WINGS OF FANCY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 December 1941, Page 7

WINGS OF FANCY

The following are not the names of English inns—The Spotted Elephant, The Black Arches, The Ground Lackey, The Glory of Kent, The Green Forester, The Lulworth Skipper, The White Admiral, The Purple Shades, The Brixton Beauty, The Rosy Rustic, The Beautiful Pug and The Dover Belle; nor are these the titles of books —The Crimson Speckled Footman, The Light Feathered Rustic, The Black Chestnut, The Cambridge Veneer (a gift to a social satirist), The November Dagger, The Belted Beauty, The Essex Emerald, The Long-Legged Pearl, and The Ringed China Mark (two beautiful titles which might fit anything from detection to fantasy), and The Beautiful Snout (which is like a gem from Thurber). They are the names of English butterflies, notes the naturalist, Mr H. E. Bates, in the Spectator. It strikes me as rather odd that these names should be so fanciful and yet should somehow have kept themselves out of the common speech. I suspect them to be of eighteenthcentury origin, but whether they are or not it is interesting to come upon another example of that genius for descriptive lyricism which is often a surprising expression of English rural life.