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;"
and later on in the same play (ii. 2) Caliban speaks of being frighted with "urchin shows." In the witch scene in "Macbeth" (iv. 1) the hedge-pig is represented as one of the witches' familiars; and in the "Midsummer-Night's Dream" (ii. 2), in the incantation of the fairies, "thorny hedgehogs" are exorcised. For the use of urchins in similar associations we may quote "Merry Wives of Windsor" (iv. 4), "like urchins, ouphes, and fairies;" and "Titus Andronicus" (ii. 3), "ten thousand swelling toads, as many urchins."[427] In the phrase still current, of "little urchin" for a child, the idea of the fairy also remains. In various legends we find this animal holding a prominent place. Thus, for example, it was in the form of a hedgehog[428] that the devil is said to have made his attempt to let the sea in through the Brighton Downs, which was prevented by a light being brought, though the seriousness of the scheme is still attested in the Devil's Dyke. There is an ancient tradition that when the devil had smuggled himself into Noah's Ark he tried to sink it by boring a hole; but this scheme was defeated, and the human race saved, by the hedgehog stuffing himself into the hole. In the Brighton story, as Mr. Conway points out, the devil would appear to have remembered his former failure in drowning people, and to have appropriated the form which defeated him. In "Richard III." (i. 2), the hedgehog is used as a term of reproach by Lady Anne, when addressing Gloster.