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XIII.

The Seal, Mermaid, and Triton.

The seal is an amphibious animal, living chiefly in the water, being provided with two broad fin-like feet for swimming. Phocæ, or Fochia, a seaport of Ionia, received its name from the seals which abound in its vicinity. The rude state of science and the ignorance of the earlier naturalists have already been mentioned; the seal was consequently assumed in heraldry as a fish, though not considered as such by modern zoologists.

The seal frequents the mouth of the Tees, and commits havoc among the salmon; it is also found in the river Severn; a stuffed seal, long preserved in the hall of Berkeley Castle, was the hero of many traditional tales of captives devoured by it. Both seals and porpoises kept their place on the table as late as the beginning of the sixteenth century: there were twelve porpoises and seals brought for the feast when Archbishop Nevile was enthroned at York in 1465, and both are mentioned in the account of Archbishop Warham's feast in 1503.

Parts of the seal are borne in the heraldry of some ancient families of Great Britain. Argent, a chevron between three seals'

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heads couped sable, were the arms of James Lord Ley, a distinguished lawyer, Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench, and Lord Treasurer of England, in the reign of James I, and who was created Earl of Marlborough by King Charles I.

Or, a seal's foot erased and erect sable, are the arms of the family of Beringburgh; and, argent, a chevron between three seals' feet erased and erect sable, are the arms of the town of Yarmouth.⁕

Among the islands and on the shores of Scotland seals are plentiful. Broadford, in the Isle of Skye, is situated on the Streamlet of Seals. Two seals are the supporters of the arms of Sir Fitz Roy J. G. Maclean, Baronet, whose ancestor, Sir Lachlan Maclean of Morvern, in the Isle of Mull, was so created by King Charles I. in 1632.

Around Juan Fernandez are always seen thousands of seals, either sitting on the shores of the bays, or going and coming in the sea, round the island. It is the opinion of an eminent naturalist that the seal was the prototype of the mermaid and triton, the splendid fictions of the classical poets; its round head and hand-like feet, he urges, might readily aid the imagination in forming a creature half human, half fish; no egregious violation of verisimilitude is required, and the distortion of actual fact might arise from the result of fear, or, what is more probable, from the love of the marvellous, natural to superstition.+

The relation of a being half fish and half human, is of the earliest authority; Berosus mentions a fish, Oannes, worshipped in Chaldea, which had the body of a fish with the head and hands of a man; a compound deity, imagined, probably, in allusion to some stranger who had arrived in a ship, and had instructed the people in the arts of civilization. In Canada the Nibanaba, half human half fish, dwells in the waters of Lake Superior, according to the fanciful mythology of the Indians.

The accounts of the appearance of mermaids are very numerous; there is testimony enough to establish their former existence in history, exhibiting instances of the credulity, not of the weak and illiterate, but of men of learning, the best instructed of any in the ages in which they lived.

It is very rare that more than one mermaid is reported to have been seen at a time, but it appears that on the coast of Ceylon some fishermen, in the year 1560, brought up at one draught of the net no less than seven mermaids and mermen; of which fact several Jesuits were witnesses. The physician to the Viceroy of Goa, who examined them with care, and dissected

* Guillim.

+ Bell's British Quadrupeds.

Babylonian Antiquities.

them, asserted that, internally as well as externally, they were found conformable to human beings.*

In the museum at Surgeons' Hall is preserved a fish, which is classed by the naturalists of the present day among the mammalia, a species of that kind which gave rise to the fabulous stories of the mermaid: it is about eight feet in length, and bears resemblance to the seal. The fins terminate, internally, in a structure like the human hand; the breasts are very prominent, and their situation on the body has led, no doubt, to the popular belief: in other respects the face of the fish is far from looking like that of the human race, and the long hair of the mermaid is entirely wanting. It was brought from Bencoolen, in Sumatra, in December 1820.+

A form enormous! far unlike the race
Of human birth, in stature or in face.

Advocates for the existence of the mermaid are not wanting in modern times, and it has been found necessary to show that such a creature, as it is usually described, must be utterly defenceless in the wide ocean, and consequently the prey of the shark and every other sea-monster that approached, being without speed to fly or strength to resist. Mermaids could only exist in the sea, like other defenceless fish, by going in large shoals, and preserving their race from destruction by their numbers; but, if so, the disputed fact of their existence would long ago have been cleared up.

"Few eyes," says Sir Thomas Browne , "have escaped the picture of a mermaid; Horace's monster, with woman's head above and fishy extremities below, answers the shape of the ancient syrens that attempted upon Ulysses." The syrens were three in number, inhabiting an island off Cape Pelorus: § these nymphs, emblematical of the allurements of pleasure, are represented as beautiful women to the waist, and otherwise formed like fish, deriving their name from the most obvious part of their character, singing; their melodious voices charmed all who approached them, till Ulysses, shunning their enticement, passed the dangerous coast in safety, and the point where the syrens destroyed themselves was afterwards known in Sicily as Sirenis.

The mermaid of French heraldry is called a syren. Azure, a * Hist. de la Compagnie de Jesus.

Gent's. Mag. May 1821.

Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors.

§ Now called the Faro di Messina, from the lighthouse on its summit.

syren with comb and glass argent, within a border indented gules, were the arms of the family of Poissonnier: the heiress of this house marrying into that of Berbissy, an ancient house of Dijon, the latter assumed the syren as a tenant, or supporter, to their own punning arms, azure, a brebis or sheep argent, which appear in the stained glass windows of the church of Notre Dame.⁕ The mermaid of German heraldry is often represented with two fishy extremities; gules, a mermaid affrontée, holding her two tails or, and crowned with the same, are the arms of Fennden of Augsburg. The noble family of Die Rietter of Nuremberg bears, per fess sable and or, a mermaid holding her two tails, vested gules, and crowned or; the crest, a mermaid, the same as in the arms, on a coronet.+

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The Nereids attendant on the sea-gods were fifty in number, young and handsome women, who sat on dolphins' backs, and had the power to grant a prosperous voyage and favourable return. The mermaid is sometimes confounded with the nereid by the poets as well as painters. The invention of the mermaid,—for it must be considered only as fiction—has been probably owing to a desire of finding analogies and correspondences in the works of nature.

As an architectural enrichment mermaids were a prevailing feature in the middle ages; one of the rudely-sculptured capitals in the church of Figeau in Languedoc is composed of mermaids.§ The ancient sculptors of England were not deficient in ingenuity, and among other fanciful productions the mermaid appears to have been a favourite subject. On one of the subsellia

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This was the case in a beautiful picture of a mermaid by Henry Howard, R.A. in 1841, to illustrate a passage of Shakspeare. § Engraved in the Voyage Pittoresque.

in the stalls of Exeter Cathedral is a mermaid holding a fish in each hand; and another grotesque carving, on the roof of Dulverton Church in Somersetshire, represents a mermaid holding her fishlike tail in one hand and a fish in the other; on her sides are two fish, one in an ascending and the other in a descending position. A chasuble embroidered with mermaids, worn by a canon of Poictiers in 1350, is engraved on his monumental slab formerly in the Abbey of St. Geneviève.†

One of the earliest instances in England of the assumption of the mermaid in heraldry is found on the seal of Sir William Briwere or Bruere. This William Briwere was in great favour with

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King Richard I, and equally a favourite with King John; he reaped from the bounty of the two sovereigns a plentiful harvest of lucrative wardships and valuable grants: besides numerous inferior manors, he obtained the boroughs of Bridgewater and Chesterfield, and had licence to build three castles on his estates in Hampshire, Somersetshire, and Devonshire; he founded the abbeys of Tor, Dunkeswell, and Mottisfont, and died in 1226. The heiresses of the last Lord Briwere married into the families of Broase, Wake, Mohun, and Percy. His cousin, William Briwere, was Bishop of Exeter in 1224.

The mermaid of the painter is represented as furnished with a mirror, and comb for her hair; such also was the primitive toilette of the Shepherdess Torralva in her pilgrimage, as related by Cervantes; " and these," says Mr. Inglis, "I have myself seen in La Mancha carried by a young woman, who had little else to carry."+

A mermaid is the crest of the Lords Byron of Rochdale, a

* Gent's. Mag. for 1834.

+ One of the subjects of Mr. Shaw's Decorations of the Middle Ages.

Rambles in the Footsteps of Don Quixote.

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