FABLE AND FOLKLORE 169 



Waterton 73 illustrates by an anecdote: "Good farmer 

 Muckdrag's wife, while jogging on with eggs to market, 

 knew there was mischief brewing as soon as she had 

 heard a raven croak on the unlucky side of the road: 



"That raven on the left-hand oak, 

 Curse on his ill-betiding croak, 

 Bodes me no good !" 



She had scarcely uttered this when down came her old 

 stumbling mare to the ground. Her every egg was 

 smashed to atoms ; and whilst she lay sprawling . . . she 

 was perfectly convinced in her own mind that the raven 

 had clearly foreseen her irreparable misadventure." 



If one alighted on a church-tower the whole parish 

 trembled, and when a cottager saw one perched on his 

 roof-tree he made his will; or if it happened that a 

 man or woman was ill in his house the death of that 

 person was regarded as certain. The more learned 

 would quote for you how Tiberius, Plato, Cicero and 

 other great men of the past had been similarly warned, 

 and doubtless many a person has died in these circum- 

 stances of nervous fright and discouragement. It is to 

 this dread that Marlowe refers in his Jew of Malta: 



Like the sad presaging raven that tolls 

 The sick man's passport in her hollow beak, 

 And, in the shadow of the silent night, 

 Does shake contagion from her sable wing. 



The last line contains a new and heinous calumny 

 widely credited. So Shakespeare makes Caliban threaten 

 Prospero and Ariel with 



As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed 

 With raven's feather from unwholesome fen. 



