British Wild Beasts. 179 



Helen. The otter, Enudris of the Edda, is a fearsome 

 beast, and so too is the other which, in Muscovite legend, 

 carries off the Czar's son under the winter sea, and with its 

 snoring makes the sea ebb and flow, nine miles at each 

 breath. 



As might have been expected, the hedgehog, being 

 prickly, has no friends among the poets. They do not 

 forgive it its spines. 



" Who whilst in hand it gryping hard behent, 

 Into a hedgehogge all unwares it went, 

 And prickt him so that he away it threw." 



" Ugly urchins, thick and short," is Spenser's description. 

 " The thorn-back hedgehog dull," says Quarles. If poets 

 were fairies and given to tumbling about in hedgerows and 

 copses by moonlight, the prickly animal might be objected 

 to — as indeed Titania does object to the " thorny " thing ; — 

 but that any rational man with boots on should bear a 

 grudge against the hedgehog for having spines on its back 

 seems unaccountable. For the urchin is a very pleasing 

 little animal, exceedingly harmless in a wild state, and both 

 useful and diverting when tame. That it makes garden- 

 paths untidy by rooting up the plantain weeds is a com- 

 plaint brought against it by Gilbert White, but plantains 

 are in themselves untidy on garden paths. Tennyson notes 

 its fondness for the plant in his " Aylmer's Field " — 



" Then the great hall was wholly broken down, 

 And the broad woodland parcelled into farms ; 

 And where the two contrived their daughter's good 

 Lies the hawk's cast, the mole has made his run, 

 The hedgehog underneath the plantain bores, 

 The rabbit fondles his own harmless face. 

 The slow-worm creeps, and the thin weasel there 

 Follows the mouse, and all is open field." 



Instead of ridiculing it and reproaching it, why did not the 



