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Ill thrives the haplesse family, that showes
A cock that's silent, and a hen that crowes:
I know not which live more unnaturall lives,
Obeying husbands, or commanding wives.

-Quarles: History of Queen Ester.

(57)

A herb there is, that lowly grows,

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And some do call it rue, sir:

The smallest dunghill cock that crows,

Would make a capon of you, sir.-Percy: Baffled Knight.

Capon's corage.

-Spenser: Fairy Queen.

Our Chaunticlere loves everich hen,

Ne fawer keeps our yerd than ten.-Fenton: Parson's Wife.

Never was Shrovetide cock in such a fear.

-Dryden: The Cock and Fox.

When men a dangerous disease did 'scape

Of old, they gave a cock to Esculape.-Jonson: Epigram.

GAME-COCKS.

The boldest they who least partake the light,
As game-cocks in the dark are trained to fight.

-Fenton: To T. Lambard.

Wi' clippit feathers, kame and chirle,

The gamester's cock, frae some auld burrel

Proclaims the morning near.-A. Wilson: Daybreak.

Here cocks heroic burn with rival rage,
And mails with mails in doubtful fight engage,

Of armed heels and bustling plumage proud,
They sound the insulting clarion shrill and loud,
With rustling pinions meet, and swelling chests,
And seize with closing beaks their bleeding crests;
Rise on quick wing above the struggling foe,
And aim in air the death-devoting blow.

-Darwin: Reproduction of Life.

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'Twas nature taught the gen'rous bird to fight
In care for thee, mean wretch, who hast supplied
The weapon nature kindly had refused.

-Hurdis: The Village Curate.

Fair Catherine's pastime-who looked on the match
Between the nations as a main of cocks,

Wherein she liked her own to stand like rocks.

-Byron: Don Juan.

Here his poor bird th' inhuman cocker brings,
Arms his hard heel and clips his golden wings;
With spicy food th' impatient spirit feeds,
And shouts and curses as the battle bleeds.
Struck through the brain, depriv'd of both his eyes,
The vanquished bird must combat till he dies;
Must faintly peck at his victorious foe,

And reel and stagger at each feeble blow;
When fallen, the savage grasps his dabbled plumes,
His blood-stained arms, for other deaths assumes,
And damns the craven fowl that lost his stake,
And only bled and perished for his sake.

-Crabbe: The Parish Register.

One feathered champion he possessed,
His darling far beyond the rest,

Which never knew disgrace,

Nor e'er had fought but he made flow
The life-blood of his fiercest foe,
The Cæsar of his race.

It chanced, at last, when on a day
He pushed him to the desperate fray,
His courage drooped, he fled.

The master stormed, the prize was lost,
And, instant, frantic at the cost,

He doomed his favourite dead.

He seized him fast, and from the pit
Flew to the kitchen, snatched the spit,
And, bring me cord, he cried;

The cord was brought, and, at his word,
To that dire implement the bird

Alive and struggling tied.

But vengeance hung not far remote,

For while he stretched his clamorous throat
And heaven and earth defied,
Big with a curse too closely pent,
That struggled vainly for a vent,

He tottered, reel'd, and died.

-Cowper: Cockfighter's Garland.

(68)

Casuists, like cocks, strike out each other's eyes.

-Denham: Learning.

CONDOR.

(1) The condor of the rocks.-Campbell: Gertrude of Wyoming.

(2) 'Twas the mid-hour, when He, whose accents dread

(3)

(4)

Still wandered through the regions of the dead

(Merion, commissioned with his host to sweep
From age to age the melancholy deep),

To elude the seraph-guard that watched for man,
And mar, as erst, the Eternal's perfect plan,
Roc-like, the condor, and, at towering height,

In pomp of plumage sailed, deepening the shades of night.
Roc of the West! to him all empire given !
Who bears Axalhua's dragon-folds to heaven;

His flight a whirlwind, and, when heard afar,

Like thunder, or the distant din of war.-Rogers: Columbus.

The condor where the Andes tower

Spreads his broad wing of pride and power,

And many a storm defies.-Hemans: Hymns for Childhood.

Poland by the Northern Condor's beak,

And talons torn.-Campbell: Power of Russia.

COOT.

(1)

The coot dives merry in the lake.-Scott: Marmion.

Sooty coots.-Burns: Elegy.

The wanton coot the water skims.-Burns: Song.

(4)

There have I watched the downy coot,
Pacing with safe and steady foot
The surface of the floating field,

And, though the elastic floor might yield
In chinks and let the water flow
In beads of crystal from below,
Yet was the tremulous region true

To that rough traveller passing through.

-Faber: The Cherwell.

(5)

Bald-coot bully, Alexander.-Byron: Don Juan.

CORMORANT.

Nothing in all the natural history of poetry is more. remarkable than the poets' prejudice against the cormorant. Spenser opens the battery of undeserved opprobrium, by making "cormoyrants" sitting with "birds of ravenous race,"

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And one after another the poets follow his lead in describing the cormorant as ravenous," and repeating his sneer as to the nature of its food; Kirke White's fears going so far wrong as to imagine the bird ate human bodies:

"My bones

Be left a prey on some deserted shore

To the rapacious cormorant."

And Grahame crowning the infamy of the calumniated bird as follows:

"On distant waves, the raven of the sea,
The cormorant, devours her carrion food;
Along the blood-stained coast of Senegal,
Prowling she scents the cassia-perfumed breeze,
Tainted with death, and keener forward flies;
And now she nears the carnage-freighted keel,

Unscared by rattling fetters, or the shriek
Of mothers o'er their ocean-buried babes :
Lured by the scent unweariedly she flies,
And at the foamy dimples of the track,
'Darts sportively, or perches on a corpse."

As a simile it is used in a sinister sense.

Milton makes

Satan in Paradise a cormorant, and Coleridge repeats the fancy; the devil confessing that he

"Sate like a cormorant once Fast by the Tree of Knowledge."

Time as "the devourer" is repeatedly symbolised under the cormorant, which is also called by Montgomery "Death's living arrow," and "the destroyer," while it is a favourite metaphor for self-seeking demagogues and rapacious men generally.

This prejudice no doubt arose from the cormorant being discredited by mistranslation in Holy Writ, and has been perpetuated by the "unconscious cerebration" so frequent among poets. Yet nothing could be more unjustifiable than this contumelious treatment of Hesperia's courageous lover. For not only is the cormorant as clean-feeding a bird as that pet of the poets, "the dainty halcyon," but it is one of the very few birds that can be enlisted in the direct service of man. In our own England, cormorants were at one time trained to fish for their owners, as they are so frequently at the present day in the East; and if any bird deserved less the epithet of rapacious, or greedy, or foul-feeding, it is surely the bird which shares his food with man, and is content with such a very small share for itself.

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(2)

The greedy cormorant.-Quarles: History of Samson.

The cormorant on high, wheels from the deep.

-Thomson: Winter.