Note 774 — Chapter XVI
Reading edition
See Harting’s “Ornithology of Shakespeare,” p. 156; Strutt’s “Sports and Pastimes,” 1876, p. 98. A simple mode of bat-fowling, by means of a large clap-net and a lantern, and called bird-batting, is alluded to in Fielding’s “Joseph Andrews” (bk. ii. chap. x.). Drake thinks that it is to a stratagem of this kind Shakespeare alludes when he paints Buckingham exclaiming (“Henry VIII.” i. 1):
“The net has fall’n upon me; I shall perish Under device and practice.”