“for ’tis
The royal disposition of that beast
To prey on nothing that doth seem as dead.”
It was also supposed that the lion would not injure a royal prince. Hence, in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4) the Prince says: “You are lions too, you ran away upon instinct, you will not touch the true prince; no, fie!” The same notion is alluded to by Beaumont and Fletcher in “The Mad Lover” (iv. 5):
“Fetch the Numidian lion I brought over;
If she be sprung from royal blood, the lion
He’ll do you reverence, else—
*****
He’ll tear her all to pieces.”
According to some commentators there is an allusion in “3 Henry VI.” (i. 3) to the practice of confining lions and keeping them without food that they may devour criminals exposed to them:
“So looks the pent-up lion o’er the wretch
That trembles under his devouring paws.”
Mole. The eyes of the mole are so extremely minute, and so perfectly hid in its hair, that our ancestors considered it blind—a vulgar error, to which reference is made by Caliban in “The Tempest” (iv. 1):
“Pray you, tread softly, that the blind mole may not
Hear a foot fall.”
And again by Pericles (i. 1):
“The blind mole casts
Copp’d hills towards heaven.”
Hence the expression “blind as a mole.” Alexander Ross[436] absurdly speaks of the mole’s eyes as only the “forms of eyes,” given by nature “rather for ornament than for use; as wings are given to the ostrich, which never flies, and a long tail to the rat, which serves for no other purpose but to be catched sometimes by it.” Sir Thomas Browne, however, in his “Vulgar Errors” (bk. iii. c. xviii.),[437] has, with his usual minuteness, disproved this idea, remarking “that they have eyes in their head is manifested unto any that wants them not in his own.” A popular term for the mole was the “moldwarp” or “mouldiwarp,”[438] so called from the Anglo-Saxon, denoting turning the mould. Thus, in “1 Henry IV.” (iii. 1) Hotspur says: