312 ANIMALS AT WORK AND PL A Y 



condonation of its being killed after the nature of 

 the omen it brought was clear to all. The criticism 

 naturally suggested is the disproportion between the 

 extremity of suffering endured later by the crew, 

 and the nature of the offence committed. There 

 Coleridge lost by the date at which he wrote. The 

 destruction of a whole ship's crew by a Greek god 

 for the slaughter of his winged messenger, would 

 have been quite in keeping. But whether the crew 

 were punished for their cruelty to the bird, or in- 

 gratitude to its sender, is not quite clear in the 

 narrative of the ' Ancient Mariner.' 



The 'auspex' who suggested the appearance of 

 the albatross was Wordsworth, who had been reading 

 Shelvocke's Voyages^ though it was Coleridge who 

 developed the omen of the bird into the leading 

 motive of the poem. Its purely natural treatment 

 by an English poet, though exactly in harmony 

 with the spirit of ancient Greece, is a curious con- 

 trast to the complex and ridiculous rules for tak- 

 ing omens by birds invented by the Romans. The 

 direct and simple inferences from the appearance 

 of solitary birds were abandoned in order that 

 a body of experts might have the monopoly of 

 such interpretation. The oldest forms of augury 

 from their appearance, such as that of the eagle lift- 

 ing and replacing Tarquin's cap, or the flights of 



