461 
The Griffin. 
With these he guards against an army hold 
The hollow mines where first he findeth gold ; 
As wroth, that men upon his right should rove, 
Or thievish hands usurp his tresor-trove.” 
This is not the griffin of heraldry, but the gigantic bird 
known in Eastern fable as the roc, or rukh, to whom 
Sinbad the Sailor was indebted for his discovery of the 
“ valley of diamonds.” Burton writes :— 
“ As I go by Madagascar I would see that great bird rucke that 
can carry a man and horse or an elephant, with that Arabian phoenix 
described by Adrichomius; see the pellicanes of Egypt, those Scythian 
gryphes in Asia.” {Anatomy of Melancholy , vol. i. p. 489.) 
Drayton mentions the roc as coming with its feathered 
comrades to seek the shelter of the ark :— 
“ All feather’d things yet ever known to men, 
From the huge ruck, unto the little wren.” 
{Noah’s Flood.) 
In England a large kind of eagle was sometimes called 
the gripe, or griffin ; in this sense Shakspeare evidently 
uses the word in 1 Henry TV. (iii. 1, 152). Hotspur , 
when reproved by Mortimer for thwarting Owen Glen- 
dower, exclaims impetuously— 
“ I cannot chose : sometimes he angers me 
With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant, 
Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies. 
And of a dragon and a Unless fish, 
A clip-winged griffin and a moulten raven, 
A couching lion and a ramping cat, 
And such a deal of skimble skamble stuff 
As put me from my faith.” 
In the passage in Lucrece (line 541) the powerful 
fabulous bird described by Du Bartas is probably 
meant:— 
“ While she, the picture of pure piety, 
Like a white hind under the gripe’s sharp claws, 
Pleads, in a wilderness where are no laws, 
