n" (bk. ii. c. vii.
l. 23):

"After him owles and night ravens flew,
The hateful messengers of heavy things,
Of death and dolor telling sad tidings."

And once more the following passage from Drayton's "Barons' Wars" (bk.
v. stanza 42) illustrates the same idea:

"The ominous raven often he doth hear,
Whose croaking him of following horror tells."

In "Much Ado About Nothing" (ii. 3), the "night-raven" is mentioned.
Benedick observes to himself: "I had as lief have heard the night-raven,
come what plague could have come after it." This inauspicious bird,
according to Steevens, is the owl; but this conjecture is evidently
wrong, "being at variance with sundry passages in our early writers, who
make a distinction between it and the night-raven."[314]

[314] Dyce's "Glossary," 1876, p. 288.

Thus Johnson, in his "Seven Champions of Christendom" (part i.), speaks
of "the dismal cry of night-ravens, ... and the fearefull sound of
schriek owles." Cotgrave regarded the "night-crow" and the "night-raven"
as synonymous; and Mr. Yarrell considered them only different names for
the night-heron.[315] In "3 Henry VI." (v. 6) King Henry says:

"The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time."

[315] See Harting's "Ornithology of Shakespeare," pp. 101, 102;
Yarrell's "History of British Birds," vol. ii. p. 581.

Goldsmith, in his "Animated Nature," calls the bittern the night-raven,
and says: "I remember, in the place where I was a boy, with what terror
the bird's note affected the whole village; they consider it as the
presage of some sad event, and generally found or made one to succeed
it. If any person in the neighborhood died, they supposed it could not
be otherwise, for the night-raven had foretold it; but if nobody
happened to die, the death of a cow or a sheep gave completion to the
prophecy."

According to an old belief the raven deserts its own young, to which
Shakespeare alludes in "Titus Andronicus" (ii. 3):

"Some say that ravens foster forlorn children,
The whilst their own birds famish in their nests."

"It was supposed that when the raven," says Mr. Harting,[316] "saw its
young ones newly hatched and covered with down, it conceived such an
aversion that it forsook them, and did not return to the nest until a
darker plumage had shown itself." To this belief the commentators
consider the Psalmist refers, when he says, "He giveth to the beast his
food, and to the yo