The identity of the popular idea of the mermaid with the classical notion of the syren is shown in the following passage from Shakspeare:
“Thou rememberest
Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a Mermaid on a dolphin’s back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song.”
And Brown, in his ‘Vulgar Errours,’ observes, “few eyes have escaped [that] the picture of a Mermaid, with woman’s head above, and fishy extremity below, answers the shape of the antient syrens that attempted upon Ulysses.” The heraldric mermaid usually holds a mirror in her right hand and a comb in her left. The existence of mermaids was religiously believed not many ages since, and many accounts of their being captured on the English coast occur in the writings of our old chroniclers, and other retailers of marvels. The specimens exhibited of late years have been pronounced ingenious combinations of the upper half of the ape with the tail of a fish.
The montegre, manticora, or man-tyger, had the body of a lion (q. tiger?), the head of an old man, and the horns of an ox. Some heralds, by way of finish, give him dragon’s feet.
Butler’s well-known line,
“The herald’s martlet hath no legs,”
has rendered most readers aware of the singular defect of this otherwise beautiful charge. Heraldric authors differ as to the identity of this bird. Its being called in Latin blazon ‘merula,’ and in French ‘merlotte,’ the diminutive of ‘merle,’ has induced some to consider it a blackbird; while others, with greater plausibility, decide in favour of the common house martin, the legs of which are so short and the wings so long that when it alights upon the ground it cannot rise without great difficulty. Hence originated the mistake of pourtraying it without legs, “and for this cause,” sagely observes Guillim, “it is also given for a difference of younger brethren to put them in minde to trust to their wings of vertue and merit to raise themselves, and not to their legges, having but little land to put their foot on.”
The opinicus differs slightly from the griffin, having four lion’s legs instead of two, and the tail is short like that of a camel. It is used as the crest of the Barber-Chirurgeons Company. The pegasus or winged-horse ranks among the chimerical figures of heraldry borrowed from classical fable, and is more frequently employed as a crest or supporter than as a charge. The sphinx occurs very rarely. The satyr or satyral exhibits a human face attached to the body of a lion, and has the horns and tail of an antelope.
The sagittary is the centaur of antiquity—half man, half horse, and is said to have been assumed as the arms of king Stephen on account of the great assistance he had received from the archers, and also because he had entered the kingdom while the sun was in the sign Sagittarius. Sir John Maundevile tells us that in Bacharie “ben many Ipotaynes, that dwellen somtyme in the watre and somtyme on the lond; and thei ben half man and half hors: and thei eten men when they may take hem”—an excellent gloss upon Mrs. Glass, ‘First catch your hare,’ &c.[134]
The unicorn is the most elegant of all these fanciful figures, and is too well known as the sinister supporter of the royal arms to need any description. Mr. Dallaway derives the heraldric unicorn from the spike antiently fixed to the headpiece of a war-horse, and resembling a horn; but as this does not account for the cloven hoofs and slender, tufted tail, I should reverse the inference, and derive that appendage from the popular notion of the unicorn.