[261] Cf. "Midsummer-Night's Dream" (iv. 1). "the morning lark;" "Romeo and Juliet" (iii. 5), "the lark, the herald of the morn."
In "Love's Labour's Lost" (v. 2, song) we have a graphic touch of pastoral life:
"When shepherds pipe on oaten straws, And merry larks are ploughmen's clocks."
The words of Portia, too, in "Merchant of Venice" (v. 1), to sing "as sweetly as the lark," have long ago passed into a proverb.
It was formerly a current saying that the lark and toad changed eyes, to which Juliet refers in "Romeo and Juliet" (iii. 5):
"Some say, the lark and loathed toad change eyes;"
Warburton says this popular fancy originated in the toad having very fine eyes, and the lark very ugly ones. This tradition was formerly expressed in a rustic rhyme:
"to heav'n I'd fly, But that the toad beguil'd me of mine eye."
In "Henry VIII." (iii. 2) the Earl of Surrey, in denouncing Wolsey, alludes to a curious method of capturing larks, which was effected by small mirrors and red cloth. These, scaring the birds, made them crouch, while the fowler drew his nets over them:
"let his grace go forward, And dare us with his cap, like larks."
In this case the cap was the scarlet hat of the cardinal, which it was intended to use as a piece of red cloth. The same idea occurs in Skelton's "Why Come Ye not to Court?" a satire on Wolsey:
"The red hat with his lure Bringeth all things under cure."
The words "tirra-lirra" ("Winter's Tale," iv. 3) are a fanciful combination of sounds,[262] meant to imitate the lark's note; borrowed, says Nares, from the French _tire-lire_. Browne, "British Pastorals" (bk. i. song 4), makes it "teery-leery." In one of the Coventry pageants there is the following old song sung by the shepherds at the birth of Christ, which contains the expression:
"As I out rode this endenes night, Of three joli sheppards I sawe a syght, And all aboute there fold a stare shone bright, They sang terli terlow, So mereli the sheppards their pipes can blow."
[262] Nares's "Glossary," vol. ii. p. 886; Douce's "Illustrations of Shakespeare," 1839, p. 217.
In Scotland[263] and the north of England the peasantry say that if one is desirous of knowing what the lark says, he must lie down on his back in the field and listen, and he will then hear it say: