Note 91 — W. CAREW HAZLITT.

A Dottrel is a silly kind of bird which imitates the actions of the fowler, till at last he is taken. If the fowler stretches out a leg, the bird will do so to. So, in Butler’s “Character of a Fantastic (Remains, vol. ii., p. 132)”: “He alters his gate with the times, and has not a motion of his body that (like a Dottrel) he does not borrow from somebody else.” See also Jonson’s “Devil is an Ass,” iv., 6, and Dyce’s “Beaumont and Fletcher,” iii., 79, and v., 64.