un Drago sotto i piedi"—an eagle with a dragon under its feet—and the Ghibellini, we do not wonder at finding the noble bird, sometimes single, sometimes double-headed, so frequently figured on silks woven in Sicily, or on the Italian peninsula, triumphing over his enemy, the dragon or Ghibelline stretched down before him. About the emblematic eagle of classic times we have already spoken.
If the Roman Quintus Curtius, like the Greeks before him, was in amazement at certain birds in India, so quick in mimicking the human voice: "aves ad imitandum humanæ vocis sonum dociles,"[1] we naturally expect to find the parrot figured, as we do here, upon stuffs from Asia, or imitations of such webs.
Famous, in eastern story, are those knowing birds—and they were parrots—that, on coming home at evening, used to whisper unto Æthiopia's queen (whom Englishmen not till the sixteenth century began to call Sheba, but all the world besides called and yet calls Saba) each word and doing, that day, of the far-off Solomon, or brought round their necks letters from him. Out of this Talmudic fable grew the method with artists during the fifteenth century of figuring one of the wise men as very swarthy—an Æthiopian—under the name of Balthasar, taking as their warrant, a work called "Collectaneæ," erroneously assigned to our own Beda; and because our Salisbury books for the liturgy, sang, as all the old liturgies yet sing, on the feast of the Ephipany:—"All shall come from Saba"—the name of the country as well as of that queen who once governed it—"bringing gold and frankincense," &c. those mediæval artists deemed it proper to show somewhere about the wise men, parrots, as sure to have been brought among the other gifts, especially from the land of Saba. Upon a cope, belonging now to Mount St. Mary's, Chesterfield, made of very rich crimson velvet, there is beautifully embroidered by English hands, the arrival at Bethlehem of the three wise men. In the orphrey, on that part just above the hood, are figured in their proper colours two parrots, as those may remember who saw it in the Exhibition here of 1862; on textiles before us this bird is often shown. The appearance of the parrot on the vestments at old St. Paul's is very frequent.[2]
But of the feathered tribe which we meet with figured on these textiles, there are three that merit an especial mention through the important part they were made to take, whilom in England at many a high festival and regal celebration—we mean the so-called "Vow of the Swan, the Peacock and the Pheasant." From the graceful ease—the almost royal
