BRITISH BIRDS. 
387 
Falcons till they were let off to fifh, and a leather 
thong was tied round the lower part of their necks, 
to prevent them fwallowing the fifli. Whitlock 
tells us that he had a call of them manned like 
Hawks, which would come to hand/* He took 
much pleafure in them, and relates, that the beft 
he had was one prefented to him by Mr Wood, 
Mailer of the Gorvorants to Charles I. 
This tribe feems polfelfed of energies not of an 
ordinary kind ; they are of a ftern fullen character, 
with a remarkably keen penetrating eye and a vi- 
gorous body, and their whole deportment carries 
along with it the appearance of the wary circum- 
fpe6l plunderer, the unrelenting tyrant, and the 
greedy infatiate glutton, rendered lazy only when 
the appetite is palled, and then occafionally puffing 
forth the fetid fumes of a gorged ftomach, vented in 
the difagreeable croakings of its hoarfe hollow voice. 
Such is their .portrait, fuch the character generally 
given of them by ornithologifts, and Milton feems 
to have put the finifhing hand to it, by making Sa- 
tan perfonate the Corvorant, while he furveys, un- 
deiighted, the beauties of Paradife. * It ought, how- 
ever, to be obferved, that this bird, like other ani- 
mals, led only by the cravings of appetite, and di- 
rected by inftinCt, fills the place and purfues the 
^:ourfe affigned to it by nature. 
* Paradife luoft, Book iv, I. 194. — 198.. 
3 c 2 
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