angel of the air. So
that, in English, we could only express the meaning in some such
fashion as this:--

They perfected all their service of love,
These maiden birds that I tell you of.
They sang such a song, so finished-fair,
As if they were angels, born of the air.

39. Such were the fancies, then, and the scenes, in which Englishmen
took delight in Chaucer's time. England was then a simple country; we
boasted, for the best kind of riches, our birds and trees, and our
wives and children. We had now grown to be a rich one; and our first
pleasure is in shooting our birds; but it has become too expensive for
us to keep our trees. Lord Derby, whose crest is the eagle and
child--you will find the northern name for it, the bird and bantling,
made classical by Scott--is the first to propose that wood-birds should
have no more nests. We must cut down all our trees, he says, that we
may effectively use the steam-plow; and the effect of the steam-plow, I
find by a recent article in the _Cornhill Magazine_, is that an English
laborer must not any more have a nest, nor bantlings, neither; but may
only expect to get on prosperously in life, if he be perfectly
skillful, sober, and honest, and dispenses, at least until he is
forty-five, with the "luxury of marriage."

40. Gentlemen, you may perhaps have heard me blamed for making no
effort here to teach in the artisans' schools. But I can only say that,
since the future life of the English laborer or artisan (summing the
benefits to him of recent philosophy and economy) is to be passed in a
country without angels and without birds, without prayers and without
songs, without trees and without flowers, in a state of exemplary
sobriety, and (extending the Catholic celibacy of the clergy into
celibacy of the laity) in a state of dispensation with the luxury of
marriage, I do not believe he will derive either profit or
entertainment from lectures on the Fine Arts.

LECTURE II.[8]

THE SWALLOW.

41. We are to-day to take note of the form of a creature which gives us
a singular example of the unity of what artists call beauty, with the
fineness of mechanical structure, often mistaken for it. You cannot but
have noticed how little, during the years of my past professorship, I
have introduced any questions as to the nature of beauty. I avoided
them, partly because they are treated of at length in my books; and
partly because they are, in the last degree, unp