Compare Chaucer’s feeling respecting birds (from Canace’s falcon,1 to the nightingale, singing, “Domine, labia—” to the Lord of Love) with the usual modern British sentiments on this subject. Or even Cowley’s:—
What prince’s choir of music can excel
That which with in this shade does dwell,
To which we nothing pay, or give?
They, like all other poets, live
Without reward, or thanks for their obliging pains!
‘Tis well if they become not prey.
Yes; it is better than well; particularly since the seed sown by the wayside [LE: Matthew xiii. 4.] has been protected by the peculiar appropriation of part of the church-rates in our country parishes. See the remonstrance from a “Country Parson,” in The Times of June 4th (or 5th; the letter is dated June 3rd), 1862:— “I have heard at a vestry meeting a good deal of higgling over a few shillings’ outlay in cleaning the church; but I have never heard any dissatisfaction expressed on account of that part of the rate which is invested in 50 or 100 dozens of birds’ heads.”2 (If we could trace the innermost of all causes of modern war, I believe it would be found, not in the avarice nor ambition of nations, but in the mere idleness of the upper classes. They have nothing to do but to teach the peasantry to kill each other.)1
Notes by editors of the Library Edition
1. For Canace’s falcon, see The Squieres Tale, lines 411 seq., and for another reference to Canace, see Modern Painters, vol. iii. (5.274); for “Domine, labia” (from the verse in the Psalms with which matins began), see The Court of Love. For other references to the birds of Chaucer, see Harbours of England, § 12 (13.23); Eagle’s Nest, § 56, where several stanzas are quoted from The Cuckow and the Nightingale; and Love’s Meinie, §§ 35–38, where Ruskin quotes the company of birds in The Romaunt of the Rose. The passage from Cowley is in his piece called “The Garden,” line 60, etc.
2. “You have noticed, I suppose,” wrote Ruskin to his father, with reference to this passage (Annecy, April 12, 1863) “the bye-meaning in the reference (of church rates being paid for by birds’ heads) to protection of seed by the wayside—‘Some fell by the wayside, and the fowls came and devoured them up.”‘ Compare Ruskin’s Introduction to R. G. Sillar’s Usury, § 6 (reprinted in a later volume of this edition), where this note is referred to.
Last modified 14 March 2019