_Fabian._ With what dish o’ poison has she dressed him! _Sir Toby._ And with what wing the staniel checks at it![68] [Sidenote: _The Sparrow-Hawk_] The SPARROW-HAWK (_Musket_) is only once alluded to in the Plays, and then as a kind of pet name applied by Mrs. Ford to little Robin, the page: How now, my eyas-musket! what news with you?[69] The BUZZARD is mentioned several times by Shakespeare, and always in a more or less depreciatory sense. It is a large handsome bird, but compared with the falcon is slow and heavy in flight. So in the encounter of wits between Petruchio and Katharine, he in his characteristic falconer’s language asks her: O slow-winged turtle, shall a buzzard take thee?[70] In a passage already cited the buzzards are coupled with the disreputable kites. Professor Newton remarks that “in the old days of falconry, buzzards were regarded with infinite scorn, and hence in common English to call a man a ‘buzzard’ is to denounce him as stupid.”[71] [Illustration: THE COMMON BUZZARD] [Sidenote: _The Kite_] In the time of Elizabeth the KITE (or _Puttock_), now one of the rarest of our birds, was quite common in this country. It was particularly abundant in London, where it fed on the garbage of the streets, and even of the Thames, and where, together with the raven, it was protected by law as a useful scavenger without pay. The frequency of Shakespeare’s allusions to this bird is good evidence of how familiar it must then have been. It is always referred to in some disparaging way. The “hungry kite” did not scruple to carry off any living creature it could overcome even from the very farm-yard. When Warwick mentions to the Queen his suspicions of foul play in Duke Humphrey’s death, he tells her: Who finds the partridge in the puttock’s nest But may imagine how the bird was dead, Although the kite soar with unbloodied beak? Even so suspicious is this tragedy.[72] In an earlier part of the same Play York asks: Were’t not all one, an empty eagle were set To guard the chicken from a hungry kite, As place Duke Humphrey for the King’s protector? to which the Queen replies:――“So the poor chicken should be sure of death.”[73] In _Winter’s Tale_, when Antigonus is sent on his task to carry the child to some distant desolate spot, he takes it up, saying: Come on, poor babe: Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens To be thy nurses! Wolves and bears, they say, Casting their savageness aside, have done Like offices of pity.[74] But it was more especially as feeders on carrion or on weakly animals that the kites were held in disrepute. Cassius, before the battle of Philippi, recognises the forerunners of carnage in the foul birds that hovered above him: