ummer-Night's Dream" (ii. 1), Oberon speaks of hearing "a
mermaid on a dolphin's back;" and in "Hamlet," the Queen, referring to
Ophelia's death, says (iv. 7):

"Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up."

In two other passages Shakespeare alludes to this legendary creature.
Thus, in "3 Henry VI." (iii. 2) Gloster boasts that he will "drown more
sailors than the mermaid shall," and in "Antony and Cleopatra" (ii. 2),
Enobarbus relates how

"Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,
So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes,
And made their bends adornings: at the helm
A seeming mermaid steers."

In all these cases Shakespeare,[932] as was his wont, made his
characters say what they were likely to think, in their several
positions and periods of life. It has been suggested,[933] however, that
the idea of the mermaid, in some of the passages just quoted, seems more
applicable to the siren, especially in "A Midsummer-Night's Dream,"
where the "mermaid on a dolphin's back" could not easily have been so
placed, had she had a fish-like tail instead of legs.

[932] See "Book of Days," vol. ii. pp. 612-614.

[933] Nares's "Glossary," vol. ii. p. 565; see Brand's "Pop.
Antiq.," 1849, vol. iii. pp. 411-414.

Notices of mermaids are scattered abundantly in books of bygone times.
Mermen and mermaids, men of the sea, and women of the sea, having been
as "stoutly believed in as the great sea-serpent, and on very much the
same kind of evidence." Holinshed gives a detailed account of a merman
caught at Orford, in Suffolk, in the reign of King John. He was kept
alive on raw meal and fish for six months, but at last "gledde
secretelye to the sea, and was neuer after seene nor heard off." Even in
modern times we are told how, every now and then, a mermaid has made her
appearance. Thus, in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ (Jan., 1747), we read:
"It is reported from the north of Scotland that some time this month a
sea creature, known by the name of mermaid, which has the shape of a
human body from the trunk upwards, but below is wholly fish, was
carried some miles up the water of Devron." In 1824 a mermaid or merman
made its appearance, when, as the papers of that day inform us, "upwards
of 150 distinguished fashionables" went to see it.

The "Mermaid" was a famous tavern, situated in Bread Street.[934] As
early as the fifteenth century, we are told it was one of the