THE CRAB, ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND ASSOCIATIONS. 
105 
syllabub of new Verjuice, and then you may sit down on a hay cock and eat it.” No doubt 
palatable enough on a hot day. 
Pliny in his great work on Natural History, says but little in favour of the Crab, he remarks— 
“As to Wildings and Crabs, little they be all the sort of them, in comparison. Their taste is well 
enough liked, and they carie with them a quick and sharpe smell: how be it this gift they have for 
their harsh sournesse, that they have many a foule word and shrewd curse given them, and that 
they are able to dull the edge of any knife that shall cut them.” (Trans. Holland, p. 438.) 
In the following passage sourness of temper is suggested as the result of looking at a person 
stigmatised as a Crab ;— 
“j Petruchio. —Nay, come, Kate, come, you must not look so sour. 
Katherine. —It is my fashion when I see a Crab. 
Petruchio. —Why, here’s no Crab, and therefore look not sour. 
Katherine. —There is, there is.” 
(Taming of the Shrew, II, Sc. I.) 
A crabbed unfeeling temper may appear in animals as well as in the human race— 
“ I think Crab, my dog, be the sourest-naticred dog that lives :— 
My mother weeping, my father wailing, my sister crying, our maid howling, our cat wringing her hands, and all our 
house in a great perplexity, yet did not this cruel-hearted cur shed one tear,” 
(Two Gentlemen of Verona, II, Sc. 3.) 
-“ O she is 
Ten times more gentle than her father’s crabbed ; 
And he’s composed of harshness.” 
(Tempest, III, Sc. I.) 
“She will taste as like this, as a crab does to a crab.” 
“ Thy other daughter will use thee kindly; for though she’s as like this as a crab is like 
an apple, yet I can tell what I can tell.” 
(King Lear, I, Sc. 3.) 
“ Something too crabbed, that way, friar.” 
(Measure for Measure , III, Sc. 2.) 
So Milton has used the simile in reference to what may be thought uninteresting and 
distasteful to the mind :— 
“ How charming is divine philosophy, 
Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose.” 
(Milton — Comus, 476.) 
Southey in depicting Winter, takes a simile from the stubborn harshness appertaining to 
Crab Trees :— 
“ A wrinkled crabbed man they picture thee 
Old winter, with a ragged beard as gray 
As the long moss upon the Apple tree.” 
