The belief in the mermaid was to our ancestors as real as the belief in the mackerel; and though we have in these later days surrounded all with an air of romance, the mermaid was to them no myth or poetic fancy, but as genuine an article of credence as any other creature of earth, or air, or sea. Phisiologus simply calls it “a beast of the sea,” which is a very unpoetic definition indeed; while Boswell in like manner calls it “a sea beast wonderfully shapen.” Nowadays one’s notion of a mermaid is of a fair creature, half woman half fish, basking amongst the rocks or rocking on the waves, and engaged in nothing more arduous than alternately combing her flowing golden tresses in the sunlight, and gazing in her constant travelling companion, her mirror, to study the effect of her work. The mediæval mermaid was of sterner temper; one old writer says that “they please shipmen greatly with their song that they draw them to peril and shipwreck;” while another affirms that “this beast is glad and merry in tempest, and heavy and sad in faire weather.” Bœwulf, the Saxon poet, styles the mermaid— “The sea-wolf of the abyss, The mighty sea-woman.” The syren myth of the ancients is clearly the origin of this belief in the malevolence of the mermaid. These syrens, to quote Spencer’s “Fairie Queen,” “Were faire ladies, till they fondly strived With th’ Heliconian Maides for mastery: Of whom they overcomen were depriv’d Of their proud beautie, and th’ one moyity Transform’d to fish, for their bold surquedry: But th’ upper half their hew retayned still, And their sweet skill in wonted melody Which ever after they abused to ill,[21] T’ allure weake travellers whom gotten they did kill.” The writer of the “Speculum Mundi” believed in mermaids as firmly as his contemporaries did, but he departs somewhat from the traditional lines of belief, and instead of making his mermaids brewers of the storms, sees in them merely rather exceptionally weather-wise and gifted prophets of the coming tempest. He says of them: “The mermaids and men-fish seem to me the most strange fish in the waters. Some have supposed them to be devils or spirits, in regard of their whooping noise that they make. For (as if they had power to raise extraordinary storms and tempests) the windes blow, seas rage, and clouds drop presently after they seem to call.” This was the popular belief, but he explains matters as follows:—“Questionlesse that Nature’s instinct makes in them a quicker insight and more sudden feeling and foresight of those things than is in man, which we see even in other creatures upon earth, as fowles, who feeling the alteration of the aire in their feathers and quills, do plainly prognosticate a change of weather before it appeareth to us.” So that really the bellowing of these maidens is brought down to the level of cock-crowing, the braying of the ass,[22] or the scream of the peacock, as indications of weather-changes.