o search for his daughter,
in "Othello" (i. 1):

"Zounds, sir, you are robb'd; for shame, put on your gown;
Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul;
Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise!
Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,
Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you.
Arise, I say."

On the other hand, so diverse were the forms which devils were supposed
to assume that they are said occasionally to appear in the fairest form,
even in that of a girl (ii. 3):

"When devils will the blackest sins put on,
They do suggest at first with heavenly shows."

So in "The Comedy of Errors" (iv. 3) we have the following dialogue:

"_Ant. S._ Satan, avoid! I charge thee, tempt me not!

_Dro. S._ Master, is this mistress Satan?

_Ant. S._ It is the devil.

_Dro. S._ Nay, she is worse, she is the devil's dam; and here
she comes in the habit of a light wench; and thereof comes
that the wenches say, 'God damn me;' that's as much as to say,
'God make me a light wench.' It is written, they appear to men
like angels of light."

(Cf. also "Love's Labour's Lost," iv. 3.) In "King John" (iii. 1) even
the fair Blanch seemed to Constance none other than the devil tempting
Lewis "in likeness of a new untrimmed bride."

Not only, too, were devils thought to assume any human shape they
fancied, but, as Mr. Spalding remarks,[82] "the forms of the whole of
the animal kingdom appear to have been at their disposal; and, not
content with these, they seem to have sought for unlikely shapes to
appear in"--the same characteristic belonging also to the fairy tribe.

[82] "Elizabethan Demonology," p. 49.

Thus, when Edgar is trying to persuade the blind Gloucester that he has
in reality cast himself over the cliff, he describes the being from whom
he is supposed to have just departed:

"As I stood here below, methought his eyes
Were two full moons; he had a thousand noses,
Horns whelk'd and wav'd like the enridged sea:
It was some fiend."

Again, Edgar says ("King Lear," iii. 6): "The foul fiend haunts poor Tom
in the voice of a nightingale"--the allusion probably being to the
following incident related by Friswood Williams: "There was also another
strange thing happened at Denham about a bird. Mistris Peckham had a
nightingale which she kept in a cage, wherein Maister Dibdale took great
d