464 The Animal-Lore of ShaJcspeare’s Time. 
Ben Jonson writes:— 
44 I am neither your minotaur, nor your centaur, nor your satyr, nor 
your hyEena, nor your babion, but your mere traveller, believe me.” 
( Cynthia’s Revels , i. 1.) 
The Centaur was another classical monster, half man 
and half horse. The battle of the Centaurs 
Centaur. Lapithse has been told by Ovid 
and other authors, as well as by Theseus :■— 
44 Theseus [reads]. 4 The battle with the Centaurs, to be sung 
By an Athenian eunuch to the harp.’ 
We’ll none of that: that have I told my love. 
In glory of my kinsman Hercules.” 
{Midsummer Night’s Dream, v. 1, 44.) 
Chester writes (p. 112):— 
“ The Onocentaur is a monstrous beast; 
Supposed halfe a man, and halfe an asse. 
That never shuts his eyes in quiet rest, 
Till he his foes deare life hath round encompast, 
Such were the Centaures in their tyrannie, 
That liv’d by humane flesh and villanie.” 
Satyrs were sylvan demigods, half men, half goats,, 
who attended the revels of Bacchus. Samlet 
compares his father with his uncle :— 
44 So excellent a king ; that was to this, 
Hyperion to a satyr.” 
{Hamlet, i. 2, 139.) 
The Chimsera, a mythological monstrosity frequently 
introduced into medieval architecture, was a 
creature with a goat’s body and three heads, 
one like a lion, one like a goat, and the third like a dragon. 
In Christian art it symbolized deliberate cunning or 
fanciful illusion. The word chimerical in modern usage 
signifies an idle dream, a castle in the air, a project 
that can have no existence but in the imagination. 
A correspondent in Notes and Queries (3rd series, vol. 
