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THE VULTURE : 
“ Polyolbion,” Song xx., where a description of hawking 
at wild-fowl is given. After the falconers have put 
up the fowl from the sedge, the hawk, in the words 
of the author, having previously “towered,” “gives it a 
souse;” Beaumont and Fletcher also make use of this 
word as a hawking term in The Chances , iv. i ; and it 
occurs in Spenser’s “Faerie Queene,” Book iv. Canto v. 30. 
A notice of the various hawks made use of by falconers, 
and mentioned by Shakespeare, might be here properly 
introduced, but it will be more convenient to reserve this 
notice for a separate chapter, and confine our attention 
for the present to the larger diurnal birds of prey which, 
like the eagles, are seldom, if ever, reclaimed by man. 
Of these, excluding the eagle, Shakespeare makes men¬ 
tion of four—the Vulture, the Osprey, the Kite, and the 
Buzzard. 
Those who are acquainted with the repulsive habits of 
the Vulture, led as he is by instinct to gorge on carrion, 
will best understand the allusions to this bird which are to 
be met with in the works of Shakespeare. 
What more forcible expression can be found to indicate 
a guilty conscience than “the gnawing vulture of the 
mind”? (Titus Andronicus , Act v. Sc. 2.) 
“ There cannot be 
That vulture in you, to devour so many.” 
Macbeth , Act iv. Sc. 3. 
When King Lear would denounce the unkindness of a 
