Professor Adams, the celebrated discoverer of the planet Neptune, I used to meet early in my married life, at the house of my elderly brother-in-law, Mr. Potts. And when I returned to live in Cambridge (1863) I came to know him well. Of his distinctions in his own line it is not for me to speak. What struck me so much in him was his general alertness and interest in many subjects. He was a lively and delightful talker, had a quick sense of humour, and did not disdain a joke, or even a pun. One of Adams's humorous remarks, at a dinner of the Philosophical Society, I have related elsewhere, but may perhaps recall here. One of the company was concluding the chief after-dinner speech about the proceedings of the Society for the past year. He pointed to the book of the proceedings,' lying on the table near him, adding, But of all the proceedings this year, gentlemen, you will agree with me that one of the best is this philosophical proceeding' (waving his hand at us, the assembled diners). Illustrated with plates,' flashed out Adams in a loud whisper to his neighbour.

In the character of this eminent man, simplicity, modesty, and reverence were combined. We may read, indeed, of these in Kepler, Newton, and other great men: I had personal experience of them in Professor Adams. He was of high thoughts, yet of humble mind. Another who to great learning joined simplicity and goodness was E. B. Cowell, the first Professor of Sanskrit. He went up to Cambridge in 1857, and I soon came to know him. Our common philological tastes drew us together, and we had many a walk in company. My wife's sister said that we went out deriving: this phrase led once to an amusing mistake. Mrs. Potts happened to tell Mrs. Cowell that the Professor and I were out deriving.' She anxiously exclaimed, Oh, I hope Mr. Green will keep the reins. The Professor can't drive.'

An outstanding memory is of Richard Okes, Provost of King's from 1850 to 1889. My King's Scholarship began within a year of his Provostship. He had been my father's fag as a boy at Eton; and master and fag continued friends through life. My chief early memory of him at Eton belongs to a day when I was out for a walk with my elder brother and one or two of his friends, either butterfly hunting or jumping. We were caught in the open, unable to shirk, by Okes and another master, and were asked our names. I, in much alarm, said I was not an Eton fellow (it was before I entered, 1843). Our

captors seemed amused: no harm resulted to any of us, but the encounter was told to my father. Then, I remember that at the opening of the New Fives' Courts, Okes, with others, wrote some amusing verses. In later years, when my brother and I were up at King's, the Provost and Mrs. Okes were very kind to us: we were often at the Lodge. My brother and some of his friends, Arthur Coleridge especially, used to sing there, and in some of the old English glees Okes himself took an effective bass part.

6

There must be still many who remember Okes's outward personality. He once said to Balston, that he had thought buckram necessary to assume when he became a schoolmaster, and had worn it ever since.' He did so, in a way, even when Provost at Cambridge. Yet he unbent, and was genial and kind to well-known friends. Of his early Eton friendship with my father I have a written record in a Greek quatrain on his leaving Eton, to which my father had then returned as master Here is an exact copy.

Πεμπω σοὶ τόδε γράμμα τὸ σὸν γέρας ὡς πόθ ̓ ὑπέστην

αὐτοφυὲς μὲν ἐμῆς καὶ χερὸς ἠδὲ νόου.

Οἴχομαι οὐκέτ ̓ ἄδακρυς, ἐμῆς δὲ σοὶ ὡς τόδ ̓ ἀπελθὼν

Σῆμα λίπον τέχνης σῆμα φιλοφροσύνης. R.O. 1817.

Okes often said good things: he could pun and make humorous speeches. Of these many have been recorded in A. D. C.'s book on Eton. It was he who put into the mouth of the discrowned Bavarian king in 1840 the words, in reference to Lola Montez, part-cause of his ruin, wλa,' 'I'm undone.' But ἔλωλα, nothing can be better in its way than the quotation from the old Greek Grammar' rule about Ionic reduplications. An innkeeper, Jones, in Wales, pleaded in defence of his exorbitant charges, high-priced times.' Okes remarked to his companion consolingly, Iones in auctis temporibus geminatione uti solent. I wrote an English version of this pun, when A. D. C. published his book on Eton in 1896; but the pun I had heard before: Times are like tenses, which (we know) admit of augmentation: Dear times drive Jones Ionian-wise to use reduplication.

But the wit of the allusion flashes less plainly for a later day; nobody now remembers the old Eton Greek Grammar.'

VOL. XXXI.-NO. 185 N.S.

W. C. GREEN. 43

THE WILD BIRD'S THROAT.

AUTUMN opens a new year of English bird-song. In September, after some weeks of silence, almost, the redbreast sings anew in sweet earnest; whilst, towards its close, or more often early in October, one morning or early noon the first notes we have heard for many weeks from a song-thrush are breathed through a cool, serene air.

I confess I find my estimate of the relative merits of birds' songs often changing slightly. Thus, when I am among the hollow groves and brakes, blackcaps in full song above and all around me, I set blackcaps high above all birds save nightingales-above blackbirds and song-thrushes and garden-warblers. That is a May or early June experience. There is a like experience in March, when many blackbirds by the sea are fluting in the cluster pines, the weather being delicate and fair-the first melting days of early Spring. The blackbird then sounds almost peerless, indeed in his wholly different vein equal of the nightingale. The garden-warbler-perhaps once or twice in a season-even he can rank with the highest. Afterwards I feel these values have been set somewhat too high, and I readjust them.

But I never feel I have over-valued the first wonderful notes of the autumn song-thrush. Their sweetness and purity are above praise. If I made a list of twelve, if I made a list of six, of the best events of the year in the plant and bird and insect world in England, I should put in it the first thrush-notes heard in autumn. Another event in this list of twelve or of six would be the hatching from their chrysalids of the two pearl-bordered fritillary butterflies of our May coppices in the south of England; and a third, I think, to judge by last spring's experience, would be the full flowering of the lovely little germander speedwell. What a blue is that speedwell! Near Tunis in April, and again in Sicily, I found a speedwell in bloom which was intensely blue, a vivid burning blue, and I forgot germander;

but in May woods in England, when once more I saw germander in full bloom, I knew there could be nothing lovelier.

The value of bird-song is not to be appraised apart from the exquisite charm which bird-life has for so many of us. I have often touched on this, because I have noticed it is overlooked by critics of bird-music. Truly a bird's song would amount to little enough if considered absolutely apart from the lovely spright of the bird and the beauty of its haunts. An exception to this may be the song of the nightingale at its best. Imagine a man with highly trained ear, and profound appreciation of music and melody, who, never having heard a nightingale, one day suddenly hears a nightingale in full song; further, imagine that he has never even heard of a nightingale and has not the least notion that these sounds come from a bird. Would he be moved by them? I suppose he might be moved somewhat, but even so how much must he lose, knowing nothing of nightingales and their beauty and spright and of the literature and tradition about them, and caring nothing for birds! Take away from the bird's song the feeling for the bird, I doubt whether the songs of even the nightingale and garden-warbler and blackcap are of much worth as music pure and simple. But allow for that feeling, deep and joyous, and bird-song is one of the loveliest, choicest sensations we know.

Here are two or three notes which I wrote about the nightingale's song one evening after exchanging an hotel at Charing Cross for the lawn of a Hampshire cottage: On stone-still, pitch-dark nights such as we have in May-nights with what a spell! the world is a very sounding-board for nightingales. It is very good to go quietly out of doors late on a May night, when the last light is out and the village sleeps, and to wait in the grave stillness for that first "low piping sound more sweet than all." It begins slow, intense, wailing; then quickens and enlivens, and leads up to breathless passages, rattling clamorous, marvellous for power and execution. It is the musketry of music, full of flash and brilliance.'

"Brilliant" one feels to be the exact word for the nightingale, and brilliance is peculiar to the nightingale among English singing-birds; it should not be said of thrush or blackbird. Nor should one call the sedge-bird brilliant in song, though his staying power is so astonishing at night by the river and some at least of his notes are so good.'

To stand on the soppy grass one tranced night near moist mid-May, listening in the stillness and dark for the nightingales, and then next night to look down from hotel heights at the straining, glaring light of a city-this is a curious experience. Two night worlds so near, after all, in mere mileage and yet in such utter opposition! It is not easy at the time we are experiencing one thing to comprehend how the other, too, is being enacted at the same moment, and is equally real.'

The

The three chief singers among our English birds of passage are nightingale, blackcap, and garden-warbler. There is a fourth singer on the list of summer birds' whose merit is high, in its way singular-the sedge-warbler. But it has scarcely at all the merit of music. His song at its best is extraordinary; but at its best, as at its worst, it is full of harsh notes, full of jumbled odds and ends. In it we may nearly always catch the chink and clatter of excited blackbird, the sharp 'spink' of the chaffinch challenge, the coarse chaffer and chirrup of sparrows. In the day I am not often much impressed by this song from the sedge. Once or twice at night it has struck me as simply wonderful. I woke one June night at the Crook and Shears inn by Bransbury Common on the Test and heard the bird pour out a loud breathless song, strange in power and charm. It must have continued at least five minutes without a pause. night was ink-dark and very still; only a low murmur came from the Bullington stream, which near by enters the common to join the river Test a mile or so down. We cannot hear a song like this at dead of night and doubt-what we doubt in the day -that the sedge-warbler at times is even a wondrous singer. The rich June night gives a magic to his notes which they lack at another hour. Still, though after that experience I know well the gift of this little bird, I would not class him with the three woodland warblers. His feat is of quite another quality. His immense spirit, his power of continuity, are his merit, rather than anything like melody. Now real melody, musical merit apart from the environment of the singer, its beauty or its associations, is in the songs of the three woodland warblers-garden-warblers, blackcap, nightingale. The best descriptions of bird-song in any English book I know are two or three in White's Selborne.' Particularly I recall the exquisite thumb-nail sketch of the singing blackcap. How strange White did not know the garden-warbler! He confused