you did not see it, you would think it was a real man
talking. It greets people of its own accord, saying 'What-
cheer?' or 'Toodle-oo!" It learns other words by teaching.
Hence the story of the man who paid a compliment to
Caesar by giving him a parrot which had been taught to
say: 'I, a parrot, am willing to learn the names of others
from you. This I learnt by myself to say-Hail Caesar!'2
     A parrot's beak is so hard that if you throw down the
bird from a height on a rock, it saves itself by landing on
its beak with its mouth tight shut, using the beak as a
kind of foundation for the shock.                Actually its whole
skull is so thick that, if it has to be taught anything, it
needs to be admonished with blows.                Although it really
does try to copy what its teacher is saying, it wants an
occasional crack with an iron bar. While young, and up

  1 Ex zatura au/em sa/utal dice,zs ave ye! kere.

  2 The story is from Martial. George Crabbe relates a sadder one in The
Parish
Register:
            Her neat small room, adorn'd with maiden-taste,
            A clipp'd French puppy, first of favourites, graced:
            A parrot next, but dead and stuff'd with art;
            (For Poll, when living, lost the Lady's heart,
            And then his life; for he was heard to speak
            Such frightful words as tinged his Lady's cheek:)
            Unhappy bird~ who had no power to prove,
            Save by such speech, his gratitude and love.
  'I was the other day', writes Abraham de la Pryme in his diary of 23 April
1698
'with Mr. Wesley, minister of Epworth, the famous author of the poem of the
Life of Christ.  He says, that while he was at London, he knew a parrot that
by its long hanging in a cage in Billingsgate Street (where all the worst
language
in the city is most commonly spoke), had learned to curse and swear, and
to use
all the most bawdy expressions imaginable. But, to reform it, they sent it
to
a coffy-house in another street, where, before half-a-year was at an end,
it had
forgot all its wicked expressions, and was so full of colfy-house language
that it
could say nothing but "Bring a dish of coffy";
"Where's
the
news", and such
like. When it was thus thoroughly converted, they sent it home again, but
within a week's time it got all its cursings and swearings and its old expressions
as pat as ever.' DANIEL GEORGE, diphahetical Order, 1949.


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