their descent from the oldest Christian baron,
the Irish viscounts, Montmorency and Frankfort
de Montmorency, have a Peacock for their
crest; so have the Duke of Rutland and Lord
Manners, the Duke of Newcastle, Lord
Harborough, and Lord Yarborough ; and three
separate feathers of the Peacock's plume, issuing
from a cap of maintenance, form the crest of
the Earl of Sefton. I remember, too, seeing
the Peacock in pride above the arms of the late
Sir Matthew Tierney, the physician, full
opportunity for seeing it being afforded by the
frequent appearance of his yellow chariot, as it
drew up before his patients' doors at Brighton.
There are many living who bear the name of
Peacock, and the blazon of some amongst them
may probably be that of which we read in
Gwyllim's " Display of Heraldry," as follows :
"Sable, three Peacocks in their Pride, argent, a
chief embattled or, is borne by the name of
Peacock, and was granted to Simon Peacock of
Bramhall, in the county palatine of Durham, 10th
November, 1688 :" a period of English history
when one would think the " Fountain of
Honour," King James, with the news in his ears
of Dutch William's landing at Torbay, had
something to think of besides Peacocks ! But,
indeed, there was something in his position
just then very near akin to the bird in question,
the realm being dismantled, and himself—
" A very, very— Peacock,"

though the legitimate rhyme would have fitted
him as well as Hamlet's uncle.

Modern cookery neglects the Peacock, though
pea-fowl, when young, make their appearance at
this season at table; but in the olden time, the
full-grown bird was as much esteemed for its flesh
as admired for its plumage. The orator Hortensius
was the first who ate the Peacock at Rome,
in a solemn feast which he made when he was
consecrated high priest, and the example set by
him was so widely followed by the luxurious
dinner-givers of the Eternal City— amongst
them Marcus Aufidius Lurco, who, says Pliny,
"first devised to feed them fat," spending sixty
thousand sestraces on the experiment—that the
dish soon became one of the most expensive.
Peacocks, however, observes Latham, must have
been plentiful notwithstanding, or the Emperor
Vitellius-- that cruel, worthless glutton—could
not have procured sufficient, for his large dish,
called " The Buckler of Minerva," which,
history says, was tilled with the livers of Scari (the
Parrot-fish, one of the Labridæ), the tongues of
Flamingoes, and the brains of Pheasants and
Peacocks. Eaten in this way, the Peacock only
bore a part in an enormous and most costly
macedoine; but during the middle ages, a royal
banquet was rarely spread where it did not
figure as one of the chief dishes. Fabian,
describing the coronation feast of King Henry the
Sixth, on the sixth of November, fourteen
hundred and twenty-nine, mentions in the second
course, a " Pecok enhakyll," which Strutt takes
to be the Peacock " brought to the table with
the feathers of the tail" (he means the
wing-coverts) " as though extended." The phrase
employed in carving the stately creature was
appropriate. Amongst " the goodlye termes of
kervynge," I find it set down as an instruction
to the " kerver," to " disfygure that Peecocke,"
and in all probability the instruction was
literally obeyed. There was rare disfigurement, no
doubt, at the marriage of Roger Rockley, eldest
son of Sir Thomas Rockley, of Rockley,
Woreborough, Yorkshire, with Elizabeth Nevile,
daughter of Sir John Nevile, of Chevet, in the
same county, on the fourteenth of January,
fifteen hundred and nine, when such feasting
and junketing took place as was seldom
equalled, and, perhaps, never exeeded. On
this occasion the first course at dinner
consisted—not to speak of meaner things—of
"Brawn with musterd, served with Malmsey;"
"a Roe roasted for standard" (a large dish);
"a young lamb whole roasted;" " Swans, two
of a dish;" and " Peacocks, two of a dish;" and
"for night," says the narrative, " there was, first
a Play, and straight after the play a Mask, and
when the Mask was done then the Bauckett,
which were one hundred and ten dishes, and all
of meat: and then all the Gentlemen and Ladys
danced; and this continued from the Sunday to
the Saturday afternoon." These ladies and
gentlemen certainly did not dance on empty
stomachs, nor was it the custom to do so when
balls were heralded by feasts where

O'er Capon, Heronshaw, and Crane,
And princely Peacock's gilded train,
And o'er the Boar's head garnish'd brave,
And Cygnets from St. Mary's wave,
O'er Ptarmigan and Venison
The priest did say his benison.

The French have a proverb, not altogether
well applied, which says it is the sauce that
makes you eat the fish, and some such idea
must have been in the mind of that epicure of
whom Wildford, in The City Madam, speaks,
when inveighing against the profuse feasting in
the city. "Men," he exclaims, "may talk of
their country and court gluttony, their thirty
pounds for buttered eggs, their pies of carps'
tongues, their pheasants drench'd with
ambergrise; their carcasses of three fat wethers
bruised for gravy, to make sauce for a single
Peacock: but their feasts were fasts compared
with the cities." That the Peacock is all the
better for being served with some kind of sauce
may, I think, he inferred, from what Willoughby
relates of it. " Its flesh," he tells us, " is
esteemed harder, colder, drier, and of more difficult
concoction, than that of hens; " but if not over
tender it has this useful property, "that being
boiled or roast, it will not putrifie, but keep a
year or more uncorrupt,"—a thing, he adds,
"commonly believed, and proved by an
experiment made by Saint Augustine," who (in his
twenty-first Book of the City of God, chap, ii.)
writes thus: " Who but God the Creator of all
things gave to Peacock's flesh a faculty of not
putrifying; which thing at first hearing seeming
to me incredible, it hapned that, at Carthage,
there was set before me a roasted Peacock; of