last light.  Yet how delightful is it to reflect that such effects are within the span of a few square yards of canvass, and how ennobling is the recollection that genius, (ill-fostered as it has been in the case of the painter before us) enables one man to produce such sublime and agreeable impressions on his fellows.  To step from the busy pave of New Bond-street and its busy whirl of fashion to this placid meer of reflection is a contrast almost too severe for some of the puling votaries of London gaiety:  yet the scene teems with deep-souled poetry.  Some such feelings as those so touchingly expressed in Lord Byron’s Ode to Napoleon, on his first exile, flit through the memory:—­

  Then haste thee to thy sullen isle,
    And gaze upon the sea;
  That element may meet thy smile,
    It ne’er was ruled by thee! 
  Or trace with thine all idle hand
  In loitering mood upon the sand
    That earth is now as free.

Perhaps we ought not to mention an idea we sometimes entertain—­that our readers may imagine we are partial to Mr. Haydon, and that we pay an undue share of attention to his works.  The truth, however, is that his pictures always work upon us with greater intensity than those of any other living artist.  Further, we know Mr. Haydon but by his works.  We are acquainted with the original of Pharaoh, in his great picture of the Plague, but this association has nothing to do with our admiration of Mr. Haydon’s genius.  One of the specimens—­Eucles—­will not soon be absent from our mind’s eye; and for days after we first saw it, the sorrowful mother, and the ghastly, falling figure of the warrior, haunted our imagination at every turn.

* * * * *

THE SELECTOR; AND LITERARY NOTICES OF NEW WORKS.

* * * * *

THE ARCHITECTURE OF BIRDS.

This is another volume of the delightful Zoological series of the Library of Entertaining Knowledge.  We have already a volume and a half of Quadrupeds from the Menageries, a volume of the Transformations of Insects, and another of their Architectural Labours.  The present, in well-chosen continuity of a novel plan of illustrating the Animal economy, is devoted to “an examination of Birds in the exercise of their mechanical arts of constructing Nests.”  “This work,” observes the ingenious Editor, “is the business of their lives—­the duty which calls forth that wonderful ingenuity, which no experience can teach, and which no human skill can rival.”  The few introductory pages include a rapid sketch of the methods of classifying Birds adopted by some of the most distinguished naturalists, in which their characteristics are stripped of the jargon of technicality and hard words:  thus, “Diurnal” birds are explained as “preying in the day-time;” “Piscivorous, feeding upon fish;” “Passeres, or Sparrows;”