THE COCKATRICE. 185 



ture, to signify a hard and obdurate heart : ' Whoso stoppeth his 

 ears at the cry of the poor, he also shall cry himself, but shall not 

 be heard,' Prov. xxi. ]& It is used in the same sense of the righ- 

 teous, by the prophet : * That stoppeth his ears from the hearing 

 .cf blood, and shutteth his eyes from seeing evil,' Isaiah xxxiii. 15. 

 He remains as unmoved by the cruel and sanguinary counsels of 

 the wicked, as if he had stopped his ears. 



THE COCKATRICE. 



THE translators of the English Bible have variously rendered the 

 Hebrew words tzepho and tzephoni, by adder and cockatrice ; and 

 we are by no means certain of the particular kind of serpent to 

 which the original term is applied. In Isaiah xi. 8, * the tzephoni,' 

 says Dr. Harris, * is evidently an advance in malignity beyond the 

 petcn which precedes it ; and in ch. xiv. 29, it must mean a worse 

 kind of serpent than the nachash ; but this stiH leaves us ignorant 

 of its specific character. Mr. Taylor, who has taken extraordinary 

 pains to identify it, is of opinion that it is the naja or Cobra di 

 capdlo of the Portuguese, which we find thus described by Gold- 

 smith : 



1 Of all others, the Cobra di capello, or hooded serpent, inflicts 

 the most deadly and incurable wounds. Of this formidable creature 

 there are five or six different kinds ; but they are all equally dan- 

 gerous, and their bite followed by speedy and certain death. It is 

 from three to eight feet long, with two long fangs hanging out of 

 the upper jaw. It has a broad neck, and a mark of dark brown on 

 the forehead, which, when viewed frontwise, looks like a pair of 

 16* 



