Thou zed! thou unnecessary letter! I will tread this unbolted villain into mortar. Spare my gray beard?――you wagtail![211] There is one reference by Shakespeare to the BUNTING, probably the common corn-bunting or bunting-lark, which is not unlike the lark, and further resembles that bird in nesting on the ground. In _All’s Well that Ends Well_, the old lord Lafeu, when assured by Bertram that he had mistaken the character of Parolles, remarks; “Then my dial goes not true; I took this lark for a bunting.”[212] The REDBREAST or RUDDOCK is most fully referred to in _Cymbeline_. Arviragus enters, bearing in his arms Imogen, seemingly dead, and as he lays the body down he thus addresses it: With fairest flowers, Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele, I’ll sweeten thy sad grave: thou shalt not lack The flower that’s like thy face, pale primrose, nor The azured harebell, like thy veins; no, nor The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander Out-sweetened not thy breath: the ruddock would With charitable bill,――O bill, sore shaming Those rich-left heirs that let their fathers lie Without a monument!――bring thee all this; Yea, and furr’d moss besides, when flowers are none, To winter-ground thy corse.[213] The list of signs whereby Speed knows that his master Valentine is in love begins thus: “first, you have learned, like Sir Proteus, to wreathe your arms, like a male-content; to relish a love-song, like a robin-redbreast; to walk alone, like one that had the pestilence.”[214] When Hotspur presses his wife to sing and she twice refuses, his only remark is, “’Tis the next way to turn tailor, or be redbreast-teacher.”[215] [Sidenote: _The Hedge-sparrow and Finch_] The only allusion to the HEDGE-SPARROW occurs in _King Lear_. When Goneril has gone some way in her recrimination of her father, the Fool, who had just before called the old king “a shealed peascod,” breaks into the conversation with these lines: The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long That it had it head bit off by it young.[216] The FINCH, included in Bottom’s song, is not elsewhere mentioned by the poet, though the epithet “finch-egg,” as a term of reproach, is hurled by Thersites at Patroclus.[217] Of the various English finches we may suppose that the bird intended was the common chaffinch. The familiar HOUSE-SPARROW, though often mentioned by Shakespeare, receives little commendation from him. He twice connects it with evidence of the care of Providence, in obvious allusion to passages in Holy Writ. Hamlet observes that “there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.”[218] Reference has already been made to the trust expressed by Orlando’s faithful old Adam in Him “that providently caters for the sparrow.”[219] The bird comes also into the presentation of classical deities in _The Tempest_, where Iris tells how Venus’