Excommunication of Locusts . 
395 
And like so many screaming grasshoppers 
Held by the wings, fill every ear with noise.” 
{The Poetaster , actv. apologue.) 
The poet’s knowledge of natural history was not equal to 
his skill in classical lore, and he here, as elsewhere, con¬ 
fuses the grasshopper with the cicada of Italy and 
Greece. 
Among whole-bodied insects Harrison includes “ bee¬ 
tles, horseflies, turdbugs, or dorres (called 
in Latine scarahei), and the Locust or grass¬ 
hopper (which to me also seeme to be one thing”) 
(. Holinshed , vol. i. p. 382). The locust proper is, fortu¬ 
nately, not a visitor to the cornfields of Britain, though 
the largest species of grasshopper has sometimes received 
this name. 
Shakspeare’s only use of the word locust has refer¬ 
ence, in all probability, to the bean and not to the 
insect: “ The food that to him now is as luscious as 
locusts, shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida ” 
(Othello, i. 3, 354). 
In 1553 the neighbourhood of Arles, in the south of 
France, was visited by swarms of these locusts, which 
caused great distress by their ravages on the standing 
crops. Sir Francis Alvarez, a Portuguese priest, gives 
an account of how he excommunicated the locusts in 
Ethiopia, in the year 1560. 
“ The number of these creatures,” he writes, “ is as great as it is 
incredible, and with their multitude they cover the earth and fill the 
ayre in such wise that it is an hard matter to be able to see the pun. . . „ 
These vermine are as great as a great grasshopper, and have yellow 
wings. . . . We assembled the people of the towne, and all the priests, 
and taking a consecrated stone and a crosse, all we Portugals sung the 
Letanie. I caused them to take up a quantity of locusts, and make of 
[over] them a conjuration, which I carried with me in writing, which 
I had made the night before, requiring them, charging them, and ex¬ 
communicating them, willing them within three houres space to begin 
to depart toward the sea, or toward the land of the Moores, or towards 
