38 
The Animal-Lore of Shakspeare’s Time. 
Shakspeare may have had the passage from his great 
authority, Holinshed, in his mind when he wrote thus:— 
“For, said they [Plato and others] (of whom Pythagoras also 
had, and taught this errour), if the soule apperteined at the first 
to a king, and he in this estate did not leade his life worthie his 
calling, it should, after his decease, he shut up in the bodie of a slave, 
begger, cocke, owle, dog, ape, horsse, asse, worme, or monster, there to 
remaine as in a place of purgation and punishment, for a certeine period 
of time. Beside this, it should peradventure susteine often translation 
from one bodie to another, according to the quantitie and qualitie of 
his dooings here on earth, till it should finallie be purified and restored 
againe to an other humane bodie.” ( Chronicles , vol. i. p. 35.) 
James Howell, in his Familiar Letters , 1624 (p. 169, 
ed. 1754), tells the following anecdote of a Scotch piper 
and wolves:— 
“ A pleasant tale I heard Sir Thomas Fairfax relate of a soldier in 
Ireland, who having got his passport to go for England, as he passed 
through the wood with his knapsack upon his back, being weary, he 
sat down under a tree, where he opened his knapsack, and fell to some 
victuals he had; but on a sudden he was surprized with two or 
three wolves, who coming towards him, he threw them scraps of bread 
and cheese, till all was gone ; then the wolves making a nearer approach 
to him he knew not what shift to make, but by taking a pair of bag¬ 
pipes which he had, and as soone as he began to play upon them, the 
wolves ran all away as if they had been scared out of their wits : 
whereupon the soldier said, A pox take you all, if I had known you 
had loved music so well, you should have had it before dinner.” 
The habit of the wolf of howling by moonlight is 
alluded to by Shakspeare, “ ’Tis like the howling of Irish 
wolves against the moon 55 (As You Like It, v. 2, 118), 
and by Lyly, “ I am none of those wolves that barke most 
when thou [the moon] shinest brightest ” (Endimion). 
The Jackal is not often mentioned in old writings. 
Richard Jobson, in some observations touching 
the river Gambia (Purchas, vol. ii. p. 1575), 
describes this animal’s mode of hunting:— 
“ They have many lions, hardly seene by day, easily bnowne by 
night, by reason of his ushers or fore-runners the jackall, sometimes 
