Three large water-birds, the Cormorant, Pelican and Loon are disparagingly noticed by Shakespeare. The CORMORANT, so well-known along all our rocky shores, was described by Chaucer as “full of glotonye,” and by the dramatist as the symbol of a rapacious voracity. Thus, vanity is described as an “insatiate cormorant”; we are told of “cormorant devouring Time,” of the “cormorant belly” and of Wounds, friends, and what else dear that is consumed In hot digestion of this cormorant war.[92] The PELICAN is alluded to in the Shakespearian drama in connection with a popular fable that this bird nourishes its young with its own blood. Laertes in _Hamlet_ affirms that to his father’s friends Thus wide I’ll ope my arms, And, like the kind life-rendering pelican, Repast them with my blood.[93] When Lear, in the storm on the open heath, sees the disguised Edgar at the entrance of the hovel, he will not be persuaded that the poor man could have been so beggared save by his unkind daughters, and he asks Kent Is it the fashion that discarded fathers Should have thus little mercy on their flesh? Judicious punishment! ’twas this flesh begot Those pelican daughters.[94] The word “Loon” or “Lown” is employed by the poet to denote a rogue or low fellow. A messenger of evil tidings is called by Macbeth a “cream-faced loon.”[95] In the play of _Pericles_ we hear of a company that would include “both lord and lown”;[96] and in _Othello_ Iago sings part of a north-country ballad in which the same word occurs: [Sidenote: _The Loon_] King Stephen was a worthy peer, His breeches cost him but a crown; He held them sixpence all too dear, With that he called the tailor lown.[97] The name of Loon or Loom is a popular appellation which includes three distinct families of water-birds, all remarkable for their clumsy gait on land. Whether this name was applied to them after it had first been in use as an uncomplimentary epithet for a man, or was originally their own common designation which came eventually to acquire a human application, remains in doubt. More probably the bird was first owner, and the word may belong to the group of bird-names like goose, snipe, kite, hawk and others which have become disparaging epithets for human subjects. In Lincolnshire the word is in use as the common name of the Great Crested Grebe. Though now obsolete in conversational English as an epithet for a rogue it is still in common use in Scotland in that sense.[98] [Sidenote: _The Owl_]