“The fatal balls of murdering basilisks.”
Colt. From its wild tricks the colt was formerly used to designate, according to Johnson, “a witless, heady, gay youngster.” Portia mentions it with a quibble in “The Merchant of Venice” (i. 2), referring to the Neapolitan prince. “Ay, that’s a colt, indeed.” The term “to colt” meant to trick, or befool; as in the phrase in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 2): “What a plague mean ye to colt me thus?” Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps[397] explains the expression in “Henry VIII.” (i. 3), “Your colt’s tooth is not cast yet,” to denote a love of youthful pleasure. In “Cymbeline” (ii. 4) it is used in a coarser sense: “She hath been colted by him.”
Crocodile. According to fabulous accounts the crocodile was the most deceitful of animals; its tears being proverbially fallacious. Thus Othello (iv. 1) says:
“O devil, devil!
If that the earth could teem with woman’s tears,
Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile.—
Out of my sight!”
We may also compare the words of the queen in “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 1):
“Henry my lord is cold in great affairs,
Too full of foolish pity; and Gloster’s show
Beguiles him, as the mournful crocodile
With sorrow snares relenting passengers.”
It is said that this treacherous animal weeps over a man’s head when it has devoured the body, and will then eat up the head too. In Bullokar’s “Expositor,” 1616, we read: “Crocodile lachrymæ, crocodiles teares, do signify such teares as are feigned, and spent only with intent to deceive or do harm.” In Quarles’s “Emblems” there is the following allusion:
“O what a crocodilian world is this,
Compos’d of treachries and ensnaring wiles!
She cloaths destruction in a formal kiss,
And lodges death in her deceitful smiles.”
In the above passage from “Othello,” Singer says there is, no doubt, a reference to the doctrine of equivocal generation, by which new animals were supposed to be producible by new combinations of matter.[398]
Deer. In “King Lear” (iii. 4) Edgar uses deer for wild animals in general: