The Birds of Shakespeare 
tenderness, has an honoured place in 
Shakespeare’s pages.1 We there read of 
‘a pair of loving turtle-doves that could 
not live asunder day or night.”? Florizel 
takes Perdita’s hand in Winter’s Tale, with 
the significant assertion : 
So turtles pair 
That never mean to part.® 
And at the end of the same Play, the 
widowed Paulina, when all around her has 
at last ended happily, desires to retire into 
solitude : 
I, an old turtle, 
Will wing me to some wither’d bough and there 
My mate, that’s never to be found again, 
Lament till I am lost. 
The Pigeon is not only presented as 
an article of food; but is sometimes 
slightingly alluded to, with reflections 
on its mode of feeding and its timidity. 
1 Chaucer’s phrase is: 
The wedded turtel, with hir hertetrewe. Parlement, 355. 
It was the moaning croon of the bird from the high elms 
that dwelt in Virgil’s memory. 
21) Henry! V1. 3. uy 30. 3 iv. iv. 154. 
g2 
