186 
The Animal-Lore of Shakspeare’s Time . 
savoury diet. The raven’s croak, like many other rural 
sounds, was thought to forebode illness and death:—■ 
“ The om’nous raven with a dismal chear, 
Through his hoarse beak of following horror tells, 
Begetting strange imaginary fear, 
With heavy echoes like to passing bells.” 
(Poole, English Parnassus .) 
Shakspeare and most of his brother dramatists have effec¬ 
tively introduced the belief in the prophetic powers of 
this bird. Thus Peele writes:— 
“ Like as the fatal raven, that in his voice 
Carries the dreadful summons of our deaths, 
Flies by the fair Arabian spiceries, 
Her pleasant gardens, and delightsome parks, 
Seeming to curse them with his coarse exclaims, 
And yet doth stoop with hungry violence 
Upon a piece of hateful carrion.” 
(I)avid and Beth sale.) 
Du Bartas has a very similar passage:— 
“ Ev’n as the rav’ns with windy wings o’er-fly 
The weeping woods of happy Araby, 
Despise sweet gardens and delicious bowrs 
Perfuming heav’n with odoriferous flowres, 
And greedy, light upon the loatlisom quarters 
Of some late Lopez, or such Bomish martyrs.” 
(Divine Weehes , p. 118.) 
The voice of this bird is certainly sufficiently gruff to 
afford some excuse for the dismay which it caused, espe¬ 
cially -when heard at night, in a lonely wood, by the 
belated traveller. 
Guillim, in his Display of Heraldry, refers to the 
extraordinary belief handed down from antiquity that the 
parent birds, not approving of the colour of their newly 
hatched offspring, forsake the nest for a time. He 
says 
