283 
The Sea-gull. 
ungentle gull, the cuckoo’s bird ” (1 Henry IV., v. 1, 59), 
and the Athenian senator thus prognosticates Timon s 
downfall:— 
‘ f I do fear, 
When every feather sticks in his own wing, 
Lord Timon will he left a naked gull, 
Which flashes now a phoenix.” 
(Timon of Athens , ii. 1, 29.) 
Mr. Harting is, for once, somewhat misleading when 
he writes:— 
“ It is amid such scenes [of the sea-coast] that we naturally look for 
and find the next of Shakespeare’s birds, the gull, or, as he sometimes 
calls it, the sea-mell.” ( Ornithology , p. 266.) 
With the single exception of “ scamells from the rock,” 
dainties that Caliban offers to procure for his patrons^ 
this most beautiful frequenter of our coasts is not once 
mentioned by name by Shakspeare. Even in the 
description of the cliff in Lear, where we might 
naturally expect to find it, the more familiar choughs 
and crows rise to his mind. This is but one indication 
among many that Shakspeare was an inland naturalist. 
There is scarcely an allusion throughout his plays to 
those species of birds or to those various phenomena of 
the sea which, in a month’s voyage or a week’s sojourn 
on the coast, would have attracted his attention. 
Eor the word scamell, Mr. Harting reads sea-mell, or 
young sea-gull. Doubtless Caliban was well acquainted 
with the haunts of every bird that frequented his rocky isle; 
Miranda loved to rear the downy fledglings, brought to 
her from the nests: to the strange men, therefore, they 
might be an acceptable present. A less, poetical explana¬ 
tion of the word is that scamell is a common name 
for the limpet, both in Cornwall and Ireland. 
Thomas Muffett ( Healths Improvement, p. 108) 
mentions “ white gulls, gray-gulls, and black-gulls (com¬ 
monly termed by the name of plungers and water-crows.)” 
