Page:Gesta Romanorum - Swan - Wright - 2.djvu/463

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"Next unto which I may mention the, or ; now this is the king of serpents, not for his magnitude or greatness, but for his stately pace and magnanimous mind; for the head and half part of his body he always carries upright, and hath a kind of crest like a crown upon his head. This creature is in thicknesse as big as a man's wrist, and of length proportionable to that thickness: his eyes are red in a kind of cloudy blackness, as if fire were mixed with smoke. His poison is a very hot and venomous poison, drying up and scorching the grass as if it were burned, infecting the air round about him so as no other creature can live near him: in which he is like to the Gorgon, whom last of all I mentioned.

"And amongst all living creatures, there is none that perisheth sooner by the poison of the Cockatrice than man; for with his sight he killeth him: which is, because the beams of the Cockatrice's eyes do corrupt the visible spirit of a man; as is affirmed: which being corrupted, all the other spirits of life, coming from the heart and brain, are thereby corrupted also; and so the man dieth. His hissing,