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A salient point of interest in The Owl and the Nightingale is the amount of knowledge, expressed or implied in the poem, concerning animal life which is correct and possibly due to direct personal observation. Master Nicholas of Guildford, whom, here as elsewhere, I assume to be the author, was not writing a scientific treatise, and is at no particular pains to avoid the acceptance of popular delusion. For example, from a literary point of view, the long account of how the hooting of the owl portends disaster is one of the most effective passages in the whole poem. Such scientific interest as the poem possesses is a byproduct of his purpose to enter into bird-life and set it before the reader. Indeed, had he purposed to write a scientific treatise it is quite conceivable that he would have busied himself collecting misinformation, whether from books or from word of mouth, and would have thought his own personal observations of too little moment to be worth recording. And we should have been tempted to regard him as a man of almost no observation at all, very much as the reader is apt to regard Alexander Neckam, or would regard Neckam but for that writer's remarks about the magnetic needle. Art is older than science, and was highly developed when science was still in its infancy. Master Nicholas, our poet, writing as an artist, was sometimes contented to tell us what he had himself seen and heard. Whether he was or was not a man of uncommon observation cannot, perhaps, be determined. What is incontestably true is that in an age when writers of natural history were blind leaders of the blind, he did some justice to such powers of observation as he possessed.
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