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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE

Birds in
Eighteenth-Century
Literature
Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology,
1700–1840

Edited by
Brycchan Carey
Sayre Greenfield
Anne Milne
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

Series Editors
Susan McHugh
Department of English
University of New England
Biddeford, ME, USA

Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK

John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing
an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of
human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences
that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology
and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-­
disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the sepa-
ration of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and political
stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we locate and
understand the agency of animals in human cultures?
This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the
‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of as
the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may have
codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a wholly
other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and to ani-
malise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representations of ani-
mals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally read as
objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically human con-
cerns), this series significantly extends the new insights of interdisciplinary
animal studies by tracing the engagement of such figuration with the material
lives of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to
or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic
engagements of literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate
natural history. We publish studies of the representation of animals in literary
texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to the disci-
pline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The series focuses
on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related discussion of
the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and film to fine
art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera) with
which English studies now engages.

Series Board
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14649
 Brycchan Carey • Sayre Greenfield
Anne Milne
Editors

Birds in Eighteenth-
Century Literature
Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700–1840
Editors
Brycchan Carey Sayre Greenfield
Department of Humanities Division of Humanities
Northumbria University University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Greensburg, PA, USA

Anne Milne
Department of English
University of Toronto Scarborough
Toronto, ON, Canada

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

ISBN 978-3-030-32791-0    ISBN 978-3-030-32792-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2020
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Cover illustration: ‘Portrait of Master Hare (with bird)’ Unknown artist after Sir Joshua
Reynolds. From The Connoisseur Volume L (January-April, 1918): 182

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This book addresses the topic of the eighteenth-century bird in literature
by examining literary representations of birds from across the world in an
age of expanding European colonialism. It offers important new
perspectives into the ways birds populate and generate cultural meaning
in a variety of literary and non-literary genres from 1700 to 1840 as well
as throughout a broad range of ecosystems and bioregions. It considers a
wide range of authors, including some of the most celebrated figures in
eighteenth-century literature such as John Gay, Henry Fielding,
Laurence Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Cowper, Mary
Wollstonecraft, Thomas Bewick, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth,
and Gilbert White.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, and Anne Milne

2 Avian Encounters and Moral Sentiment in Poetry from

Eighteenth-Century Ireland 17
Lucy Collins

3 Ortolans, Partridges, and Pullets: Birds as Prey in Henry

Fielding’s Tom Jones 39
Leslie Aronson

4 ‘In Clouds Unnumber’d’: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘Birds

and Insects’, Speculative Ecology, and the Politics of
Naturalism 51
D. T. Walker

5 Charlotte Smith and the Nightingale 71

Bethan Roberts

6 The Labouring-Class Bird 91

Nancy M. Derbyshire

vii
viii Contents

7 The Language of Birds and the Language of Real Men:

Wordsworth, Coleridge and the ‘Best Part’ of Language111
Francesca Mackenney

8 ‘No Parrot, Either in Morality or Sentiment’: Talking

Birds and Mechanical Copying in the Age of Sensibility131
Alex Wetmore

9 Placing Birds in Place: Reading Habitat in Beilby’s and

Bewick’s History of British Birds151
Anne Milne

10 The Literary Gilbert White173

Brycchan Carey

11 When Poet Meets Penguin: British Verse Confronts

Exotic Avifauna193
Sayre Greenfield

12 Bird Metaphors in Racialised Ethnographic Description,

c. 1700–1800211
George T. Newberry

13 ‘The Incomparable Curiosity of Every Feather!’: Cotton

Mather’s Birds231
Nicholas Junkerman

14 The Passenger Pigeon and the New World Myth of

Plenitude247
Kevin Joel Berland

Index269
 Notes on Contributors

Leslie Aronson is an independent scholar based in Michigan. Her 2014

PhD thesis was titled ‘Fictions of Consumption: Novels of the Long
Eighteenth Century, 1749–1817’. She is revising it for publication.
Kevin Joel Berland is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative
Literature, the Pennsylvania State University. He is the editor of The
Dividing Line Histories of William Byrd II of Westover (2013).
Brycchan Carey is Professor of English at Northumbria University. The
author of numerous publications on eighteenth-century literature and cul-
ture, his books include British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility:
Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Palgrave, 2005) and From
Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery,
1658–1761 (2014).
Lucy Collins is Associate Professor of English at University College
Dublin. Recent books include The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An
Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics (2014) and
a monograph Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement
(2015). Her articles on ecocritical topics have appeared in C21
Literature, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, and Green Letters.
Nancy M. Derbyshire is an assistant professor at the Borough of
Manhattan Community College, CUNY. She is the author of several
essays, including ‘The License of Listening’ (John Clare Society Journal,

ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

July 2018), ‘The Purposive Emptiness of Elizabeth Bentley’ (Women’s

Writing, January 2019), and John’s Clare’s ‘Dawnings of Genius’ (The
Explicator, forthcoming).
Sayre Greenfield is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh
at Greensburg. He has been a research fellow at Chawton House Library
and has recently contributed an essay on Shakespearean allusions to The
Cambridge Shakespeare Encyclopedia and various essays on Austen to
Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal. He is also the co-editor of Jane
Austen in Hollywood (2001) and the author of The Ends of Allegory (1998).
Nicholas Junkerman is Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore
College. He writes on early American literature, religion, and the repre-
sentation of disability. He is completing a book manuscript on Protestant
miracle discourse in early America. His article ‘“Confined Unto a Low
Chair”: Reading the Particulars of Disability in Cotton Mather’s Miracle
Narratives’ has appeared in Early American Literature.
Francesca Mackenney completed her PhD at the University of Bristol,
where she now serves as a research associate. She has also taught as a visit-
ing tutor at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has written on the
figure of the talking bird in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (2015) and
on birdsong in the poetry of John Clare (2020). She is particularly inter-
ested in the history of representations of animals in literature and
philosophy.
Anne Milne is a lecturer at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She
was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and
Society in Munich, Germany (2011) and published ‘Lactilla Tends Her
Fav’rite Cow’: Ecocritical Readings of Animals and Women in Eighteenth-­
Century British Labouring-Class Women’s Poetry (2008). Her research
highlights animals, environment, and local cultural production in
eighteenth-­century British poetry.
George T. Newberry is Honorary Research Associate in the History
Department at the University of Sheffield. His PhD thesis titled
‘Representations of “Race” in British Science and Culture During the
Eighteenth Century’ was completed there in 2011. Since then he has lec-
tured at Sheffield, the University of Nottingham, and Bishop Grosseteste
University, and has also worked in commercial ecology. His article on
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

evolutionary psychology and race theory has appeared most recently in

History Compass.
Bethan Roberts is William Noble Post-Doctoral Research Associate in
the English Department, University of Liverpool. She is the author of
Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet: Form, Tradition and Place (2019). She is
researching nightingales in literature, science, and ecology in the long
eighteenth century, and writing Nightingale for the Reaktion Press
Animal series.
D. T. Walker holds a PhD in English from Princeton University. His
book project explores the intersections of epistemology and moral phi-
losophy in eighteenth-century Britain, with particular emphasis on forms
of sociability that emerge under doubt. Further areas of research include
maps and cartography, digital humanities, Gothic affect, and film
adaptations of eighteenth-century texts. He has written on Laurence
Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Jane Austen, Thomas Hobbes,
and others.
Alex Wetmore is an assistant professor in the English Department at
University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) in British Columbia, Canada. He is
the author of Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Palgrave,
2013), and his research focuses on sites where machines and machine-­like
phenomena intersect with emotion in the 1700s.
 List of Figures

Fig. 8.1 Isaac Cruikshank. Fellow Feeling. 1801. Print on wove paper,
23 × 28 cm. (Source: Image courtesy of The Lewis Walpole
Library, Yale University) 134
Fig. 8.2 The Gouty Husband and His Young Wife. 1760. Etching on laid
paper, 13 × 21 cm. (Source: Image courtesy of The Lewis
Walpole Library, Yale University) 143
Fig. 8.3 High Life at Noon. 1769. Etching with engraving, 23 × 33 cm.
(Source: Image courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale
University)144
Fig. 9.1 Thomas Bewick. Frontispiece to volume 1 of the History of
British Birds. 1797. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas
Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) 156
Fig. 9.2 Thomas Bewick. Frontispiece to volume 2 of the History of
British Birds. 1804. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas
Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) 157
Fig. 9.3 Thomas Bewick. ‘The Golden Eagle’. From History of British
Birds, vol. 1 (1797), p. 5. (Source: Image courtesy of The
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) 161
Fig. 9.4 Thomas Bewick. ‘The Yellow Wagtail’. From History of British
Birds, vol. 1 (1797), p. 191. (Source: Image courtesy of The
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) 162

xiii
xiv List of Figures

Fig. 9.5 Thomas Bewick. ‘The Redstart’. From History of British Birds,
vol. 1 (1797), p. 209. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas
Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) 163
Fig. 9.6 Thomas Bewick. ‘Tailpiece’. From History of British Birds, vol.
2 (1804), p. 5. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas Fisher
Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) 167
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, and Anne Milne

Birds and words: of all the attributes birds have—song, colour, flavour, and
those distinctive modified scales, feathers—one thing they do not have,
except by human imposition, is words. This book is about that imposi-
tion—about the conjunction of two very different sorts of species at a time
when their relationship was changing drastically. The chapters in this vol-
ume map out many aspects of that change. Some focus on a single species,
or even an individual bird. Others consider literary representations of birds
more broadly or alongside other forms of writing about nature. All explore
the tension in literature of this period between a utilitarian view of birds

B. Carey (*)
Department of Humanities, Northumbria University,
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
e-mail: brycchan@brycchancarey.com
S. Greenfield
Division of Humanities, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg,
Greensburg, PA, USA
e-mail: sng6@pitt.edu
A. Milne
Department of English, University of Toronto Scarborough,
Toronto, ON, Canada
e-mail: anne.milne@utoronto.ca

© The Author(s) 2020 1

B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature,
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_1
2 B. CAREY ET AL.

and the trend towards granting birds their own ontological status. That is,
birds move from serving mankind (literally, metaphorically, or even spiritu-
ally) to birds having their own independent existence that humans can per-
ceive, sympathise with, rhapsodise about, or categorise, but that is indeed
separate. One might say that birds start as feathered extensions of human
concerns but, paradoxically at a time of accelerating scientific understand-
ing, become a highly visible and audible way for the eighteenth century to
grasp, a little, its own incomprehension of the natural world.
From a modern point of view, the most significant development of the
eighteenth century so far as changing attitudes to birds is concerned is the
scientific one. The view of birds as part of God’s creation maintains itself in
this period, but, as the details of ornithology accumulate, the power of birds
to illustrate divine power and ingenuity becomes less foregrounded among
the details of avian life. Literature, by nature conservative in its preservation
of metaphoric applications of birds and its repetition of avian motifs, may
seem somewhat detached from this movement. Pre-Christian and early
Christian applications of bird images and medieval motifs repeat themselves,
but with an increasing difference that makes it harder and harder, as the cen-
tury proceeds, to dissolve the birds into their metaphors. Birds gain an ever-
increasing life of their own, not just part of the divine world or the human
world, but with an existence in the natural world that demands increasing
attention. That natural world, too, becomes increasingly dynamic in the
avian-enhanced view, not existing in the same state throughout human expe-
rience, but changing by its own rhythms and with human interference.
Inevitably, literature is called to account. For example, in 1777, John
Aikin urges studious poetic engagement with natural history in An Essay
on the Application of Natural History to Poetry. He praises James Thomson
as the only ‘painter of rural beauty’ since Theocritus to have ‘look[ed]
abroad into the face of nature’.1 Despite this anthropomorphic metaphor,
Aikin meticulously documents a series of erroneous literary renderings of
animal behaviours and natural phenomena, pointing out the disfiguring
effects of figurative language. Aikin is well aware that his call is further
compromised by the creative impulses of some self-styled natural histori-
ans. In one example, he specifically points to Oliver Goldsmith, suggesting
that Goldsmith is ‘a Naturalist only of the Bookseller’s making [who] has
many descriptions in his History of Animated Nature that are wrought
with peculiar warmth of fancy and strength of colouring’.2 While Aikin
lands firmly on the side of science informing literature, his admonishment
of Goldsmith invites greater critical engagement with the experiential
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

processes and underlying practices of representing nature. Such an eco-

critical turn at the end of the eighteenth century points to the complexity
of unpacking and engaging with literary relationships with birds. The aim
of this collection is both to detail bird-human interactions as they were
experienced in the eighteenth century and to join a complementary con-
versation with other recent animal studies, ecocritical, and ecofeminist
monographs and collections that focus on British and American cultures
of nature before 1900.
To that end, this collection enacts the dynamic movement from what
Lawrence Buell calls ‘first-wave ecocriticism’, which tends towards identi-
fying and celebrating representations of nature in literary works, to what
he calls ‘second-wave ecocriticism’, a development in the discipline that
enacts greater scepticism and critical engagement with the relationships
between environmental science, environmental political ‘movements’, and
literary and cultural products.3 While all of the chapters in this collection
can be described as ecocritical, some do the ‘first-wave’ work of identify-
ing (and indeed celebrating) representations of birds in eighteenth-­century
literature, while others, especially those by Collins (Chap. 2),
Aronson (Chap. 3), Derbyshire (Chap. 6), Milne (Chap. 9), and
Newberry (Chap. 12), engage directly with issues current in animal stud-
ies, ecofeminism, bioregionalism, and intersectional analysis. What all the
chapters in the collection enthusiastically respond to is the ‘largely
untapped’ potential ‘for ecocritical approaches to [mostly] British litera-
ture between 1660 and 1800’ forcefully underlined by Christopher Hitt
in his 2004 essay, ‘Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century’.4
If broad ecocritical studies of the long eighteenth century remain
scarce, critical literature dealing specifically with birds in this period is even
sparser, despite the appearance in recent years of a small number of impor-
tant interventions from the wider perspective of animal studies. There are,
in fact, few book-length studies of birds in the literature of any period, and
none that the editors are aware of that specifically address the eighteenth
century. Of those that consider the bird in literature more generally, most
are aimed at a popular audience, often simply anthologising poetry and
quotations from longer works. A small number have attempted to synthe-
sise the contributions of birds to British culture more broadly. Of these,
Edward A. Armstrong’s The Life and Lore of the Bird in Nature, Art, Myth,
and Literature (1975), Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey’s Birds
Britannica (2005), and Cocker’s Birds and People (2013) have been most
successful, but all include eighteenth-century material alongside material
from the whole of British cultural history and are often stronger on
4 B. CAREY ET AL.

folklore than literature (Armstrong also contributed the important Folklore

of Birds to the New Naturalists series in 1958). Leonard Lutwack’s Birds
in Literature (1994) remains the best-known general scholarly study but
is not strong on eighteenth-century literature. Several books deal with
birds in the literature of Romanticism, at least in passing, including David
Perkins’s Romanticism and Animal Rights (2003), Dewey W. Hall’s,
Romantic Naturalists, Early Environmentalists: An Ecocritical Study,
1789–1912 (2014), and, less convincingly, Thomas C. Gannon’s Skylark
Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining the Bird in British Romantic and
Contemporary Native American Literature (2009). In addition, there
have been several studies of birds in the poetry of John Clare, most nota-
bly Eric Robinson and Richard Fitter’s John Clare’s Birds (1982). At the
other end of the eighteenth century, there are also a handful of studies of
the bird in medieval and early modern literature including, predictably,
several that deal with birds in Shakespeare.
Studies of animals in eighteenth-century culture are nevertheless on the
increase, although important recent books such as Nathaniel Wolloch’s
Subjugated Animals: Animals And Anthropocentrism in Early Modern
European Culture (2006) and Laura Brown’s Homeless Dogs and
Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary
Imagination (2010) have been distinctly mammalian and mostly disregard
birds. A 2010 special issue of The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies,
edited by Glynis Ridley and containing fifteen fine essays on eighteenth-­
century animals, finds room for only one essay that discuses birds any
more than in passing—an essay on the poetry of William Cowper by
Conrad Brunström and Katherine Turner. In Tobias Menely’s important
The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice (2015), however,
birds appear as a minor but consistent theme throughout, as they do in
Anne Milne’s ‘Lactilla Tends Her Fav’rite Cow’: Ecocritical Readings of
Animals and Women in Eighteenth-Century British Labouring-Class
Women’s Poetry (2008) and in John Morillo’s, The Rise of Animals and
Descent of Man, 1660–1800: Toward Posthumanism in British Literature
Between Descartes and Darwin (2018), particularly in his reading of the
bird poetry of William Cowper. Heather Keenleyside’s Animals and Other
People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century
(2016) contains a valuable analysis of parrots and other speaking birds in
the philosophy of John Locke and the literature of Daniel Defoe and
Laurence Sterne. Perhaps the most important recent discussion of
eighteenth-­ century literary birds can be found in Ingrid H. Tague’s
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century

Britain (2015), although her illuminating discussion of the practical and
moral implications of caging and buying birds of course deals with the
animals as pets, rather than in the wild. Overall, therefore, while some
work has been done, there nevertheless remains much potential for further
investigation, both of eighteenth-century birds and of eighteenth-century
animals more broadly.
The primary question posed by most recent literary animal studies,
albeit often framed in complex and highly theorised terms, is simply what
do animals signify in human discourse? It is readily apparent that represen-
tations of birds have always had a role in literature (and culture more
broadly) as similes and metaphors for attributes such as speed, unbound-
edness, or keen-sightedness, or as symbols for peace, wisdom, or the soul.
In this way, argues one school of thought, literature appropriates animals
as metaphors to serve narrowly human interests, needs, and desires—
much as animals themselves are exploited as food, as beasts of burden, or
as captive companions. Posthumanist analyses ask us to consider, or
attempt to consider, animals on their own terms and with their own inter-
ests, needs, and desires. Some scholars of eighteenth-century literature
ask, however, how these patterns of signification are negotiated in a period
which sought to extend the boundaries of sympathy through discourses of
sentiment and sensibility while simultaneously asserting the idea of the
interrelatedness of all living things through comparative investigation of
anatomy, physiology, and taxonomy. Birds, indeed all animals, come in
and out of focus in recent criticism as ideas, metaphors, symbols on the
one hand and as autonomous living beings on the other. ‘Rhetorical con-
ventions’, argues Heather Keenleyside, ‘make real-world claims’ while ani-
mal metaphors are less about ‘changing things to persons’ and more about
restoring ‘an original animality’. Eighteenth-century writers, she suggests,
increasingly rejected the Cartesian notion of animals as machines, and
instead directly compared their own experiences to those of animals. ‘The
possibility that animals are people like me’, she contends, ‘is one that
eighteenth-­century writers repeatedly register by way of the figure of per-
sonification’.5 Tobias Menely argues ‘for an understanding of sensibility,
and particularly of the dynamics of sympathy, as oriented around questions
of communication’. The key is the eighteenth-century’s ‘interest in the
thorny problem of conceptualising the relation of natural signs (such as
“countenances, gestures, voices, and sounds”) to instituted signs (arbi-
trary, conventional, and symbolic)’.6 As Keenleyside shows at length,
6 B. CAREY ET AL.

speaking birds such as parrots and starlings challenged any simple dichot-
omy between the natural and the instituted sign, and forced eighteenth-­
century writers to question what constituted ‘personhood’ itself. As Nancy
M. Derbyshire puts it in Chap. 6 of this collection, ‘at the heart of this
debate between posthumanism and humanism is the question of whether
animal figuration is exclusively anthropomorphic’.
The authors whose chapters make up this collection pay attention to
these and other recent developments in animal studies, but just as often
approach the texts from the critical position of eighteenth-century literary
history. This is perhaps unavoidable since scholarly discussion of birds in
the literature of this period is scarce, whereas approaches grounded in
close reading, historicism, and cultural materialism are numerous. But
even these more traditional approaches can have much to say when turned
towards new objects of attention. In this collection, we consider a close
reading of a poem about a nightingale or a study of an ornithologist’s lit-
erary sources and influences of as much value as a highly theorised eco-
critical study of avian semiotics. Indeed, while poets and scholars have
asked what birds mean, most people simply ask what are they good for?
What uses do they have? The answers to this question run from issues of
selfishness to salvation. That is, as eighteenth-century writers remind us
time and again, birds can serve as food, as tools, as physical ornaments, as
ornaments of language, and as connections to the divine. They can con-
nect humans with the state of their environment or detach them from that
environment. Some chapters collected here, especially those by
Aronson (Chap. 3), Greenfield (Chap. 11), and Berland (Chap. 14), con-
sider birds as something that humans ingest. Sustenance or taste, however,
does not fully explain the literary uses of birds as food—that is, even this
most utilitarian of attitudes to birds is not entirely so. A taste of the wild
adds savour because the birds can be more difficult to obtain. This attitude
was established before the long eighteenth century, as in Ben Jonson’s
‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’:

        with a short-legged hen,

     If we can get her, full of eggs, and then
Lemons and wine for sauce ….
………………………………………
And though fowl, now, be scarce, yet there are clerks,
     The sky not falling, think we may have larks.
I’ll tell you of more, and lie, so you will come:
     Of partridge, pheasant, woodcock, of which some
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

May yet be there; and godwit, if we can,

     Knat, rail, and ruff, too.7

All fowl, those of the farm and those of the fields and mudflats, are food
for Jonson’s table. Yet here the merely speculative wild birds seem greater
attractions for the guests than the chicken. In eighteenth-century litera-
ture, that added menu value of wild birds grows—and also grows more
problematic. Jonson’s birds fall from the sky and simply appear on the bill
of fare. Eighteenth-century literary texts often emphasise the hunting of
birds, much more literally than the metaphoric uses of trapping in the
Renaissance, such as Polonius’s ‘springes to catch woodcocks’ (Hamlet
2.3.115). The added value in many of these texts is the human effort, and
that brings with it moral concerns, ranging from the destruction of species
to the callous killing of individual birds. And yet, even the most sentimen-
tal of eighteenth-century poets and protagonists are found hunting. The
narrator of Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling is introduced with a gun in
his hand and a dog at his side in pursuit of gamebirds.8 William Cowper,
perhaps the poet most sympathetic to birds as autonomous, feeling beings,
offers a dialogue between himself and his spaniel Beau, admonishing the
dog for killing a young bird, not because birds should not be killed but
simply because it was neither a pest nor a gamebird:

Nor was he of the thievish sort,

Or one whom blood allures,
But innocent was all his sport
Whom you have torn for yours.9

Beau’s defence is that ‘’Twas nature, sir, whose strong behest/Impell’d

me to the deed’. That poets and men of feeling should keep dogs for
pointing, flushing, and retrieving gamebirds is presented as equally natu-
ral—although the fashion for hawking, a medieval sport, was decidedly on
the decline in the eighteenth century.
In fact, the main utility of birds for literature has always been illustrat-
ing human concerns, with birds functioning as metaphors, as investigated
in the chapters of Walker (Chap. 4), Roberts (Chap. 5), Derbyshire (Chap.
6), and Newberry (Chap. 12). The longevity of such metaphors, indeed,
becomes a source of aesthetic complaint in the later eighteenth century, as
Greenfield’s chapter notes (Chap. 11), and it is certainly true that doves
and nightingales continue to represent love and falcons and eagles
8 B. CAREY ET AL.

continue to perch at the top of the human social order. The metaphors of
the eighteenth century, however, are not exactly continuations of those
from earlier periods because the relationship of humans to birds has
changed. In the eighteenth century, writers are more aware of the effort of
mankind to modify the avian world, even when read metaphorically, by
shooting doves, banishing eagles to remote regions, and identifying more
strongly and personally with the nightingales. The natural order cannot be
a neutral model for society or individuals because eighteenth-century writ-
ers are more aware than were previous generations that humans shape
their environment.
Eighteenth-century bird metaphors frequently extend into the metony-
mies of the birds, their associations rather than their features. That is, the
situations surrounding the birds themselves in their environments often
come to control the interpretations of the birds, not the resemblance of
characteristics in the birds to those in types of humans. Derbyshire’s chap-
ter (Chap. 6) illustrates how the English robin’s surroundings, in gardens
and villages, and its non-migratory habits, more than the features of the
bird itself, make the bird suitable as an emblem of the labouring-class
poets. Here and elsewhere, the voices of birds inspire comparisons with
human speech: poets often invoke likenesses of skylarks and nightingales
to themselves. Voices of birds and their human equivalents feature in a
number of chapters, including those by Roberts (Chap. 5) on the nightin-
gale and Mackenney (Chap. 7) on cage birds. However, when the gift of
speech is passed on to parrots, the comparative effect is often less pleasant,
as Newberry’s chapter (Chap. 12) on racial denigration and Wetmore’s
(Chap. 8) on mechanical copying investigate. Collins (Chap. 2), however,
finds a parrot that was considered as superior to humans in some respects,
but then the lory is a non-speaking variety. That species does not confront
us with ourselves but points to something beyond human experience.
Birds, indeed, connect people to what many believe lies beyond the
human domain, that is, with the divine. The religious worldview, although
not universal, was widespread in the eighteenth century and, while increas-
ingly challenged by scientific conceptions of the cosmos, movements such
as Methodism, Evangelicalism, and the Great Awakening showed that reli-
gious faith was far from in decline. Birds function in Christian discourse in
two main ways: as metaphors, with flying birds and particularly the skylark
and the dove representing the ascending soul, and as examples, with the
plenitude and variety of birds indicating to believers the greatness of God’s
creation. In metaphors, those avian features that more blatantly reflect
human features tend to turn birds by analogy into us: the visually and
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

vocally obvious courtship displays can stand in for human courtship, bird-
song can stand in for poetic expression, and the pecking order (or preying
order) can substitute for human social order. When the avian feature has no
clear human equivalent—the birds’ wings, for instance—the useful meta-
phor must stretch humans beyond themselves. Of course, morphologically,
the wing is analogous to the arm, but the power of directed flight for the
eighteenth century exceeded human experience. Thus, that avian aspect
must play as a metaphor for the imagination or the soul rising to God or
something outside of normal human experience. As examples, birds con-
sidered collectively could be considered by religious observers to connect
the soul to the divine by showing the power and the imagination of the
divine spirit to fill the world with such a variety of dazzling creatures, a
sense ever-growing during the eighteenth century as more and more of the
world was opened up to ornithological exploration. The chapters by
Collins (Chap. 2), Walker (Chap. 4), and, in particular, Junkerman (Chap.
13) explore birds as a way of providing links to nature’s God. After all,
many of the most prominent ornithologists of the eighteenth century, from
John Ray (1627–1705) to Gilbert White (1720–1793), were clergymen.
If birds inspired some observers to reach for the divine, they prompted
others to search within themselves (although one might argue that using
birds to seek a connection to divinity still reflects the human gaze at birds
back upon itself). In the eighteenth century, as Menely and others have
noted, birds inspired, created, or were at least the occasion for articulating
particular sorts of emotion within the mode of sensibility. To create sus-
tained feelings of sympathy towards birds, eighteenth-century culture
needed face-to-face opportunities of observation—birds in the fields flee-
ing human approach will not do. Also, such sympathy required birds in
situations that evoked pity. One can, indeed, find expressions of pity for
captured or dead birds in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Britain,
but the situations are often ones of trapping birds—the liming of birds by
fowlers—or images of birds captured or killed by hawks or cats. In these
cases, people may mark the fall of sparrows, but the suffering of the birds
is not prolonged—death follows swiftly. The clamour is nonetheless con-
siderable in the most famous instance, that depicted as coming from young
Jane Scroop in John Skelton’s Philip Sparrow, written during the first
decade of the sixteenth century:

Whan I remember again

How my Philip was slain,
Never half the pain
10 B. CAREY ET AL.

Was between you twain,

Pyramus and Thisbe,
As than befell to me.
I wept and wailed,
The tears down hailed;
But nothing it availed
To call Philip again,
Whom Gib, our cat, hath slain.10

Though Jane’s sorrow appears at considerable length, it is hard to take this

voiced concern entirely seriously, and Skelton, as the poet, is much more
diverted with displaying his wide reading in classical and English litera-
ture, as well as natural history, with a long list of birds attending the spar-
row’s funeral service. Intellectual showmanship does not promote a feeling
of sincerity, nor does the eroticism. The relationship between the young
woman and the sparrow is intimate in the classical tradition, and thus the
bond to the pet is strong:

For it would come and go

And flee so to and fro;
And on me it would leap
Whan I was asleep,
And his feathers shake,
Wherewith he would make
Me often for to wake,
And for to take him in
Upon my naked skin.
God wot, we thought no sin:
What though he crept so low?11

The sparrow is an excuse for intellectual and erotic display more than a
legitimate object of emotion. Philip Sparrow is also not caged, but flies
and hops at will. That situation is very different in the caged-bird poetry
of the eighteenth century. With a live bird in a cage, as with Laurence
Sterne’s famous starling, one can talk back to the bird, establishing an
ongoing relationship. Wetmore (Chap. 8), among the following chapters,
considers this increased eighteenth-century fashion for caged birds as pets.
Certainly, birdcages are of long standing—one is mentioned in Geoffrey
Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale (line 611)—but searches through Early English
Books Online for ‘bird cage’ or ‘birdcage’ find the expression is a relatively
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

rare one in print, with few examples before 1660, although ‘cagebird’ can
be found as listed as an English word as far back as Richard Mulcaster’s
Elementarie of 1582.12 After 1660 and throughout the eighteenth cen-
tury, the term ‘birdcage’ becomes increasingly common.
The caged bird, even without putting ‘all Heaven in a Rage’, as William
Blake so powerfully expressed it in ‘Auguries of Innocence’, has a number
of uses explored in this volume, as in the political images discussed by
Collins or the studies of birdsong explored by Mackenney (Chap. 7).13 In
these cases, birds can evoke a feeling of identification or trans-species sym-
pathy. Birds are caged or turned into pets because they are inferior beings,
but once in their cage and attended to with the proper sensibility, they
become like humans, especially through their song and denied freedom.
In the cage, birds turn into expressive and suffering individuals that can
take people out of their own perspectives as the birds are sentimentally
reimagined as other humans. Even Beau, Cowper’s bird-killing spaniel,
recognises the poet’s caged linnet as semi-human, ‘a sacred thing,/not
destined to my tooth’, while sardonically recounting his efforts to revive
the bird by licking it clean after ‘Passing his prison door,/[the linnet] had
fluttered all his strength away’. The most egregious example from
Cowper’s oeuvre is his mock-heroic ode ‘On the Death of Mrs
Throckmorton’s Bullfinch’ in which the bird is anthropomorphically
‘assassin’d by a thief’ rather than, as was actually the case, attacked by a rat.
The tragic incident prompts a macabre, yet bathetic outbreak of neoclas-
sical sensibility:

Maria weeps, the Muses mourn—

So, when by Bacchanalians torn
On Thracian Hebrus’ side
The tree-enchanter Orpheus fell,
His head alone remain’d to tell
The cruel death he died.14

The bird might have survived had it not been caged. Cowper appears to
demonstrate little sympathy for the decapitated bullfinch, even as he,
albeit facetiously, commiserates with Maria Throckmorton. But her dis-
tress, one supposes, was genuine.
Away from sentimental verse, truly adopting—or attempting to under-
stand—a perspective that is as alien as it is avian requires less personal
involvement. The eighteenth century is a period of both identification
with birds and identification of birds. For confronting what truly belongs
12 B. CAREY ET AL.

to birds perhaps the latter is more profitable, but recognition of the avian
other is not easy to achieve. Some of the chapters here look at the scientific
understanding of birds as applied to literature. This may occur on as lim-
ited a scale as recognising the sex of the singing nightingale (Roberts,
Chap. 5) or as complicated an issue as figuring out the motivations for and
nature of birdsong and whether it is analogous to human speech
(Mackenney, Chap. 7). Birds are often extracted from their habitats, such
as happens to those in cages, but the eighteenth century also makes some
steps to understand that birds are not independent of supporting environ-
ments (Milne, Chap. 9). Attempts to capture intellectually the literal elu-
siveness of birds—the fact that they disappear from what was thought of as
their habitats for entire seasons—led to much speculation on the migra-
tion patterns or hibernation patterns of various bird species (Walker, Chap.
4; Carey, Chap. 10). In their complex behaviours, birds remain a fascinat-
ing mystery, and that mystery can feed into their literary presentation.
Ornithologists try to work against the mystery, and those earlier tabula-
tors of birds in this period do so through both a categorising and a totalis-
ing impulse: they want to understand what bird species are and they want
to collect them all. This impulse seen in early ornithological manuals
serves both a scientific and a religious end: indeed, the two are not split,
as Junkerman notes (Chap. 13). It is an attempt to assert human control
over nature, and, after all, the naming of the animals is one of the earliest
injunctions of the Bible. Eighteenth-century ornithologists saw them-
selves as continuing Adam’s work. Such control is fleeting, however, for as
more and more birds are named with greater precision, so ever more new
birds are being discovered. This new abundance occurs through more
careful observation such as that of Gilbert White, when through close
measurement and attention to song he splits the chiffchaff from the willow
warbler and from the wood warbler, still a tricky business for the modern
birdwatcher (see Carey, Chap. 10). Or the increasing variety of species
may occur through the explorations of regions of the world far from the
British Isles (Greenfield, Chap. 11; Berland, Chap. 14). The attempt to
master the natural world succeeds ultimately in reminding ornithologists
that there are more birds on earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy
and that the categories used to contain the birds constantly burst their
bounds. Indeed, the dynamics of scientific investigation with its collecting
of specimens may not be so different from those of caging birds: an
attempt to constrain the birds leads to minute examination, which gives
the birds a surprising power to disconcert us.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

The elusiveness of birds tempts our control, creating a tension condu-

cive to literary effects: their songs inspire our words, their feathers inspire
our descriptions, and their flight takes our imagination beyond itself. In
the eighteenth century, the relationship of birds to humans seems at a
conscious breaking point, the attempts to categorise and list the birds
overmatched by continual discoveries of new species, the harvesting of
avian abundance registered by the diminution of birdlife, the appropria-
tion of birds metaphorically challenged by the overuse of such imagery,
and the admiration of birds for their obvious freedom in flight—that
supremely non-human avian quality—undercut by the ownership and cag-
ing and shooting of the birds so admired. Yet some escape to take a por-
tion of the literary imagination with them.

Notes
1. John Aikin, An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry
(London: J. Johnson, 1773), 5.
2. Ibid., 54.
3. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental
Crisis and Literary Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 17.
4. Christopher Hitt, ‘Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century’, College
Literature 31, no. 3 (2004): 123–47.
5. Heather Keenleyside, Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living
Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 1, 3, 6.
6. Tobias Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 3.
7. Ben Jonson, ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’, in Seventeenth-Century British
Poetry: 1603–1660, ed. John P. Rumrich and Gregory Chaplin (New York:
Norton, 2006), 89.
8. Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771), ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford:
Oxford World’s Classics, 2009), 4.
9. William Cowper, ‘On a Spaniel, Called Beau, Killing a Young Bird’ and
‘Beau’s Reply’ (1793) in The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird
and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980–1995),
III, 201–3.
10. John Skelton, Philip Sparrow, in The Renaissance in England: Non-­
dramatic Prose and Verse of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Hyder E. Rollins and
Herschel Baker (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1992).
11. Skelton, 74.
14 B. CAREY ET AL.

12. Richard Mulcaster, The first part of the elementarie vvhich entreateth chefelie
of the right writing of our English tung, set furth by Richard Mulcaster
(London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1582), 177.
13. William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’ in The Complete Poetry and Prose of
William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, Newly Revised Edition (New York:
Doubleday, 1988), 490.
14. William Cowper, ‘On the Death of Mrs Throckmorton’s Bullfinch’ (1788)
in Poems, ed. Baird and Ryskamp, III, 30–32.

Bibliography
Aikin, John. An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry. London:
J. Johnson, 1773.
Armstrong, Edward A. The Folklore of Birds: An Enquiry into the Origin and
Distribution of some Magico-religious Traditions. London: Collins New
Naturalists, 1958.
Armstrong, Edward A. The Life and Lore of the Bird in Nature, Art, Myth, and
Literature. New York: Crown Publishers, 1975.
Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed David
V. Erdman. Newly Revised Edition. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in
the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.
Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis
and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Cocker, Mark. Birds and People. London: Jonathan Cape, 2013.
Cocker, Mark, and Richard Mabey. Birds Britannica. London: Chatto and
Windus, 2005.
Cowper, William. The Poems of William Cowper. Edited by John D. Baird and
Charles Ryskamp. 3 vols. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980–1995.
Gannon, Thomas C. Skylark Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining the Bird in British
Romantic and Contemporary Native American Literature. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2009.
Hall, Dewey W. Romantic Naturalists, Early Environmentalists: An Ecocritical
Study, 1789–1912. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.
Hitt, Christopher. ‘Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century.’ College
Literature 31, no. 3 (2004): 123–47.
Jonson, Ben. ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper.’ In Seventeenth-Century British Poetry:
1603–1660. Edited by John P. Rumrich and Gregory Chaplin, 89. New York:
Norton, 2006.
Keenleyside, Heather. Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings
in the Long Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2016.
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

Lutwack, Leonard. Birds in Literature. Gainesville: University Press of

Florida, 1994.
Mackenzie, Henry. The Man of Feeling. Edited by Brian Vickers. Oxford: Oxford
World’s Classics, 2009.
Menely, Tobias. The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Milne, Anne. ‘Lactilla Tends Her Fav’rite Cow’: Ecocritical Readings of Animals
and Women in Eighteenth-Century British Labouring-Class Women’s Poetry.
Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008.
Morillo, John. The Rise of Animals and Descent of Man, 1660–1800: Toward
Posthumanism in British Literature Between Descartes and Darwin. Newark,
DE: University of Delaware Press, 2018.
Mulcaster, Richard. The first part of the elementarie vvhich entreateth chefelie of the
right writing of our English tung, set furth by Richard Mulcaster. London:
Thomas Vautroullier, 1582.
Perkins, David. Romanticism and Animal Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003.
Robinson, Eric and Richard Fitter. John Clare’s Birds. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1982.
Skelton, John. Philip Sparrow. In The Renaissance in England: Non-dramatic
Prose and Verse of the Sixteenth Century. Edited by Hyder E. Rollins and
Herschel Baker. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1992.
Tague, Ingrid H. Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-­
Century Britain. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015.
Wolloch, Nathaniel. Subjugated Animals: Animals and Anthropocentrism in Early
Modern European Culture. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2006.
 CHAPTER 2

Avian Encounters and Moral Sentiment

in Poetry from Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Lucy Collins

The relationship between human and animal worlds has a long history of
literary and artistic representation in Ireland, which was intensified by the
cultural and intellectual changes of the eighteenth century. The transition
from a Cartesian understanding of animals as without capacity for reason
and feeling to one that could accommodate the animal as an individuated
subject is reflected in the imaginative writings of the period. These increas-
ingly represent the enmeshed character of human-animal relations,
acknowledging the significance of animal life in the construction of human
meaning, but reminding us that it is always mediated by human represen-
tation.1 The bird was a popular subject for poetry during the eighteenth
century; from allegorical verse to poems of religious feeling, human
encounters with the avian Other indicate changing attitudes towards ani-
mal life, but must also be set within a framework of increasingly complex
political and social relationships. Of particular significance in this context
is the rise of moral philosophy and its implications for public discourse

L. Collins (*)
University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
e-mail: lucy.collins@ucd.ie

© The Author(s) 2020 17

B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature,
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_2
18 L. COLLINS

across the British Isles. This chapter argues that the eighteenth-century
bird poem illuminates this important intersection of aesthetic, intellectual,
and social debates.
In Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the complex
dynamics of Gaelic, Old English, and New English communities yielded
diverse attitudes towards the natural world, which were expressed in dis-
tinctive ways.2 From medieval texts in Irish and in Latin to the widely read
texts from the Renaissance period—those of Giraldus Cambrensis, Sir
John Davies, and Edmund Spenser—the representation of animal life in
Ireland signalled the contested nature of cultural identities. Certain formal
expectations shape the ways in which these texts are written and read and
they are also inflected by the specific political and social conditions. The
original colonists of the Tudor and Elizabethan plantations saw themselves
as pioneers, bringing civilisation and Protestantism to a backward land
and, in many texts from this period, the boundaries between animal and
human life in Ireland were deliberately blurred to emphasise the ‘barba-
rous’ nature of the Irish people. Poems such as John Derrick’s ‘Image of
Irelande’ from 1581 celebrate the country’s natural world while denigrat-
ing its human inhabitants, yet in the poem the presence of literary precur-
sors can also be detected—Derrick’s praise of Ireland’s birds of prey is
linked to their importance in late medieval Ireland:

The Goshauke first of the Crewe,

deserves to have the name,
The Faucon next for high attemptes,
in glorie and in fame.3

Other poems read nature as evidence of the divine: the anonymous ‘A

Battell of Birds’ (1622) recalls the spectacle of a large number of starlings
attacking one another in the skies over Cork City, an event assumed to
signal divine displeasure.4 The texts of this period form an important foun-
dation for this discussion of avian representation in eighteenth-century
Ireland because they indicate the depiction of the animal world as expres-
sive of a range of personal, political, and religious concerns.
Though written in seventeenth-century Ireland, most probably around
1663, Sir William Temple’s poem ‘On My Lady Giffard’s Loory’ likewise
foreshadows many important aspects of the eighteenth-century bird poem
in Ireland. Written for his sister on the death of her beloved bird, Temple’s
poem also gestures towards the grieving process that this woman had
 2 AVIAN ENCOUNTERS AND MORAL SENTIMENT IN POETRY… 19

lately undergone on the death of her husband.5 The depiction of the

Loory, or Lory (probably one of the lorikeets, bright parrotlike birds
native to East Asia), first emphasises the bird’s exotic characteristics. His
‘longish hawked bill’, ‘jetty eyes’, and ‘swelling breast’ are sharply delin-
eated, while the description of his plumage—‘His back a scarlet mantle
cover’d o’er. … All down his belly a deep violet hue’—shows his brilliance
to be greater than the most sumptuous garments. The belief that beauty
in nature exceeded human creative ingenuity was already in circulation at
this time, and is expressed in the emphasis on descriptive detail here, which
is given priority over poetic convention.6 If the bird’s physical appearance
is remarkable, his temperament is even more so:

No passion moving in a human breast

Was plainer seen, or livelier exprest.
No wit or learning, eloquence or song,
Acknowledg’d kindness, or complain’d of wrong,
With accents half so feeling.7

Here it is the bird’s apparent equality with—even superiority to—a human

sensibility that animates the verse and sanctions his intimacy with his
owner: he is ‘fed with her hands … nested in her bed’.8 Yet it is his unique
relation to bird life as a whole that makes this special relationship possible,
and that signals the lory as deserving of this treatment, in life and in verse.
By integrating him into human society, Temple allows this poem to speak
of the bereavement suffered by his sister in indirect terms. As well as
exploring every dimension of the bird’s life in the household—in this case,
the world of an important Anglo-Irish family—the poem obliquely con-
siders the power of metaphor itself: the vivid, exemplary figure that epito-
mizes imaginative expression.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, then, key debates about
human relationship to a non-human other are reflected in poetry, and the
next 150 years would see an increasing imaginative engagement with ani-
mal life. Awareness of the interdependency of man and animal was intensi-
fied by developments in natural philosophy, which shed new light on
creaturely experience. Humans dwelt in proximity to their non-human
counterparts, observing them and integrating these reflections into an
understanding of their own place in the world. Across the early modern
period, avian conduct provided unique ways of reading animal skills and
behaviour. The multiple roles of the bird as exotic object, close
20 L. COLLINS

companion and intelligent life form, are all to be found in Temple’s text
and are taken up by other poets in both conventional and innovative ways.
The bird becomes a familiar motif for readers in England and Ireland, but
it is not until the mid-eighteenth century that it is used to explore both
the idea and expression of emotion. By the late 1720s, significant new
philosophical writings began to investigate the concept of feeling and its
impact on human development. This sensitivity to the relationship between
self and other would shape the representation of animals in lasting ways.
The Irish Enlightenment, though national in character, was influenced
by European thought and facilitated by a growth in Ireland’s book trade
as well as by the reprinting of foreign texts for Irish readers.9 Critics such
as Luke Gibbons and Michael Neill have characterised this participation as
a form of ‘postcolonial enlightenment’: ‘In this theoretical model, Ireland
and the Irish are significant to the international movement because, in the
philosophical imagination, they served as some of the colonized, dialecti-
cal “Others” helping to define the Enlightened subject’.10 These ‘Others’
included animals and, like the Irish, they could no longer be seen as stable,
subordinate subjects. In Keith Thomas’s view, it was the close contact
between humans and their companion animals that altered philosophical
and scientific thinking on the latter’s agency: ‘[T]here is no doubt that it
was the observation of household pets which buttressed the claims for
animal intelligence and character’.11 The contained space of the poem
would become a key site for the exploration of these relationships. Though
inherited symbolic codes positioned the animal as merely a vehicle for
human concerns, the rise of moral sentiment encouraged readers to
respond with sensitivity and compassion to creaturely experience.
Key thinkers of the period were pivotal to this representational change.
Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) was one of the most important philoso-
phers of his day, and his work would have a profound influence on two
later figures: David Hume (1711–1776) and Adam Smith (1723–1790).
Born in Ulster and educated in Scotland, it was in Dublin between 1719
and 1730 that Hutcheson’s most significant writings on moral sentiment
were completed.12 In the era of the Penal Laws, the exercise of power by
one group over another was relevant to Presbyterians such as Hutcheson,
as well as to Roman Catholics, who formed the majority of those living in
Ireland. The fact that three of the most gifted moral philosophers were
Scottish or Irish suggests that their distance from the centre of empire may
have influenced their intellectual formation.13 Indeed, the role of sympa-
thy in the imperial project was a matter for debate, and the question of
 2 AVIAN ENCOUNTERS AND MORAL SENTIMENT IN POETRY… 21

whether it constituted a resistance to empire, or a means by which subjects

could be brought under imperial control, remains contentious. This con-
text undoubtedly highlights the impact of this new thinking on political
dynamics and, with this, on power relations between races, genders, and
species. Although thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and Bernard
Mandeville read benevolence towards others as a product of self-love, for
Hutcheson approval or condemnation and the pleasure or pain derived
from them precede rational thought and therefore self-interest.14 We can-
not, he argues, will ourselves to feel compassion.15 Championing the right
of private judgement, he saw moral action as generative of personal happi-
ness: ‘We have a secret sense of pleasure accompanying such of our own
actions as we call virtuous, even when we expect no other advantage from
them’.16 Hutcheson, whose reading of human nature was considerably
more positive than that of many of his peers, held drama and epic poetry
to be effective vehicles for moral instruction, since their characters were
identified as either good or evil. Most readers, he argued, would prefer
‘the most lively image’ of an object, so ‘the epic poem, or tragedy, gives a
far greater pleasure than the writings of philosophers, tho’ both aim at
recommending virtue’.17 The correlation between pleasure and virtue
draws attention to the affective power of poetry and emphasises the role
of aesthetics in shaping the representation of the human-animal bond.
This, in turn, suggests that evolving philosophical thought may demand
significant changes in the form and style of imaginative texts.
From the 1720s onwards, the increasing significance of ideas of feeling
and sympathy influenced the way the Other was conceived, and this in
turn shaped contemporary representations of avian life. Though the
breeding of birds for food and ornament, and the hunting of wild birds,
remained important pastimes in Ireland, these practices co-existed with
the representation of birds as objects of human feeling throughout the
long eighteenth century. This observation may be equally traced in the
visual arts, especially in the case of Charles Collins (c. 1680–1744), who
lived and worked in Ireland, and has been described as the greatest bird
painter of the period.18 Though he first became famous for his still-life
treatment of animals, Collins later demonstrated his skill in depicting birds
in nature. This crossing of generic boundaries exemplifies a flexible imagi-
native response to avian life in various art forms at this time and suggests
too their value as status objects. Toby Barnard has explored the presence
of birds in Ireland’s commodity culture, noting both the taming of wild
birds and the keeping of exotic animals, including parrots and canaries, as
22 L. COLLINS

pets.19 In this respect Irish landowners, and the growing middle class,
replicated the fashions of their English counterparts. This concern with
identity and social position inflected the poetry of the period, in which an
increasing consciousness of contemporary material culture mingled with
classical conventions. So, the deepening reflection on sympathy—on how
the Other may be understood—led to the co-existence of poems where
the bird is rendered in real and immediate terms, with texts where the
metaphorical power of the creature, and its long literary tradition, is clearly
the most important aspect.
The representation of wild birds from this period is a key area for the
advancement of ideas about human stewardship of the natural world. The
widespread practice of shooting birds becomes a preoccupation for many
Irish poets: some celebrate the value of tradition, as well as the excitement
of the pursuit itself; others are equivocal or explicitly critical of the killing.
The co-existence of texts depicting real avian encounters with those that
draw on a classical or literary lineage encourages some poets to play with
the relationship between these modes. Laetitia Pilkington’s 1725 poem
‘The Petition of the Birds’ gives voice to the experience of birds killed for
sport. Written when Laetitia and her husband Matthew, the poet and art
historian, were on their honeymoon, it explicitly addressed to her husband
‘on his return from shooting’, juxtaposing public action with private feel-
ing. As one poet writing to another, Pilkington uses literary conventions
to powerful effect, placing the ethics of cross-species care in the larger
moral context of human relationships:

Ah Shepherd, gentle Shepherd! spare

Us plum’d Inhabitants of Air
That hop, and inoffensive rove
From Tree to Tree, from Grove to Grove;
What Phrensy has possess’d your mind?
To be destructive of your Kind?
Admire not if we Kindred Claim
Our sep’rate natures are the same.
To each of us thou ow’st a Part
To grace thy Person, Head or Heart;20

The poem figures the act of shooting as a form of madness, and Pilkington
here appeals to rational thought rather than instinctive action. She uses
personification to appeal to masculine ideals, but the argument of the
 2 AVIAN ENCOUNTERS AND MORAL SENTIMENT IN POETRY… 23

poem rests on the reconfiguring of normative behaviour to take into

account the non-human perspective. In describing human and bird as kin-
dred, she registers her own anxieties at her husband’s deeds but extends
this sympathy beyond the human realm. The poem, which she wrote at a
country house near Ashbourne, Co. Meath, goes on to list the attributes
that the human draws from the avian world, such as sweetness of temper,
courage, and the power of observation. Her recognition of the resonance
of these associations shows a capacity to combine metaphorical and literal
readings of the lives of others. Later in the poem, Pilkington lists many
different types of birds—dove, eagle, finch, hawk, swan, robin, and stork—
and in doing so draws attention to the authenticity of representation, at
the same time as she uses formal conventions appropriate to poetic tradi-
tion. The act of calling the animals by name evokes the story of creation
but it also has a textual function, showing the power of language itself to
elicit feeling in the listener. As an integral part of Pilkington’s memoirs,
the poem draws particular attention to the boundaries between private
and public, reality and artifice. The text closes by asserting the reciprocity
of feeling between human and animal: in showing clemency the poet’s
husband will benefit from the gratitude of other living creatures and,
through the resurrection image of the phoenix, himself ascend to a higher
moral condition. This dual function aptly expresses the layered meanings
of the poem as a whole, and the extent to which poetry united personal
perspectives with shared currents of feeling.
The carelessness that attends the killing of birds for pleasure, rather
than necessity, is linked to an increasing interest in leisure and consump-
tion during this period. ‘On the Ortolans’, a poem that can be dated to
the second half of the 1720s, takes as its subject the preparation of song-
birds for the table at Dublin Castle.21 This setting frames the bird as a deli-
cacy within a culture of privilege, and speaks to other texts from the period
praising or celebrating the Lords Lieutenant of Ireland. The poet reflects
on the fate of the birds and the ‘honour’ of their death, which is greater
than either captivity or life in the wild:

Go then, my Birds, your Lives with pleasure yield,

And prove yourselves the choicest of the Field;
It is more Honour for you thus to die,
Than live in Prison, or away to fly.
The Muse, regarded by them, has prevail’d,
And now they go as fast as Ship e’er sail’d;
Not dreading any thing they haste along,
And twittle to themselves a kind of Song.22
24 L. COLLINS

The poem simultaneously insists on the passive virtue of the birds’ sacrifice
and on their agency—their power to ‘yield’ their lives to the waiting din-
ers. The ortolans, however, are oblivious to their fate; their innocent song
gives voice to their animal nature but does not communicate directly with
the human listener, affirming Adam Smith’s reservations concerning the
attribution of feeling to non-verbal animals. The poem does possess affec-
tive power, however, creating a tension between the artifice of the text and
its capacity to express the lives of others.
Within fifteen years of the publication of this poem the significant
impact of moral issues on human feeling had been explored by David
Hume in Part III of his Treatise of Human Nature: ‘An action, or senti-
ment, or character, is virtuous or vicious; why? Because its view causes a
pleasure or uneasiness of a particular kind.’23 For Hume, direct perception
of an action or object is insufficient to determine whether it is good or
evil; this can only be understood by the sentiment it prompts in the
observer. Later, Adam Smith, in his seminal work, A Theory of Moral
Sentiment (1759), asks why the mind prefers one form of conduct over
another; why it ‘denominates the one right and the other wrong; consid-
ers the one as the object of approbation, honour, and reward, and the
other of blame, censure, and punishment?’24

Sympathy … does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from
that of the situation which excites it. We sometimes feel for another, a pas-
sion of which he himself seems to be altogether incapable; because, when we
put ourselves in his case, the passion arises in our breast from the imagina-
tion, though it does not in his from the reality.25

The power of imagination to excite sympathy, even in the absence of

evident feeling in the suffering subject, is an important extension of my
exploration of the influence of moral sentiment on the poetic representa-
tion of birds. In these texts from Ireland, the poet voices a sympathetic
bond with the avian Other that particularises non-human experience, at
the same time as it allows larger issues of moral responsibility to be consid-
ered. This act of representation—insofar as it purports to speak for the
animal Other—is controversial, yet it also gives form to the kind of instinc-
tive response envisaged by both Hume and Smith. Though a moral judge-
ment is expressive of the speaker’s perspective and experience, it cannot be
limited to mere autobiography. In Hume’s argument, this initial reaction
could later be modified by the rational mind, allowing us ‘to consider the
 2 AVIAN ENCOUNTERS AND MORAL SENTIMENT IN POETRY… 25

type of character or action in general, neglecting individuating features’.26

This qualification draws attention to the relationship between the indi-
vidual and the group, between the encounter of human and bird in a
particular context, and the larger question of interspecies connection. As
James Chandler has pointed out, the capacity to reflect on one’s sensa-
tions, rather than simply being impressed by them, is essential to this
thinking.27 The felt response is a prerequisite for moral judgement, how-
ever, and the power of poetry to prompt feeling, but not to be limited by
it, is of importance here. The dynamic relationship between subject mat-
ter, poet, and reader suggests that the role of observer can be two-fold and
that the feeling that first inspired the creative act may also be invoked in
the reader, not through his or her identification with the speaker in the
poem, but rather by the revelatory power of language itself.
The recognition of feeling as essential to moral judgement takes many
forms in the Irish poetry of this period and is often expressed through the
adoption of a dialectical mode. ‘The Linnet and Goldfinch’ is a political
parable dedicated to Mr Latouche, who was deprived of his seat as MP for
the City of Dublin in 1749.28 The image of the caged songbirds reflects
their popularity as pets during the period,29 but also confirms the long-
standing symbolic value of specific subspecies. This poem is just one of a
number of Irish poems from the period to put such symbolism to specific
political use. Framed as a dialogue between linnet and goldfinch—the one
flying free, the other caged—this poem debates the value of reason over
custom. Here the power of independent thought is equated with freedom;
most people give up their independence in exchange for immediate
reward. This contention is explored though the tropes of the poem: the
heat of ‘sickly summer’ has an enervating effect, just as Chloe’s love for
her caged bird is a form of oppression—‘What Pomp could give, his Chloe
gave;/Thus oft a palace holds a slave.’30 The linnet celebrates his freedom;
unlike the goldfinch, he claims to be led by justice and reason:

Oh! rouze to Virtue, hear my Call,

Live free, or with thy Freedom fall;
Awake thy Soul, thy Shackles spurn,
To Liberty, or Dust, return.31

Both birds assert the morality of their position but the conclusion gives
most weight to the independent spirit, to action over passivity, nature over
artifice, freedom over subjection.
26 L. COLLINS

Allegorical readings place birds once again at the service of human

meaning. In practical ways too, birds remained useful to humans for sur-
vival and entertainment throughout the eighteenth century, and some-
times poets sought to combine these elements in a single text. An
anonymous Irish poem from 1777, ‘The Cock’, draws its power from the
participative nature of blood sports and the responsibility that each reader
bears in relation to shared cultural experiences. Animal combats were
sometimes judged to have an educational quality: George Wilson’s
Commendation of Cockes, and Cock-fighting (1607) interpreted the birds
not as living creatures but rather as ‘symbols of manly virtue’.32 Later writ-
ers were clearer about the real context for this sport: ‘No animal in the
world has greater courage than the cock when opposed to one of his own
species; and in every part of the world where refinement and polished
manners have not entirely taken place, cock fighting is a principle diver-
sion’, wrote Oliver Goldsmith in 1776.33 ‘The Cock’ uses a regular rhythm
and alternating rhyme to express this bravery and the bird’s natural desire
to protect his young:

Stately bird of dauntless courage!

See him with his cackling train,
Strutting o’er the busy farm-yard,
Picking up the scattered grain.
Should a neighbouring foe, advancing,
Thro’ the fence, invade his right;
Straight, indignant, he attacks him,
Death the combat ends, or flight.34

Later the human power to distort these qualities emerges:

Men, miscall’d, of brutal feelings,

Who in bar’brous sports delight,
Joy to make more gen’rous creatures
Join in fierce, unnatural fight.35

While making its disgust at those who enjoy these inhumane pursuits clear,
the poem combines several other interesting features.36 The spectacular
appearance of the cock with ‘steel’d martial weapons’ on his legs leads to
a reference to Chaucer, and these elements heighten the reader’s sense of
an animal removed from the natural habitat depicted at the opening of the
poem, as well as underpinning the text’s literary precursors. Another
 2 AVIAN ENCOUNTERS AND MORAL SENTIMENT IN POETRY… 27

interesting dimension is the juxtaposition of the singular and collective

entities in the poem. Contrary to the normal current of representation, it
is the animal that is seen as the singular figure: the cock is individualised,
the humans in the poem remain ‘the gaping croud’, ‘the madd’ning rab-
ble’.37 Bidding the muse leave the scene of depravity, the anonymous
poet—like others of the period—highlights the ways in which the poetic
process mediates, and takes responsibility for mediating, the ethical judge-
ments of its readers.
This poem highlights the implications of gendered identity, both for
animal and spectator. The image of the captive bird, in literature and art,
has long been linked to the representation of women and became a signifi-
cant trope in the work of women poets from the Romantic period, as
Paula Feldman points out:

Birds permeate verse by women … not simply as a symbol for ecstatic poetic
creation as in Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ or Shelley’s ‘To a Sky-Lark’
(though women certainly wrote their share of verse in this popular vein) but
also as a perfect metaphor to explore the conflicting desires for freedom and
for safety.38

In particular, the bird elegy offered a mode within which a female subject
could engage with this tension though a legitimate expression of emotion.
Mourning the loss of animals requires an acknowledgement of their indi-
viduality, as Juliana Schiesari argues: ‘by the act of “naming” what histori-
cally and philosophically did not have a proper name (the animal), we can
begin an act of mourning that can lead us to creative frontiers that radi-
cally revise our relation to the Other’.39 The Irish poem ‘An Elegie on the
Death of Two Goldfinches’, published in 1774, mourns a pair of (named)
birds given to the anonymous poet by Lady Mary Leslie, once his pupil.
Two memories are thus interwoven: a recollection of the birds and of their
previous owner. This modifies the problematic relation to sympathy that
the exaggerated grief for the dead animal can sometimes suggest. Here the
sorrow at the death of these creatures invokes the feelings of loss that the
poet registered at Lady Mary’s marriage and departure. He justifies his
theme by affirming the virtue of feeling for its own sake:

Affection with Virtue is join’d

It dwells with the Brave and the Free,
It warms, and ennobles the Mind,
Then, is it a Weakness in me?40
28 L. COLLINS

The role of sentiment in the poem is a complex one. It is prominent in

Lady Mary’s original motivation to rescue the nestlings and to bring
them home:

Soft Transport quick glanc’d from your Eye,

Sweet Innocence lisp’d on your Tongue;
They chirrup’d—you wish’d, with a Sigh,
To protect both the Nest and the Young.41

The poet affirms the appropriateness of the girl’s action and the happiness
of the creatures in her care.42 Her subsequent gift of the birds to him rep-
resents an exchange of feeling that is affirmed through the act of mourn-
ing as well as through its expression in verse. In addition, the birds
themselves are emblematic of enduring love. Though the male goldfinch
escapes through an open window, he returns at dusk at the call of his mate.
This lasting affection of the birds for each other indicates the poet’s own
feelings for the young woman, inseparable from those he expresses for the
avian Other.
The identification of the bird with the power of feeling is an indication
of an increasing ‘romantic’ strain in Irish poetry at the close of the eigh-
teenth century. ‘The Lamentation of Cara Pluma, a Female Pheasant’
depicts the game bird mourning her ‘husband’ after he was killed by a
fowler. The poem was published anonymously in Belfast in 1790 in the
Universal Magazine.43 It is dedicated to the gunsmith Robert McCormick,
providing a sentimental work with a clear interpretative context.44 Like
Pilkington’s text, this poem is voiced by a bird, but where the earlier text
makes a rational argument against the sport as a whole, this poem appeals
more directly to the sympathy of the reader. Using the poet as her mouth-
piece the pheasant begins by justifying her decision to speak: ‘And must I
still my grief restrain,/And not my keenest woes impart?’45 Equating avian
with human feeling, the bereaved bird draws emotional sustenance from
the landscape she shared with her mate, even though this is a place
of threat:

Now scatter’d wide our children roam,

To ’scape the bloody spaniel’s way;
The bush-clad bank we call’d our home,
The sportsman plunders for his prey.46
 2 AVIAN ENCOUNTERS AND MORAL SENTIMENT IN POETRY… 29

Not only the human but also the hunting dog is feared, and the involve-
ment of non-human species in the practice of the hunt is abhorred. The
pheasant’s desire for both security and freedom can be aligned with the
characterisation of this bird in natural history: it has ‘continued its attach-
ment to native freedom; and now wild among us, makes the most envied
ornament of our parks and forests, where he feeds upon acorns and ber-
ries, and the scanty produce of our chilling climate’.47
The dialectic of the wild and caged bird is used in many different con-
texts in eighteenth-century poetry in Ireland. In subtle ways, the move-
ment between the representation of wild birds and texts depicting birds as
pets is suggestive of a shifting cultural relationship between Britain and
Ireland during a period of increasing political upheaval prior to the Act of
Union in 1801. The role played by a discourse of sympathy in exploring
the relationship between the two islands shows the interweaving of philo-
sophical and political concerns and this process is evident in the poetry of
the period.48 The fear of the revolutionary potential of feeling was regis-
tered at the time but could be countered by asserting the close sisterly
bonds between the two islands. These affinities can be traced in textual
terms too, in the printing of poems of a specifically Irish character along-
side work imitating English literary modes.49 The extent to which poetry
from Ireland could be both distinct from, and readily assimilated into,
English literary production indicates the complex political and cultural
dynamics of the time.
Questions of intimacy were crucial to animal representation too. The
domestication of birds is a transformative process: dominance and affec-
tion shape the human-animal relationship in this setting.50 The pet is not
only a tame animal but also one whose relationship with humans offers
pleasure and companionship. This is why the bird is both the object of
admiration and affection, and functions as a conduit for emotions in the
poetry of the period. Though it has been argued that animals colluded in
their own domestication, since this represented the best opportunity for
survival,51 humans bear responsibility for the way in which this relation-
ship has evolved. Even those with benign intentions use pets for their own
gratification; poets use birds as an inspiration for their art. Human power
over the animal is expressed through the breeding of species for profit or
pleasure. Donna Haraway has noted the long history of utilitarian rela-
tionships between human and animal and, as Friedrich Engels argued
before her, these continuous ties marked a significant change in social rela-
tions over time.52
30 L. COLLINS

The plight of the captive bird has exercised commentators since antiq-
uity, but it did not give rise to widespread concern until the late eigh-
teenth century. When, in 1780, Jeremy Bentham asked, ‘The question is
not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but Can they suffer?’, he exposed
the key debates concerning the status of animals at this time.53 The removal
of the bird from its natural habitat profoundly alters the pleasure that the
bird takes in nature, and poets—most notably William Blake—would
refute the notion that suffering strengthens the avian and, by extension,
the human spirit.54 The capacity for close scrutiny that the caging of birds
afforded was linked to man’s education in the natural sciences and, domes-
tically too, the pet was perceived as an educator, encouraging feelings of
responsibility in the young.55 Yet the presence of animals in domestic set-
tings may also result in the careless exercise of power over them, or even
in instances of cruelty.56
The treatment of birds in captivity raised moral questions that were
viewed by some poets in specifically religious terms. A poem by the Ulster
poet William M’Elroy, written in the first decade of the nineteenth cen-
tury, specifically frames its argument around man’s usurpation of the
divine right of control over all living things.57 Its title, ‘The Blind Bird’s
Mournful Lamentation to the Bird Blinders’, links it to ‘The Lamentation
of Cara Pluma’ and to others that choose to personify animal life in a bid
to address the rights of the non-human. Yet this text blurs the line between
subject and object—it addresses ‘Man’ as Other, yet it does not represent
the position of the bird itself:

When shall that sympathetic tender power

Find entrance in thy cruel bower;
To thee O Man, to thee I speak,
When shall thy feeling powers awake.
That lovely bird that mourns its sight,
Thy cruel dart prolongs its night;
Its chirping cries for help in vain,
Its righteous plaints no entrance gain,
Into thy hard unfeeling breast.58

The need for man to open himself to feeling as a powerful ethical force
is clearly addressed in the poem, suggesting the circulation of ideas of
sympathy at this time. Yet though the reader is called to account, the
expression of distress at the suffering of animals can affirm not equality
between the species but rather human beings’ specific capacity for higher
 2 AVIAN ENCOUNTERS AND MORAL SENTIMENT IN POETRY… 31

feeling.59 The importance of speech in bearing witness to cruelty, and in

exhorting the listener to change his behaviour, expresses the immediacy of
the moral encounter. It is mimicked in the blinded bird’s cry for help;
again, the bird seeks to communicate with the reader through the agency
of the poet, and the failure to be receptive to its pleas compounds the act
of physical cruelty. The poem is palimpsestic in structure: two sentences,
one of four lines and one of five, are reversed in the second half of the
poem. The text therefore combines the power of rational argument with
the appeal to emotions—thought and feeling are united in ways suited to
the pantheistic thrust of the work. The impulse to have God, man, and
nature in harmony here is strong. In its second stanza, the poem dwells
specifically on the containment of the bird, not just its injury. The refer-
ence to Samson, blinded and chained by the Philistines, is also an image of
retribution: his recovering strength enabled him to revenge himself against
those who caused his suffering. Here the postscript, reminding the listener
that God cares for all living creatures, suggests that a price will be exacted
for this action. The biblical reference enters the text into the larger world
of language quoted and known, internalised by the speaker.
The role of birds in the varied poetic representations of eighteenth-­
century Ireland speaks of their imaginative significance for the poetic act
itself. Connected both to inspiration and verbal expression, these animals
suggest the close links between philosophical thought and poetic creation,
as well as the ways in which changing attitudes are represented, and modi-
fied, by particular aesthetic choices. These poems show that conventional
and innovative modes of composition remain entwined throughout the
century, though individual texts reflect changing attitudes towards both
human and non-human Others. Many of these poems effectively belong
to an English poetic tradition, but others speak directly to an Irish political
sphere, as well as with a consciousness of the fate of those far from the
centre of power. Poets domiciled in Ireland wrote from within a society
that felt badly treated: just as caged or blinded birds are powerless in the
face of human aggression, so the people of Ireland felt powerless against
the self-interest of English mercantile and political behaviour towards
them. The growth of sympathy in the course of the period is an important
way in which poets and their readers can cross the boundary between spe-
cies to seek to understand bird life more fully, as well as to broaden the
range of emotional responses possible. In this way, the bird poems of
eighteenth-­century Ireland invite an examination of the act of reading
itself and its lasting moral effects.
32 L. COLLINS

Notes
1. Erica Fudge has discussed the difficulties inherent in accessing animals in
history since they are only available to us in documents written by humans.
An emphasis on the purely textual can make the real animal disappear.
Erica Fudge, ‘A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals’, in
Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 2002), loc. 228–41.
2. Texts written in English, Irish, and Latin date from this period. These offer
differing perspectives on the relationship between humans and their envi-
ronment. Almost all of the poems under consideration here are the work
of educated Protestants. See The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An
Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics, eds Andrew
Carpenter and Lucy Collins (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014),
1–15; 63–107.
3. The poem praises the falcon, and more specifically the goshawk, the mer-
lin, and the sparrowhawk. John Derricke, ‘From: The First Part of the
Image of Irelande,’ in The Irish Poet and the Natural World, eds Carpenter
and Collins. For a general discussion of the history of poetry in Ireland
during this period, see Andrew Carpenter, ‘Poetry in English, 1690–1800’,
in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, 2 vols, eds Margaret Kelleher
and Philip O’Leary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), I,
282–319.
4. Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 77–80.
5. Sir William Temple and his sister Martha were brought up in Dublin where
their father, Sir John Temple, was Master of the Rolls. Martha married Sir
Thomas Giffard in Dublin in 1662, but he died a week later. As well as
being the most famous diplomat of his age, William Temple was a writer of
distinction. His essays on diverse subjects, from political theory to grief,
reveal the range of his interests. See Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet
and the Natural World, 108–11.
6. Erica Fudge identifies Godfrey Goodman’s Fall of Man (1616) as one
source for this conviction. Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality,
and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2006), 100.
7. Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 109.
8. Ibid., 111. The question of interspecies intimacy is explored by Laura
Brown in ‘Immoderate Love: The Lady and the Lapdog,’ Homeless Dogs
and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary
Imagination (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), 65–90.
9. For further detail on the Irish print trade during the Enlightenment, see
Máire Kennedy, French Books in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001) and ‘Reading the Enlightenment in
Ireland,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, 45.3 (Spring 2012), 355–78.
 2 AVIAN ENCOUNTERS AND MORAL SENTIMENT IN POETRY… 33

10. Sean Moore, ‘Introduction: Ireland and Enlightenment,’ Eighteenth-­

Century Studies, 45.3 (Spring 2012), 348.
11. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes to
England 1500–1800 (London: Penguin, 1983), 121
12. Hutcheson is best known for two works: An Inquiry Concerning the
Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1725) and An Essay
on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions with Illustrations on the Moral
Sense (London, 1728). See Michael Brown, Francis Hutcheson in Dublin,
1719–1739 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002).
13. In Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English
Writing, 1707–1832, Evan Gottlieb notes the importance of marginal
groups in the construction of sympathetic Britishness in the long eigh-
teenth century.
14. Thomas Duddy contrasts Hutcheson’s willingness to see virtue in the
human endeavour with what he calls the ‘unflattering moralities’ of Hobbes
and Mandeville. See Duddy, ‘Against the Selfish Philosophers: Francis
Hutcheson, Edmund Burke, and James Usher’, A History of Irish Thought
(London: Routledge, 2002), 170.
15. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning the Original of Our Ideas of
Beauty and Virtue (Glasgow: R. and A. Foulis, 1772), 126–27.
16. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 105.
17. Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions
with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (New York: Garland Publishing,
1971), 239–40.
18. Collins was described thus by Iolo Williams, who collected his work.
Though born in England, Collins was active in Ireland for part of his
career. See Nicola Figgis in The Art and Architecture of Ireland, vol. 2
(London: Yale University Press), 212.
19. Toby Barnard, Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland,
1641–1770 (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 241.
20. Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 161.
Pilkington’s poems, together with those of some of her friends, are embed-
ded in her three-volume Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington (1748–1754).
21. The author of the poem, Mr B-------r, was probably Mr Belcher, holder of
minor offices at Dublin Castle. The poem is dedicated to Lady Cartaret;
Lord Cartaret was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1724 to 1730.
22. Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 163.
23. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, analytical index by L.A. Selby-
Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1978), 471.
24. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Ryan Patrick Hanley,
intr. Amartya Sen (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 232.
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against the native strength of the other, the manners and
pusillanimity of the one against the fate-defying chivalry of the other
—had each his active workers not only in Spain, but in America,
those of Velazquez being some of them in the very camp of Cortés.
Since the royal grant of superior powers to Velazquez, this faction
has lifted its head. And now its brain works.
The messengers for Spain had scarcely left the port before these
malcontents form a plot, this time not with the sole desire to return to
a more comfortable and secure life, but with a view to advise
Velazquez of the treasure ship so close at hand. Amongst them are
to be found the priest Juan Diaz; Juan Escudero, the alguacil of
Baracoa, who beguiled and surrendered Cortés into the hands of the
authorities; Diego Cermeño and Gonzalo de Umbría, pilots;
Bernardino de Coria, and Alonso Peñate, beside several leading
men who merely countenanced the plot.[252] They have already
secured a small vessel with the necessary supplies, and the night of
embarkment is at hand, when Coria repents and betrays his
companions.
Cortés is profoundly moved. It is not so much the hot indignation
that stirs his breast against the traitors as the light from afar that
seems to float in upon his mind like an inspiration, showing him more
vividly than he had ever seen it before, his situation. So lately a lax
and frivolous youth, apparently of inept nature, wrought to stiffer
consistency by some years of New World kneading, by a stroke of
the rarest fortune he suddenly finds himself a commander of men, in
a virgin field of enterprise fascinating beyond expression, and
offering to the soldier possibilities excelled by nothing within the
century. As the mind enlarges to take in these possibilities, the whole
being seems to enlarge with it, the unstable adventurer is a thing of
the past, and behold a mighty rock fills the place. Against it heads
shall beat unprofitably. The momentous question of to be or not to be
is forever determined; it is an affair simply of life now. Life and the
power of which he finds himself possessed shall rise or fall together;
and if his life, then the lives of others. No life shall be more precious
to him than his own; no life shall be accounted precious at all that
stands in the way of his plans. To a lady who complained of the
burning of the Palatinate by Turenne, Napoleon answered: “And why
not, madame, if it was necessary to his designs?” The Palatinate! ay,
and a hundred million souls flung into the same fire, ere the one
omnipotent soul shall suffer the least abridgment. It was a small
matter, and he would do it; all the islands of the Western Inde he
would uproot and fling into the face of the Cuban governor before he
would yield one jot of his stolen advantage. Each for himself were
Velazquez, Columbus, and Charles, and the rest of this world’s great
and little ones, and Cortés would be for himself. Henceforth, like
Themistocles, though he would die for his country he would not trust
her. Return to Cuba he well knew for him was death, or ignominy
worse than death. His only way was toward Mexico. As well first as
last. All the past life of Cortés, all his purposes for the future,
concentred in these resolves to make them the pivot of his destiny.
Cortés, master of kings, arbiter of men’s lives! As for these traitors,
they shall die; and if other impediments appear, as presently we shall
see them appear, be they in the form of eye or right hand, they shall
be removed. Tyrant, he might be branded; ay, as well that as another
name, for so are great ends often brought to pass by small means.
Unpleasant as it may be, the survivors may as well bear in mind that
it will be less difficult another time.
So the conspirators are promptly seized and sentenced,
Escudero and Cermeño to be hanged, Umbría to lose his feet, and
others to receive each two hundred lashes.[253] Under cover of his
cloth Padre Diaz, the ringleader and most guilty of them all, escapes
with a reprimand. As for the rest, though among them were some
equally guilty, they were treated with such dissembling courtesy and
prudence as either to render them harmless or to convert them into
friends. “Happy the man who cannot write, if it save him from such
business as this!” exclaimed the commander, as he affixed his name
to the death-warrants. For notwithstanding his inexorable resolve he
was troubled, and would not see his comrades die though they
would have sacrificed him. On the morning of the day of execution
he set off at breakneck speed for Cempoala, after ordering two
hundred soldiers to follow with the horses and join a similar force
which had left three days before under Alvarado.[254]
Cortés’ brain was in a whirl during that ride. It was a horrible
thing, this hanging of Spaniards, cutting off feet, and flogging.
Viewed in one light it was but a common piece of military discipline;
from another stand-point it was the act of an outlaw. The greater part
of the little army was with the commander; to this full extent the men
believed in him, that on his valor and discretion they would
adventure their lives. With most men beliefs are but prejudices, and
opinions tastes. These Spaniards not only believed in their general,
but they held to a most impetuous belief in themselves. They could
do not only anything that any one else ever had done or could do,
but they could command the supernatural, and fight with or against
phantoms and devils. They were a host in themselves; besides
which the hosts of Jehovah were on their side. And Cortés measured
his men and their capabilities, not as Xerxes measured his army, by
filling successively a pen capable of holding just ten thousand; he
measured them rather by his ambition, which was as bright and as
limitless as the firmament. Already they were heroes, whose story
presently should vie in thrilling interest with the most romantic tales
of chivalry and knight-errantry, and in whom the strongest human
passions were so blended as to lift them for a time out of the hand of
fate and make their fortunes their own. The thirst for wealth, the
enthusiasm of religion, the love of glory, united with reckless daring
and excessive loyalty, formed the most powerful incentives to action.
Life to them without the attainment of their object was valueless; they
would do or die; for to die in doing was life, whereas to live failing
was worse than death. Cortés felt all this, though it scarcely lay on
his mind in threads of tangible thought. There was enough however
that was tangible in his thinkings, and exceedingly troubling.
Unfortunately the mind and heart of all his people were not of the
complexion he would have them. And those ships. And the
disaffected men lying so near them, looking wistfully at them every
morning, and plotting, and plotting all the day long. Like the
Palatinate to Turenne, like anything that seduced from the stern
purposes of Cortés, it were better they were not.
This thought once flashed into his mind fastened itself there. And
it grew. And Cortés grew with it, until the man and the idea filled all
that country, and became the wonder and admiration of the world.
Destroy the ships! Cut off all escape, should such be needed in case
of failure! Burn the bridge that spans time, and bring to his desperate
desire the aid of the eternities! The thought of it alone was daring;
more fearfully fascinating it became as Cortés dashed along toward
Cempoala, and by the time he had reached his destination the thing
was determined, and he might with Cæsar at the Rubicon exclaim,
Jacta est alea! But what would his soldiers say? They must be made
to feel as he feels, to see with his eyes, and to swell with his
ambition.
The confession of the conspirators opened the eyes of Cortés to
a fact which surely he had seen often enough before, though by
reason of his generous nature which forgot an injury immediately it
was forgiven, it had not been much in his mind of late, namely, that
too many of his companions were lukewarm, if not openly
disaffected. They could not forget that Cortés was a common man
like themselves, their superior in name only, and placed over them
for the accomplishment of this single purpose. They felt they had a
right to say whether they would remain and take the desperate
chance their leader seemed determined on, and to act on that right
with or without his consent. And their position assuredly was sound;
whether it was sensible depended greatly on their ability to sustain
themselves in it. Cortés was exercising the arbitrary power of a
majority to drive the minority as it appeared to their death. They had
a perfect right to rebel; they had not entered the service under any
such compact. Cortés himself was a rebel; hence the rebellion of the
Velazquez men, being a rebelling against a rebel, was in truth an
adherence to loyalty. Here as everywhere it was might that made
right; and, indeed, with the right of these matters the narrator has
little to do.
Success, shame, fear, bright prospects, had all lent their aid to
hold the discontented in check, but in these several regards feeling
and opinion were subject to daily fluctuations. Let serious danger or
reverses come, and they would flee in a moment if they could. And
the fleet lying so near was a constant temptation. Cut that off, and
the nerves of every man there would be freshly strung. The meanest
would suddenly become charged with a kind of nobility; they would
at once become inspired with the courage that comes from
desperation. Often those least inclined to fight when forced to it are
the most indifferent to death. Other dormant elements would be
brought out by the disappearance of those ships; union, fraternity,
complete community, not only of interest but of life. Their leader with
multiplied power would become their god. On him they would be
dependent for all things; for food and raiment, for riches, glory, and
every success; for life itself. Cortés saw all this, pondered it well, and
thought it would be very pretty to play the god awhile. He would
much prefer it to confinement in old Velazquez’ plaza-pen, or even in
a Seville prison. Cortés was now certain in his own mind that if his
band remained unbroken either by internal dissension or by white
men yet to arrive, he would tread the streets of the Mexican capital
before he entered the gates of the celestial city. If Montezuma would
not admit him peaceably, he would gather such a force of the
emperor’s enemies as would pull the kingdom down about his ears.
It would be necessary on going inland to leave a garrison at Villa
Rica; but it would be madness to leave also vessels in which they
could sail away to Cuba or elsewhere. And finally, if the ships were
destroyed, the sailors, who otherwise would be required to care for
them, might be added to the army. Such were the arguments which
the commander would use to win the consent of his people to one of
the most desperate and daring acts ever conceived by a strategist of
any age or nation.
Not that such consent was necessary. He might destroy the
ships and settle with the soldiers afterward. The deed accomplished,
with or without their consent, there would be but one course open to
them. Nevertheless he preferred they should think themselves the
authors of it rather than feel that they had been tricked, or in any way
unfairly dealt with. And with the moral he would shift the pecuniary
responsibility to their shoulders. So he went to work as usual, with
instruments apparently independent, but whose every step and word
were of his directing. One day quickly thereafter it came to pass that
the masters of several of the largest ships appeared before the
captain-general with lengthened faces well put on, with the sad
intelligence that their respective craft were unseaworthy; indeed one
of them had sunk already. They did not say they had secretly bored
holes in them according to instructions. Cortés was surprised, nay he
was painfully affected; Roscius himself could not have performed the
part better; “for well he could dissemble when it served his purpose,”
chimes in Las Casas. With Christian fortitude he said: “Well, the will
of God be done; but look you sharply to the other ships.” Barnacles
were then freely discussed, and teredos. And so well obeyed the
mariners their instructions that soon they were able to swear that all
the vessels save three were unsafe, and even these required costly
repairs before they would be seaworthy.[255] Thus as by the hand of
providence, to the minds of the men as they were able to bear it, the
deed unfolded. Soon quite apparent became the expediency of
abandoning such vessels as were leaking badly; there was trouble
and no profit in attempting to maintain them, for they would surely
have to be abandoned in the end. “And indeed, fellow-soldiers,”
continued Cortés, “I am not sure but it were best to doom to
destruction also the others, and so secure the coöperation of the
sailors in the coming campaign, instead of leaving them in idleness
to hatch fresh treachery.” This intimation was successful, as had
been foreordained by the ruler of these events it should be. It was
forthwith resolved to scuttle all the ships but one, the one brought by
Salcedo. Accordingly Escalante, the alguacil mayor, a brave and
able officer wholly devoted to Cortés, was sent down to Villa Rica to
carry out the order, with the aid of the picked soldiers there
stationed. Sails, anchors, cables, and everything that could be
utilized were removed, and a few hours later some small boats were
all that remained of the Cuban fleet.[256]
It was then the community first realized its situation. The
followers of Cortés, with unbounded faith in their leader, did not so
much care, but the partisans of Velazquez, few of whom knew that
the affair had been coolly predetermined, were somewhat agitated.
And when on closer inquiry they were enlightened by certain of the
mariners, the cry arose that they were betrayed; they were lambs led
to the slaughter. Cortés promptly faced the now furious crowd. What
did they want? Were their lives more precious than those of the rest?
“For shame! Be men!” he cried, in conclusion. “You should know ere
this how vain are the attempts to thwart my purpose. Look on this
magnificent land with its vast treasures, and narrow not your vision
to your insignificant selves. Think of your glorious reward, present
and to come, and trust in God, who, if it so please him, can conquer
this empire with a single arm. Yet if there be one here still so craven
as to wish to turn his back on the glories and advantages thus
offered; if there be one here so base, so recreant to heaven, to his
king, to his comrades, as to slink from such honorable duty, in God’s
name let him go. There is one ship left, which I will equip at my own
charge to give that man the immortal infamy he deserves.” This he
said and much more, and to the desired effect. The speaker knew
well how to play upon his men, as on an instrument, so that they
would respond in any tune he pleased. Cheers rent the air as he
concluded, in which the opposition were forced to join through very
shame. Seeing which Cortés gently intimated, “Would it not be well
to destroy the remaining vessel, and so make a safe, clean thing of
it?” In the enthusiasm of the moment the act was consummated with
hearty approval.[257]
“To Mexico!” was now the cry, and preparations for the march
were at once made. Escalante, whose character and services had
endeared him to Cortés, was placed in command of Villa Rica. The
native chiefs were directed to regard him as the representative of the
general, and to supply him with every requirement.[258]
Some nine days after the sinking of the fleet a messenger
arrived from Escalante, announcing that four vessels[259] had
passed by the harbor, refusing to enter, and had anchored three
leagues off, at the mouth of a river. Fearing the descent upon him of
Velazquez, Cortés hurried off with four horsemen, after selecting fifty
soldiers to follow. Alvarado and Sandoval were left jointly in charge
of the army, to the exclusion of Ávila, who manifested no little
jealousy of the latter. Cortés halted at the town merely to learn
particulars, declining Escalante’s hospitality with the proverb, “A
lame goat has no rest.” On the way to the vessels they met a notary
with two witnesses,[260] commissioned to arrange a boundary on
behalf of Francisco de Garay, who claimed the coast to the north as
first discoverer, and desired to form a settlement a little beyond
Nautla. It appeared that Garay, who had come out with Diego Colon,
and had risen from procurador of Española to become governor of
Jamaica, had resolved to devote his great wealth to extending his
fame as explorer and colonizer. On learning from Alaminos and his
fellow voyagers of the coasts discovered in this direction, he
resolved to revive the famed projects of Ponce de Leon, and with
this view despatched a small fleet in 1518, under Diego de Camargo.
[261]Driven back by the Floridans with great slaughter, says Gomara,
the expedition sailed down to Pánuco River, again to be repulsed,
with the loss of some men, who were flayed and eaten. Torralba,
steward of Garay, was then sent to Spain, and there, with the aid of
Garay’s friends, obtained for him a commission as adelantado and
governor of the territories that he might discover north of Rio San
Pedro y San Pablo.[262] Meanwhile a new expedition was
despatched to Pánuco, under Alonso Álvarez Pineda, to form a
settlement and to barter for gold. After obtaining some three
thousand pesos, Pineda sailed southward to take possession and to
select a site for the colony.[263]
And now while the notary is endeavoring to arrange matters with
Cortés, Pineda waits for him a little distance from the shore. At that
moment Cortés cared little for Garays or boundaries; but he would
by no means object to a few more Spaniards to take the place of
those he had hanged, and of others whom he might yet be obliged to
hang. To this end he converted perforce to his cause the notary and
his attendants. Then learning from them that Pineda could on no
account be prevailed on to land for a conference, Cortés signalled to
the vessels with the hope that more men would come on shore. This
failing, he bethought himself of letting three of his men exchange
clothes with the new-comers and approach the landing, while he
marched back with the rest in full view of the vessels. As soon as it
grew dark, the whole force returned to hide near the spot. It was not
till late the following morning that the suspicious Pineda responded
to the signals from shore, and sent off a boat with armed men. The
trio now withdrew behind some bushes, as if for shade. Four
Spaniards and one Indian landed, armed with two firelocks and two
cross-bows, and on reaching the shrubbery they were pounced upon
by the hidden force, while the boat pushed off to join the vessels all
ready to sail.[264]

FOOTNOTES
[252] The names vary somewhat in different authorities, Bernal Diaz including
instead of Peñate, a number of the Gibraltar sailors known as Peñates, who were
lashed at Cozumel for theft. The plot was hatched ‘Desde â quatro dias que
partieron nuestros Procuradores.’ Hist. Verdad., 39. Cortés mentions only four
‘determinado de tomar un bergantin ... y matar al maestre dél, y irse á la isla
Fernandina.’ Cartas, 53-4. Gomara assumes them to be the same who last
revolted on setting out for Tizapantzinco. Hist. Mex., 64. ‘Pusieron ... por obra de
hurtar un navío pequeño, é salir á robar lo que llevaban para el rey.’ Tapia,
Relacion, in Icazbalceta, Col. Doc., ii. 563. Peter Martyr jumbles the names, dec.
v. cap. i.

[253] Thus Cortés had his revenge on the alguacil. ‘Y no le valiò el ser su
Compadre,’ says Vetancvrt, with a hasty assumption which is not uncommon with
him. Teatro Mex., pt. iii. 119. Gomara mentions no mutilation. ‘Parece claro ser
aquestas obras, ... propias de averiguado tirano,’ says Las Casas, Hist. Ind., iv.
496, which may be regarded as a singularly mild expression for the bishop.
Herrera dwells upon Cermeño’s extraordinary skill with the leaping-pole; he could
also smell land fifteen leagues off the coast, dec. ii. lib. v. cap. xiv. ‘Coria, vezino
que fue despues de Chiapa.’ Bernal Diaz, Hist. Verdad., 39.

[254] ‘Embiado ... por los pueblos de la sierra, porque tuuiessen que comer;
porque en nuestra Villa passauamos mucha necessidad de bastimentos.’ Id. This
seems unlikely, since the Totonacs were not only willing, but bound, to provide
supplies.

[255] Testimonio de Montejo y Puertocarrero, in Col. Doc. Inéd., i. 489, 494.

‘Viniesen á él, cuando estuviese mucha gente con él junta, y le denunciasen como
no podian vencer el agua de los navíos.’ Las Casas, Hist. Ind., iv. 497. ‘Tuuo
forma para que los soldados mas aficionados que tenia se lo pidiessen.... Los
soldados se lo pidieron, y dello se recibio auto por ante escriuano.’ Herrera, dec.
ii. lib. v. cap. xiv. ‘Le aconsejamos los que eramos sus amigos, que no dexasse
Nauio en el Puerto.’ Bernal Diaz, Hist. Verdad., 39.
[256] ‘Los Pilotos, ê Maestres viejos, y marineros, que no erã buenos para ir â la
guerra, que se quedassen en la Villa, y cõ dos chinchorros que tuuiessen cargo
de pescar ... y luego se vino (Escalante) â Cempoal con vna Capitania de
hombres de la mar, que fuessen los que sacaron de los Nauios, y salieron
algunos dellos muy buenos soldados.’ Bernal Diaz, Hist. Verdad., 40.

[257] It is generally admitted that Cortés suggested the idea of destroying the fleet,
for even Bernal Diaz, who at first gives the credit to the men by saying, ‘le
aconsejamos los que eramos sus amigos,’ confesses on the following page that
‘el mismo Cortès lo tenia ya concertado.’ Hist. Verdad., 39-40. The preponderating
testimony also shows that the masters made their report in public, with the evident
object, as the best authorities clearly indicate, of obtaining the consent of the
responsible majority for the scuttling. During the partition of treasures at Mexico,
large shares were set aside for Cortés and Velazquez to cover the cost of the fleet
and the outfit, ‘que dimos al traues con ellos, pues todos fuimos en ellos,’ Bernal
Diaz, Hist. Verdad., 84, which is proof, in addition to the reliable assertion that the
deed was agreed upon by the majority. Cortés’ expression, ‘los eché á la costa,’
Cartas, 54, is merely that of a leader of that party or majority, who besides really
gives credit to others. Hence the conclusion of Prescott and others, that the
scuttling was done on his own responsibility, is not well founded. Cortés was
clever enough always to have those present who were ready to take any
responsibility for him that he might wish. The phrase, ‘his was the greatest
sacrifice, for they (the vessels) were his property,’ Prescott’s Mex., i. 374, is also
wrong, for he was compensated by the army. And it is an exaggeration to say that
the execution of the measure ‘in the face of an incensed and desperate soldiery,
was an act of resolution that has few parallels in history,’ Id., 376, since his party
supported him. According to Gomara the pilots bore holes in the vessels, and
bring their report, whereupon five vessels are first sunk; shortly afterward the
remainder except one are scuttled. The offer of this vessel to those who wished to
return was made with a view to learn who were the cowards and malcontents.
Many indeed did ask for leave, but half of them were sailors. Others kept quiet out
of shame. Hist. Mex., 65. It was never Cortés’ policy to mark the disaffected,
however. This author is followed by Torquemada, ‘porque asi se ha platicado
siempre entre las Gentes, que mas supieron de esta Jornada,’ i. 409, and on the
strength of this the latter argues that Herrera’s version, dec. ii. lib. v. cap. xiv.,
which adheres chiefly to Bernal Diaz’, must be wrong. Tapia, Relacion, in
Icazbalceta, Col. Doc., ii. 563, conforms chiefly to Gomara. Robertson, after
following Bernal Diaz, takes the trouble of having the ships ‘drawn ashore and ...
broke in pieces.’ Hist. Am., ii. 33-4; Clavigero, Storia Mess., iii. 35-6; Oviedo, Hist.
Gen., iii. 262; Sandoval, Hist. Carlos V., i. 171; Peter Martyr, dec. v. cap. i. Peralta
has them burned by secret agents of Cortés. Nat. Hist., 76. Solis, ever zealous for
his hero, objects to Bernal Diaz’ attempt to pluck any of the glory, and scouts the
idea that fears of pecuniary liability could have influenced Cortés to gain the
approval of others for his act. ‘Tuvo á destreza de historiador el penetrar lo interior
de las acciones,’ is the complacent tribute to his own skill in penetrating the
question. Hist. Mex., i. 214-15. The view of the foundering fleet, appended to
some editions of his work, has been extensively copied. One is given in the
Antwerp edition of 1704, 141. A still finer view, with the men busy on shore, and
the sinking vessels in the distance, is to be found in the Madrid issue of 1783, i.
213. The destruction of the fleet has been lauded in extravagant terms by almost
every authority, from Gomara and Solis to Robertson and Prescott, as an
unparalleled deed. Of previous examples there are enough, however, even though
the motives and the means differ. We may go back to Æneas, to whose fleet the
wives of the party applied the torch, tired of roaming; or we may point to
Agathocles, who first fired his soldiers with a resolution to conquer or to die, and
then compelled them to keep their word by firing the vessels. Julian offered a
tamer instance during his campaign on the Tigris; but the deed of the terrible
Barbarossa in the Mediterranean, only a few years before the Mexican campaign,
was marked by reckless determination. Still examples little affect the greatness of
an act; motives, means, and results afford the criteria. ‘Pocos exemplos destos ay,
y aquellos son de grandes hombres.’ Gomara, Hist. Mex., 65. ‘Una de las
acciones en que mas se reconoce la grandeza de su ánimo.... Y no sabemos si
de su género se hallará mayor alguna en todo el campo de las Historias.’ Solis,
Hist. Mex., i. 213. ‘An effort of magnanimity, to which there is nothing parallel in
history.’ Robertson, Hist. Am., ii. 34. ‘Un’impresa, che da per se sola basterebbe a
far conoscere la sua magnanimità, e ad immortalare il suo nome.’ Clavigero,
Storia Mess., iii. 35; Prescott, Mex., i. 375-6, is equally carried away, and he finds
more words for his admiration. He is wrong in supposing that one of the vessels in
the harbor was left intact; the exempt ship referred to by a chronicler was the one
carrying the messengers to Spain.
Antonio de Solis y Ribadeneyra is remarkable as the first Spanish historian of
the conquest. It appears to us strange that an episode so glorious to the fame of
Castilians should have been allowed to lie so long neglected in the musty pages of
their chroniclers. True, these were worthy, zealous men, who conscientiously
narrated every occurrence of any note, but their standard for historic truth and
dignity caused them to clothe facts, however striking, in a garb of dreary gravity,
dryness of detail, and ambiguous confusion, which discouraged even the student.
It required the dramatic eye of the composer and the imagination of the poet to
appreciate the picturesque sketches of a strange people now fading into oblivion,
the grandeur of a semi-savage pageantry, the romantic exploits that recalled the
achievements of the Cid. This faculty was innate in Solis, developed besides by a
long and successful career in letters. He had profited also by the advantages
opened to him as the secretary of Conde de Oropesa, Viceroy of Navarre and of
Valencia, who Mæcenas-like fostered the talents and aided in the promotion of the
promising savant, for as such he already ranked. Cradled in the famous college
town of Alcalá de Henares, he had given early evidence of talent, and at
Salamanca university he had signalized himself in his seventeenth year by
producing a comedy of considerable merit. While pursuing with energy the study
of law and moral philosophy, he cultivated with hardly less ardor the muses, to
which end he was no doubt impelled also by his intimacy with the illustrious
Calderon. Several of his dramas were received with acclamation, and one was
translated into French, while his miscellaneous poems, reprinted in our days, are
marked by a vivid imagination and an elegance which also adorns his letters.
Talents so conspicuous did not wait long for recognition, and with the aid of his
patron he advanced to the dignities of royal secretary and chief chronicler of the
Indies. When 56 years old his mind underwent a change, and entering the church
he abandoned forever the drama and light literature. The pen changed only its
sphere, however, for it served the historiographer zealously, achieving for him the
greatest fame; and fame alone, for at his death, in April, 1686, at the age of 76,
deep poverty was his companion. When he entered on this office the Indies had
lapsed into the dormant quietude imposed by a strict and secluding colonial
régime. There were no stirring incidents to reward the efforts of the historian, save
those connected with free-booter raids, which offered little that could flatter
Spanish pride. To achieve fame he must take up some old theme, and present it in
a form likely to rouse attention by its contrast. Thus it was that he selected the
thrilling episode of the conquest of Mexico, with the determination to rescue it from
the unskilful arrangement and repetitions, the want of harmony and consistency,
the dryness and faulty coloring, to which it had hitherto been subjected, and to
expend upon it the effects of elegant style and vast erudition. When the work
appeared at Madrid, in 1684, its superior merits were instantly recognized, and
although the sale at first was not large, editions have multiplied till our day, the
finest and costliest being the illustrated issue of 1783-4, in two volumes, which I
quote, while consulting also the notes of several others. So grand and finely
elaborated a subject, and that from a Spanish historian who was supposed to
have exhausted all the available resources of the Iberian archives, could not fail to
rouse general attention throughout Europe, and translations were made into
different languages. Robertson, among others, while not failing to point out certain
blemishes, has paid the high compliment of accepting Solis for almost sole guide
on the conquest, and this with a blindness which at times leads him into most
amusing errors. Even Prescott warms to his theme in a review of six closely
printed pages, wherein eulogy, though not unmingled with censure, is stronger
than a clearer comprehension of the theme would seem to warrant. But in this he
is impelled to a great extent by his oft displayed tendency to hero worship.
Solis deserves acknowledgment for bringing order out of chaos, for presenting
in a connected form the narrative of the conquest, and for adorning it with an
elegant style. But he has fulfilled only a part of the promises made in his preface,
and above all has he neglected to obtain information on his topic beyond that
presented in a few of the generally accessible works, even their evidence being
not very closely examined. He has also taken great liberties with the text,
subordinating facts to style and fancy, seizing every possible opportunity to
manufacture speeches for both native and Spanish heroes, and this with an
amusing disregard for the consistency of language with the person and the time.
His religious tendencies seriously interfere with calm judgment, and impel him to
rave with bigoted zeal against the natives. The hero worship of the dramatist
introduces itself to such an extent as frequently to overshadow everything else,
and to misrepresent. ‘Sembra più un panegirico, che una istoria,’ says Clavigero,
very aptly. Storia Mess., i. 16. His arguments and deductions are at times most
childish, while his estimation of himself as a historian and thinker is aired in more
than one place with a ridiculous gravity. With regard to style, Solis had Livy for a
model, and belonged to the elder school of historians; he was its last good
representative, in fact. His language is expressive and elegant, greatly imbued
with a poetic spirit not unsuited to the subject, and sustained in eloquence, while
its pure idiom aids to maintain the work as classic among Castilians. ‘Ingenio
Conceptuoso, Floridisimo, i Eloquente,’ is the observation in the work of his
historiographic predecessor, Pinelo, Epitome, ii. 607. But it lacks in boldness and
dignity; the rhapsodies are often misplaced, and the verboseness is tiresome.
Some of the faults are of course due to the time, but not the many, and it also
becomes only too apparent that Solis is so conceitedly infatuated with his affected
grandiloquence as to sacrifice facts wherever they interfere with its free scope. It is
said that he intended to continue the history of Mexico after the conquest, and that
death alone prevented the consummation of the project. But this is mere
conjecture, and it appears just as likely that the dramatist recognized the effect of
closing a great work at so appropriate a point as the fall of Mexico. The work was
taken up, however, by Salazar y Olarte, who published in 1743 the second part of
the Conquest, till the death of Cortés, abounding in all the faults of the superficial
and florid composition of Solis.

[258] ‘Luego le zahumaron [the chiefs] al Juan de Escalante con sus inciensos.’
Bernal Diaz, Hist. Verdad., 40. ‘Dejé en la villa de la Veracruz ciento y cincuenta
hombres con doze de caballo.’ Cortés, Cartas, 52-3. One hundred and fifty
Spaniards, with two horses and two fire-arms, were left here under Pedro de Ircio,
Gomara, Hist. Mex., 65-6, but Bernal Diaz corrects him. ‘Al Pedro de Ircio no le
auian dado cargo ninguno, ni aun de cuadrillero.’ ubi sup.; Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich.,
291. The force seems to be altogether too large. Bernal Diaz, Hist. Verdad., 51,
says 60 old and suffering soldiers were left as garrison.

[259] Bernal Diaz says one vessel; but Cortés and other authorities mention four.

[260] Bernal Diaz, who appears to have been with the party, names them as
Guillen de la Loa, notary; Andrés Nuñez, shipwright; Pedro de la Arpa, a
Valencian, and a fourth man. Hist. Verdad., 40.

[261] ‘Armo Francisco de Garay tres carauelas en Iamaica, el año de mil quiniẽtos
y deziocho, y fue a tentar la Florida.’ Gomara, Hist. Ind., 55. ‘Determinó de enviar
á un hidalgo, llamado Diego de Camargo, á descubrir é continuar el
descubrimiento que Grijalva habia hecho, con uno ó con dos navios; el cual
descubrió la provincia de Panuco, ó, por mejor decir, comenzó de allí donde
Grijalva se habia tornado, que fué desde Panuco, y anduvo navegando por la
costa cien leguas hácia la Florida.’ Las Casas, Hist. Ind., iv. 466; Herrera, dec. ii.
lib. iii. cap. xi.; Galvano’s Discov., 133-4.

[262] See Hist. Mex., i. 29, this series. ‘El Rey se las concedió el año de 819,
estando en Barcelona.’ Las Casas, loc. cit. ‘Torralua ... truxo prouisiones para que
fuesse Adelantado, y Gouernador desde el rio de San Pedro, y San Pablo, y todo
lo que descubriesse: y por aquellas prouisiones embiò luego tres Nauios con
hasta dozientos y setenta soldados.’ Bernal Diaz, Hist. Verdad., 41.

[263] Bernal Diaz intimates that Pineda had remained at Rio Pánuco to colonize,
while one vessel was sent down to take possession where Cortés met the men.
After giving an account of two expeditions in 1518 and 1519, Gomara says: ‘Otros
dizen, que no fue mas de vna vez. Sino que como estuuo mucho alla cuẽtan por
dos.’ Hist. Ind., 55. But Las Casas mentions distinctly that it was on the strength of
Camargo’s discoveries, in 1518, that the grant was made to Garay in the following
year, ubi sup. ‘Garai auia corrido mucha costa en demãda de la Florida, y tocado
en vn rio y tierra, cuyo rey se llamaua Panuco, donde vieron oro, aun que poco. Y
que sin salir de las naues auiã rescatado hasta tres mil pesos de oro.’ Gomara,
Hist. Mex., 67; Cortés, Cartas, 56-7; Oviedo, iii. 262-3; Herrera, dec. ii. lib. vi. cap.
i.

[264] ‘El uno(of the captured ones) era maestre de la una nao, é puso fuego á la
escopeta, é matara al capitan de la Veracruz, sino que á la mecha le faltó el
fuego.’ Oviedo, iii. 263. Bernal Diaz, in a less intelligent account of the capture,
states that only two men landed. ‘Por manera que se huuieron de aquel Nauio
seis soldados.... Y esto es lo que se hizo, y no lo que escriue el Coronista
Gomara.’ Hist. Verdad., 41. But Cortés’ version must surely be the best, since it
was related shortly after the occurrence, and by an immediate participator in the
events.
 CHAPTER XII.
MARCH TOWARD MEXICO.

August-September, 1519.

Enthusiasm of the Army—The Force—The Totonacs Advise the Tlascalan

Route—Arrival at Jalapa—A Look Backward—The Anáhuac Plateau—
Meeting with Olintetl—Arrival in the Country of the Tlascaltecs—The
Senate Convenes and Receives the Envoys of Cortés—An Encounter—
A More Serious Battle—Xicotencatl Resolves to Try the Prowess of
the Invaders, and is Defeated.

The Garay affair having thus been disposed of, it was

announced to the Spaniards that they would now go in quest of the
great Montezuma. For as the conciliating sea smooths the sand
which but lately it ground in its determinate purpose from the rocks,
so had Cortés quieted the ruffled temper of the malcontents, till they
were committed as one man to the will of the leader. And he smiled
somewhat grimly as he concluded his harangue: “To success or total
destruction now we march; for there is open to us no retreat. In
Christ we trust, and on our arms rely. And though few in number, our
hearts are strong.” The soldiers shouted their approval, and again
signified their desire to press onward to Mexico.[265]
The force for the expedition consisted of about four hundred and
fifty Spaniards, with fifteen horses, and six or seven light guns,
attended by a considerable number of Indian warriors and carriers,
including Cubans. The Totonac force comprised also forty chiefs,
taken really as hostages, among whom are named Mamexi, Tamalli,
and Teuch, the latter proving a most able and trusty guide and
counsellor.[266]

The advice of the Totonacs is to take the route through Tlascala,

as a state friendly to them and bitterly opposed to the Mexicans, and
on the 16th of August the army leaves Cempoala for the interior.
Soon begins the gentle ascent which lifts them from oppressive heat
and overpowering vegetation to cooler regions, and at the close of
the second day is reached the beautiful Jalapa,[267] a halting-place
between the border of the sea and the upper plateau.
There they turn with one accord and look back. How charming!
how inexpressibly refreshing are these approaching highlands to the
Spaniards, so lately from the malarious Isthmus and the jungle-
covered isles, and whose ancestors not long since had held all
tropics to be uninhabitable; on the border, too, of Montezuma’s
kingdom, wrapped in the soft folds of perpetual spring. Before the
invaders are the ardent waters of the gulf, instant in their humane
pilgrimage to otherwise frozen and uninhabitable lands; before them
the low, infectious tierra caliente that skirts the lofty interior
threateningly, like the poisoned garment of Hercules, with vegetation
bloated by the noxious air and by nourishment sucked from the
putrid remains of nature’s opulence, while over all, filled with the
remembrance of streams stained sanguine from sacrificial altars,
passes with sullen sighs the low-voiced winds. But a change comes
gradually as the steep ascent is made that walls the healthful table-
land of Anáhuac. On the templada terrace new foliage is observed,
though still glistening with sun-painted birds and enlivened by
parliaments of monkeys. Insects and flowers bathe in waves of
burning light until they display a variety of colors as wonderful as
they are brilliant, while from cool cañons rise metallic mists
overspreading the warm hills. Blue and purple are the summits in the
distance, and dim glowing hazy the imperial heights beyond that
daily baffle the departing sun. And on the broad plateau, whose rich
earth with copious yield of gold and grain allures to cultivation, all the
realm are out of doors keeping company with the sun. From afar
comes the music-laden breeze whispering its secrets to graceful
palms, aloft against the sky, and which bend to meet the confidence,
while the little shrubs stand motionless with awe. Each cluster of
trees repeats the story, and sings in turn its own matin to which the
rest are listeners. At night, how glittering bright with stars the
heavens, which otherwise were a shroud of impenetrable blackness.
In this land of wild Arcadian beauty the beasts are free, and man
keeps constant holiday. And how the hearts of these marauders
burned within them as they thought, nothing doubting, how soon
these glories should be Spain’s and theirs.
The boundary of the Totonac territory was crossed, and on the
fourth day the army entered a province called by Cortés
Sienchimalen, wherein the sway of Montezuma was still maintained.
This made no difference to the Spaniards, however, for the late
imperial envoys had left orders with the coast governors to treat the
strangers with every consideration. Of this they had a pleasing
experience at Xicochimalco,[268] a strong fortress situated on the
slope of a steep mountain, to which access could be had only by a
stairway easily defended. It overlooked a sloping plain strewn with
villages and farms, mustering in all nearly six thousand warriors.[269]
With replenished stores the expedition began to ascend the
cordillera in reality, and to approach the pine forests which mark the
border of the tierra fria. Marching through a hard pass named
Nombre de Dios,[270] they entered another province defended by a
fortress, named Teoxihuacan,[271] in no wise inferior to the first for
strength or hospitality. They now finished the ascent of the cordillera,
passed through Tejotla, and for three days continued their way
through the alkaline wastes skirting the ancient volcano of
Nauhcampatepetl,[272] exposed to chilling winds and hailstorms,
which the Spaniards with their quilted armor managed to endure, but
which caused to succumb many of the less protected and less hardy
Cubans. The brackish water also brought sickness. On the fourth
day the pass of Puerto de Leña,[273] so called from the wood piled
near some temples, admitted them to the Anáhuac plateau, over
seven thousand feet above the sea. With a less balmy climate and a
flora less redundant than that of the Antillean stamping-ground, it
offered on the other hand the attraction of being not unlike their
native Spain. A smiling valley opened before them, doubly alluring to
the pinched wanderers, with its broad fields of corn, dotted with
houses, and displaying not far off the gleaming walls and thirteen
towering temples of Xocotlan, the capital of the district. Some
Portuguese soldiers declaring it the very picture of their cherished
Castilblanco, this name was applied to it.[274]
 Cacique Olintetl, nicknamed the temblador from the shaking of
his fat body, came forth with a suite and escorted them through the
plaza to the quarters assigned them, past pyramids of grinning
human skulls, estimated by Bernal Diaz at over one hundred
thousand. There were also piles of bones, and skulls suspended
from beams, all of which produced far from pleasant impressions.
This horror was aggravated by the evident coldness of their
reception, and by the scanty fare offered.[275] Olintetl occupied what
Cortés describes as the “largest and most finely constructed houses
he had yet seen in this country,” wherein two thousand servants
attended to the wants of himself and his thirty wives.
Impressed by the magnificence of his surroundings, Cortés
inquired whether he was a subject or ally of Montezuma. “Who is not
his slave?” was the reply. He himself ruled twenty thousand subjects,
[276] yet was but a lowly vassal of the emperor, at whose command
thirty chiefs at least could place each one hundred thousand warriors
in the field. He proceeded to extol the imperial wealth and power,
and the grandeur of the capital, wherein twenty thousand human
victims were annually given to the idols. This was probably intended
to awe the little band; “But we,” says Bernal Diaz,[277] “with the
qualities of Spanish soldiers, wished we were there striving for
fortunes, despite the dangers described.” Cortés calmly assured the
cacique that great as Montezuma was, there were vassals of his own
king still mightier, with more to the same effect; and he concluded by
demanding the submission of the cacique, together with a present of
gold, and the abandonment of sacrifices and cannibalism. Olintetl’s
only reply was that he could do nothing without authority from the
capital. “Your Montezuma,” replied the audacious Spaniard, with
suppressed anger, “shall speedily send you orders to surrender to
me gold or any other desired effects in your possession.”