1 4 The Poets and Nature. 



Ne belching rucks forth flames, his moving eye 



Shines like the glory of the morning skie ; 



His craggy sinewes are like wreathes of brasse 



And from his mouth quick flames of fier passe 



As from an Oven ; the temper of his heart 



Is like a Nether-Milstone, which no Dart 



Can pierce, secured from the threatning Speare ; 



Afraid of none, he strikes the world with feare. 



The Bow-moms brawny arms send shafts in vaine, 



They fall like stubble, or bound backe againe : 



Stones are his pillow, and the Mud his Downe, 



In earth none greater is, nor equall none, 



Compar'd with him, all things he doth deride 



And well may challenge to be King of Pride." Quarles. 



But why does Thomson describe the great beast as " cased 

 in green scales," or Shelley imagine the species to have been 

 exterminated by the Deluge ? 



"The jagged alligator, and the might 

 Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once 

 Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores 

 And weed-overgrown continents of earth 

 Increased and multiplied like summer worms 

 On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe 

 Wrapt deluge round it like a cloke, and they 

 Yelled, gasped, and were abolished." 



That this reptile, " who can falsely weep," as Heber says, 1 

 is a hypocrite, who needs telling? The poets are much 

 attracted by this fancy. "With a feigned grief the tomb 

 relents, And like a crocodile its prey laments," says Congreve. 

 In Savage we find it "weeping cruel tears " over its "bleed- 

 ing prey." And in Thomson it is "the smooth crocodile 

 Destruction." Coleridge gives Hypocrisy a "crocodile's 

 eye ; " and Shelley in the " Masque of Anarchy/' sees her 

 ride by on its back. 



Spenser draws from the saurian's "swike" the admir- 

 able moral that it is as well to mind your own affairs 

 while charitably bent on minding those of others : 



1 ' ' And the beeste who can falsely weepe 

 Crocodilus was here goode shepe." 



