The author of the “Speculum Mundi” also refers to “the nightingale sitting all the night singing upon a bough, with the sharp end of a thorn against her breast,” assigning, as the reason, “to keep her waking.” The bird is a great favourite with the poets, but in most cases their invocations are somewhat misplaced: it is not the “sweet songstress” that so delights us, for though her notes are sweet, the real flood of melody wells from the heart of her lord. ’Tis he, to quote the words of Coleridge— “That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates With thick fast warble his delicious notes, As he were fearful that an April night Would be too short for him to utter forth His love-chant, and disburden his full soul Of all its music.” The error as to sex, and the error as to the pensive character of the song, have a common origin and date back from the ancient time when Ovid declared that Philomela, the daughter of Pandion, King of Athens, mourning for her children, was turned into a nightingale: hence Virgil uses the word “Philomela” when speaking of the bird, and the mediæval and modern poets have continued the usage; and on this same account, the song of the nightingale has by poetic fiction been deemed pensive and melancholy. Thus Shelley refers to “the nightingale’s complaint,” and Drayton writes of “our mournful Philomela,” while Milton calls the bird “most musical, most melancholy.” Coleridge, Clare, and others refuse however to follow this precedent. When the peasant of mediæval days heard the cuckoo for the first time in each year, he rolled himself vigorously on the grass, and thus secured himself for the rest of the year from pains in the back. Much of the virtue of this remedy, we should imagine, would depend upon how damp the grass might be. We could easily imagine a state of things when this rolling process would be provocative rather than preventative. It was generally believed that the cuckoo sucked the eggs of other birds. “The cuckoo, he sings in the spring of the year, And he sucks little birds’ eggs to make his voice clear.” Hence so soon as the general nesting season is over, and this selfish ovisuction fails him, the cuckoo to a great extent loses his song.[96] It was a generally accepted belief, too, that the cuckoo repaid the care of his foster parents, when he had no further occasion for it, by swallowing them. This belief dates from very early times. Aristotle refers to it, for instance, while in later days it crops up in the various books on so-called Natural History. On turning again to Shakespeare, who rarely fails us when any quaint folk-lore has to be illustrated, we find an interesting reference to it in King Lear: “The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long that it had its head bit off by its young”—and again in the first part of King Henry IV., where Worcester, reminding the king of his broken word, says:—