While the king of beasts has been credited with generosity and other royal virtues, the eagle, king of birds, seems not to have developed, either in nature or in fable, any such regal qualities. The most favourable estimate we have encountered is that of the “Speculum Mundi,” and even that leaves much to be desired. “The Eagle,” writes our authority, “is commended for her faithfulnesse towards other birds in some kinde, though sometimes she show herselfe cruell. They all stand in awe of her; and when she hath gotten meat she useth to communicate it unto such fowls as do accompany with her; onely this some affirme, that when she hath no more to make distribution of, then she will attack some of her guests, and for lack of food, dismember them.” The eagle is often depicted as bearing the thunderbolts of Jove, from an ancient belief that “of all flying fowles the ægle only is not smitten nor killed with lightening.” “Secure from thunder, and unharm’d by Jove.”[79] A man clothed in the skins of seals, or crowned with bay-leaves, enjoyed like immunity. The pelican has been pressed into the service of religious symbolism, from a belief that it nourished its young with its own blood, and hence it was made the emblem of loving sacrifice.[80] “The pelicane, whose sons are nursed with bloude, stabbeth deep her breast, self-murdresse through fondnesse to hir broode,” and the Shakespearian student will recall the lines in Hamlet:— “To his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms, And, like the kind, life-rendering pelican, Refresh them with my blood.” The whole myth is based upon a very slender basis indeed, as it is conjectured that it arose from the habit of the bird pressing its breast feathers with its bill, the bill itself having a crimson spot at its extremity that suggested the idea of blood. When the bird is represented in ecclesiastical work, or as a charge in heraldry, it is always shown in this position, and is known technically as “a pelican in her piety.” Many of the early writers accept the legend in the most perfect good faith, and no more doubted that the young pelicans were reared on the blood of the mother bird, than that hens would eat barley, or sparrows come for bread-crumbs. Some ecclesiastical writers, whom we cannot quite exonerate from acting on the principle that it is lawful to do ill if good flows from it, added the detail that when the young of the pelican were destroyed by serpents, the mother pelican shed her blood upon them, and brought them to life again, and hence became a striking symbol of the restoration to life of those dead in trespasses and sin by the vivifying blood of the Redeemer of mankind. It was for many centuries a belief that the swan, mute through life, sang melodiously at its death. “Sweet strains he chaunteth out with’s dying tongue, And is the singer of his funerall song.”