'Sweet bird, that shun'st the noise of folly,
Most musical, most melancholy,'


is untrue to fact. So far from shunning the noise of folly, the
nightingale sings as boldly as anywhere close to a stage-coach road,
or a public path, as anyone will testify who recollects the
'Wrangler's Walk' from Cambridge to Trumpington forty years ago, when
the covert, which has now become hollow and shelterless, held, at
every twenty yards, an unabashed and jubilant nightingale.

Coleridge surely was not far wrong when he guessed that -


'Some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced
With the remembrance of a grievous wrong,
Or slow distemper, or neglected love
(And so, poor wretch, filled all things with himself,
And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale
Of his own sorrow)--he, and such as he,
First named these sounds a melancholy strain,
And many a poet echoes the conceit.'


That the old Greek poets were right, and had some grounds for the
myth of Philomela, I do not dispute; though Sophocles, speaking of
the nightingales of Colonos, certainly does not represent them as
lamenting. The Elizabethan poets, however, when they talked of
Philomel, 'her breast against a thorn,' were unaware that they and
the Greeks were talking of two different birds; that our English