“As when a gryphon through the wilderness
With wingèd course o’er hill and moory dale
Pursues the Arimaspian, who by stealth
Has from his watchful custody purloin’d
The guarded gold: so eagerly the fiend
O’er bog, or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.”
The Arimaspians were a one-eyed people of Scythia, who braided their hair with gold and drew their supplies of the precious metal as best they could from the stores guarded by the griffins. The griffin has long been employed as a symbol of watchfulness, courage, and perseverance, on account of this fabled treasure-guarding. But Browne, who, as we have seen, took great delight in vivisecting the vulgar errors of his day and generation, discourses as follows on the matter—“Aristeus affirmed that neer the Arimaspi, or one-eyed nation, griffins defended the mines of gold, but this, as Herodotus delivereth, he wrote from hearsay, and Michovius, who hath expressly written of those parts, plainly affirmeth that there is neither gold nor griffins in that country, nor any such Animall extant, for so doth he conclude, ‘Ego vero contra veteres authores, gryphes nec in illa septentrionis nec in alius orbis partibus inveniri affirmarim.’”
Like the dragon, the griffin seems to have been a good sort of fellow to deal with if you only took him the right way, and though a terrible monster to encounter if one had any burglarious intentions, he seems to have served his masters with a singleness of purpose and bull-dog tenacity that were very much to his credit. In Ariosto’s “Orlando Furioso” we read of a griffin-steed that flew through the air with its master on its back, and landed him wheresoever he listed.
The griffin was fabled to be the offspring of the union of the lion and the eagle; it has the leonine body and stout claws of one parent, the hooked beak, keen eye, and wings of the other. The form is very often met with in heraldry, past and present, either as a crest or as a supporter to the arms. A very familiar example of their employment in this latter service will be seen in the arms of the city of London. It is also a very common form in Roman and Renaissance painting and sculpture. Gryphius, a celebrated French printer, adopted the creature as his device, and on his decease the following epitaph was written:—
“La grande griffe
Qui tout griffe
A griffé le corps de Gryphe.”
Though ordinarily written as griffin or griffon, the alternative rendering gryphon is somewhat more correct, as the word is derived from the Greek grypos, or hook-nosed, in evident allusion to its eagle-beak. Shakespeare frequently refers to the creature, but the only instance we need here refer to is where a considerable difference in the spelling of the word might lead some of our readers astray. The passage to which we allude will be found in “The Rape of Lucrece,” where she
“Like a white hind under the grype’s sharp claws
Pleads in a wilderness, where are no laws.”
In the forests of Bohemia, we are told by Burton in his “Miracles of Art and Nature,” there is a little beast called the Lomie, “which hath hanging under its neck a bladder always full of scalding water, with which, when she is hunted, she so tortureth the dogs that she thereby easily makes her escape.” Elsewhere he tells of four-footed serpents, strange creatures that, unlike many of his wonders—only to be found in Peru or India, or such like distant lands—are to be seen as near home as Poland. The people of Poland, we are told, are “boysterous, rude, and barbarous; nourishing amongst them a kind of four-footed serpent, above three handfuls in length, which they worship as their household gods, tending them with fear and reverence when they call them out to their repasts; and if any mischance do happen to any of their family it is imputed presently to some want of due observations of these ugly creatures.”
Vegetable Lambs were another of the wonders of our forefathers. The credulous Sir John Mandeville says that in Cathay a gourd-like fruit is found that when ripe contains “as though it were a lytylle lomb withouten wolle.” In the twenty-sixth chapter of his book the lamb-tree is duly figured, and its peculiar fruit development graphically delineated. In many old books of natural history we find representations of some such creature under the names of the Scythian or Tartarian lamb. According to some old writers it was said to be purely an animal, and although rooted to the ground, was held to have so deadly an effect on vegetation in its neighbourhood that it effectually prevented the growth of all herbage within the scope of its baleful influence. So singular a creature naturally provoked attention and curiosity, and in the earlier days of the Royal Society the matter was considered quite worthy of their notice. Naturally, also, the supply endeavoured to keep pace with the demand, and as the belief in mermaids led to their fabrication and exhibition, so also the myth of the Scythian lamb took visible shape. One of these impositions was formerly preserved in the British Museum, not from any belief in it, of course, but as an illustration of the old belief.[13]