The Magpie
It will be remembered that among the produce on its way to London in the carts of the two carriers at the Rochester inn there was a pannier of live turkeys.[183]
The PEACOCK is alluded to several times in the Plays as the accepted personification of pride. Joan of Arc is represented as counselling the Princes:
Let frantic Talbot triumph for a while
And like a peacock sweep along his tail;
We’ll pull his plumes and take away his train.[184]
Thersites says of Ajax that he “goes up and down the field asking for himself; he stalks up and down like a peacock—a stride and a stand.”[185] When King Henry V. mingles incognito among his soldiers in France, one of them tells him:
That’s a perilous shot out of an elder-gun, that a poor and a private displeasure can do against a monarch! you may as well go about to turn the sun to ice with fanning in his face with a peacock’s feather.[186]