THE RAVEN. 273 
in civilised society, for its perpetual bickerings with 
stranger dogs, and its incautious approach to the 
heels of vicious horses, seldom fail, sooner or later, 
to bring it to an untimely end. Still, I should be the 
last man in the world to question the veracity of 
remote antiquity, upon the mere strength of hasty 
surmise. Those who are gone before us, may 
possibly have had better opportunities of ascertain- 
ing the longevity of birds, than any which we now 
possess. 
I never tire with reading the old fables in which 
birds are introduced. Notwithstanding the impos- 
sibilities and absurdities which are manifest in 
those rich effusions of ancient wit and humour; 
still I can always find much in them to convince me, 
that the writers of the olden times were no strang- 
ers to the real habits of birds. Ovid, who flou- 
rished some two thousand years ago, tells of a re- 
markably old raven. It might indeed have been a 
companion for Methusalem himself. When Medea, 
that wicked, wanton, wandering witch, had made 
up her mind to restore her aged father to the bloom 
of youth, (which was contrary to the order of the 
Fates,) she boiled a pot of herbs, and threw into it 
the bones and carcass of an ow], together with a few 
slices of wolf’s flesh, and the shell and inside of a 
fresh water-turtle. To these she added the beak 
and head of a raven, above nine hundred years old. 
« Quibus insuper addit 
Ora, caputque, novem cornicis secula passz.” 
Thrice she soused her father over head in water, 
T 
