kind of illustration once common enough and probably admired enough, and not extinct even now. It is one of the illustrations of " Greenland" and gives the impression of some thirty badly stuffed and very doubtful made-up specimens of birds having been pinned quite indiscriminately to a sheet. The apostle of this school of bird caricaturists (we cannot call them ornithologists, or artists) is...
