Should run thy head from thy unreverent shoulders.
Gaunt. O, spare me not, my brother Edward’s son,
For that I was his father Edward’s son;
That blood already, like the pelican,
Hast thou tapp’d out and drunkenly caroused.”
The idea, indeed, almost supposes that the young pelicans strike at the breasts of the old ones, and forcibly or thoughtlessly drain their life out. So it is in King Lear (act iii. sc. 4, l. 68, vol. viii. p. 342), when the old king exclaims,—
“Death, traitor! nothing could have subdued nature
To such a lowness but his unkind daughters.
Is it the fashion that discarded fathers
Should have thus little mercy on their flesh?