An old writer has this ingenious illustration:—"Mermaids, in Homer, were witches, and their songs enchantments;" which reminds us of the invitation in Haydn's Mermaid's Song:—
"Come with me, and we will go
Where the rocks of coral grow."
The orthodox Mermaid is half woman, half fish; and the fishy half is sometimes depicted as doubly tailed, such as we see in the heraldry of France and Germany; and in the Basle edition of Ptolemy's "Geography," dated 1540, a double-tailed Mermaid figures in one of the plates. In the arms of the Fishmongers' Company of London, the supporters are "a Merman and maid, first, armed, the latter with a mirror in the left hand, proper." From this heraldic employment, the Mermaid became a popular tavern sign; and there was an old dance called the Mermaid.
Sir Thomas Browne refers to the picture of Mermaids, though he does not admit their existence. They "are conceived to answer the shape of the ancient Sirens that attempted upon Ulysses; which, notwithstanding, were of another description, containing no fishy composure, but made up of man and bird." Sir Thomas is inclined to refer the Mermaid to Dagon, the tutelary deity of the Philistines, which, according to the common opinion, had a human female bust and a fish-like termination; though the details of this fish idolatry are entirely conjectural.
Leyden, the Scottish poet, has left a charming ballad, entitled "The Mermaid," the scene of which is laid at Corrievreckin: the opening of this poem Sir Walter Scott praised as exhibiting a power of numbers which, for mere melody of sound, has seldom been excelled in English poetry:—
"On Jura's heath how sweetly swell
The murmurs of the mountain bee!
How softly mourns the writhèd shell
Of Jura's shore its parent sea!