Bewick, who may be trusted to speak of a bird which he has drawn with such exquisite fidelity, refers (Water Birds, 1847, p. 49) to ‘the hollow booming noise which the bittern makes during the night, in the breeding season, from its swampy retreats.’ Cf. also that close observer Crabbe (The Borough, Letter xxii, ll. 197–8):—
And the loud bittern, from the bull-rush home,
Gave from the salt-ditch side the bellowing boom.
[Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made.]
Mitford compares Confessio Amantis, fol. 152:—
A kynge may make a lorde a knave,
And of a knave a lord also;
and Professor Hales recalls Burns’s later line in the Cotter’s Saturday Night, 1785:—
Princes and lords are but the breath of kings.
But Prior finds the exact equivalent of the second line in the verses of an old French poet, De. Caux, upon an hour-glass:—
C’est un verre qui luit,
Qu’un souffle peut détruire, et qu’un souffle a produit.
[A time there was, ere England’s griefs began.] Here wherever the locality of Auburn, the author had clearly England in mind. A caustic commentator has observed that the ‘time’ indicated must have been a long while ago.