I tremble still with fear: but if there be
Yet left in heaven as small a drop of pity
As a wren’s eye, fear’d gods, a part of it![208]
Shakespeare hardly does justice to the notes of the wren, which are louder, sweeter and more varied than might have been looked for in so tiny a bird. Portia thought that if the nightingale sang by day it would be thought no better than the wren.[209] And, in another passage, words of consolation “from a hollow breast” are likened to “the chirping of a wren.”[210]
The Wagtail and Bunting
The WAGTAIL is alluded to once by the poet, when its name is used in contempt by Kent towards Goneril’s steward:
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,