Like the salamander, the Griffin was to our forefathers no mere creature of the imagination. Ctesias describes them in all sober earnestness as "birds with four feet, of the size of a wolf, and having the legs and claws of a lion. Their feathers are red on the breast and black on the rest of the body." Glanvil says of them, "The claws of a griffin are so large and ample that he can seize an armed man as easily by the body as a hawk a little bird. In like manner he can carry off a horse or an ox, or any other beast in his flight." The creature is, if anything, still more terrible when met with in the description given by Sir John Mandeville:--"Thai have the body upward as an egle, and benethe as a lyoun, but a griffonne hath the body more gret, and is more strong than eight lyouns, and more grete and strongere than an hundred egles such as we have among us. For he hath his talouns so large and so longe and grete upon his fete as though thei weren homes of grete oxen, so that men maken cuppes of them to drinken of." Oriental writers, who appear to have an especial delight in the marvellous, go even beyond this, and the creature becomes with them the roc, the terrible creature we read of, for example, in the wonderful adventures of "Sindbad the Sailor." Milton introduces the creature very finely in his noble poem, as for instance:--
"As when a gryphon through the wilderness With wingèd course o'er hill and moory dale Pursues the Arimaspian, who by stealth Has from his watchful custody purloin'd The guarded gold: so eagerly the fiend O'er bog, or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way, And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies."
The Arimaspians were a one-eyed people of Scythia, who braided their hair with gold and drew their supplies of the precious metal as best they could from the stores guarded by the griffins. The griffin has long been employed as a symbol of watchfulness, courage, and perseverance, on account of this fabled treasure-guarding. But Browne, who, as we have seen, took great delight in vivisecting the vulgar errors of his day and generation, discourses as follows on the matter--"Aristeus affirmed that neer the Arimaspi, or one-eyed nation, griffins defended the mines of gold, but this, as Herodotus delivereth, he wrote from hearsay, and Michovius, who hath expressly written of those parts, plainly affirmeth that there is neither gold nor griffins in that country, nor any such Animall extant, for so doth he conclude, 'Ego vero contra veteres authores, gryphes nec in illa septentrionis nec in alius orbis partibus inveniri affirmarim.'"