Have lost the wager.”
Rosalind, in As You Like It (act iv. sc. 3, l. 15, vol. ii. p. 442), thus speaks of the letter which Phebe, the shepherdess, had sent her,—
“She says I am not fair, that I lack manners;
She calls me proud, and that she could not love me,
Were man as rare as phœnix.”
The oneliness of the bird is, too, well set forth in the Tempest (act iii. sc. 3, l. 22, vol. i. p. 50),—
“In Arabia
There is one tree, the phœnix' throne; one phœnix
At this hour reigning there.”
To the Heraldry of Imaginative Devices might be referred the greater part of the coats of arms, badges and cognizances by which noble and gentle families are distinguished. To conclude this branch of our subject, I will name a woodcut which was probably peculiar to Geffrey Whitney at the time when Shakespeare wrote, though accessible to the dramatist from other sources; it is the fine frontispiece to the Choice of Emblemes, setting forth the heraldic honours and arms of Robert, Earl of Leycester, and in part of his brother, Ambrose, Earl of Warwick. Each of these noblemen bore the same crest, and it was, what Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI. (act v. sc. 1, l. 203, vol. v. p. 215), terms “the rampant bear chained to the ragged staff.”