The Cormorant and Pelican 
garden, when he vowed to the honest 
owner that 
Pll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and 
swallow my sword like a great pin, ere thou and 
I part.} 
Three large water-birds, the Cormorant, 
Pelican and Loon are disparagingly noticed 
by Shakespeare. The cormorant, so well- 
known along all our rocky shores, was 
described by Chaucer as “‘full of glotonye,”’ 
and by the dramatist as the symbol of a 
rapacious voracity. ‘Thus, vanity is de- 
scribed as an “‘insatiate cormorant’; we 
are told of ‘cormorant devouring Time,” 
of the “cormorant belly ” and of 
Wounds, friends, and what else dear that is con- 
sumed 
In hot digestion of this cormorant war.” 
The peLican is alluded to in the 
Shakespearian drama in connection with 
a popular fable that this bird nourishes 
12 Henry VI. Ww. x. 27. 
2 Rickard 11... i638.) Loves) Labour's’ Lost. 1. 1. ae 
Coriolanus,1.1. 119. Troilus and Cressida, u. il. 6. 
51 
