The old Greek epigram relating to the hare—
“Strike ye my body, now that life is fled;
So hares insult the lion when he’s dead,”
—is alluded to by the Bastard in “King John” (ii. 1):
“You are the hare of whom the proverb goes,
Whose valour plucks dead lions by the beard.”
A familiar expression among sportsmen for a hare is “Wat,” so called, perhaps, from its long ears or wattles. In “Venus and Adonis” the term occurs:
“By this, poor Wat, far off upon a hill,
Stands on his hinder legs, with listening ear.”
In Drayton’s “Polyolbion” (xxiii.) we read:
“The man whose vacant mind prepares him to the sport,
The finder sendeth out, to seek out nimble Wat,
Which crosseth in the field, each furlong, every flat,
Till he this pretty beast upon the form hath found.”
Hedgehog. The urchin or hedgehog, like the toad, for its solitariness, the ugliness of its appearance, and from a popular belief that it sucked or poisoned the udders of cows, was adopted into the demonologic system; and its shape was sometimes supposed to be assumed by mischievous elves.[426] Hence, in “The Tempest” (i. 2), Prospero says:
“Urchins
Shall, for that vast of night that they may work,
All exercise on thee;”