i8o The Poets Beasts. 



poets take it (as antiquity did) as the symbol of prudence, 

 mother-wit, and self-reliance ? Can modesty, honour, virtue, 

 do more than the hedgehog does when attacked — roll itself 

 up, and present to the assailant a front equally defended at 

 every point ? What a delightful lesson of patient hopeful- 

 ness it teaches the Christian ! It submits to misfortune 

 without a murmur, waiting till malice shall have spent itself 

 and its troubles cease. What problems too it symbolises, 

 this spherical impossibility ! How gingerly you have to 

 handle them. Can you make head or tail out of them ? 

 Yet, like most problems, if you will leave them alone long 

 enough, they will solve themselves. It is surely, too, a 

 type of innocence, being so harmless itself, yet so fully 

 armed. It might stand, too, for law, which runs along on 

 four feet, looking a simple thing enough, but which, the 

 moment any one begins to meddle with it, resolves itself 

 into a hopeless ball of difficulties. 



One of the legends of the hedgehog tells us how a viper 

 had come into its hole, and being very much inconvenienced 

 by the hedgehog's prickles, begged it to go away. "Let 

 him go," replied the master of the house, "who cannot 

 stay." The hedgehog's treatment of the mythic wolf is 

 equally delightful. 



In folk-lore the urchin possesses occult properties which 

 make it more or less eerie in reputation, but do not prevent 

 it being eaten or kept in houses for clearing them of cock- 

 roaches. In Drayton's " Polyolbion " the rustic, enumerat- 

 ing his worldly possessions, says — 



" .Sweeting mine, if thou mine own wilt be, 



I've many a pretty gaud I kcepe in store for thee, 

 A nest of broad-faced owls and goodly urchins too ; 

 And better yet than these, a bulkin two years old, 

 A curled-pate calf it is, and oft could have been sold ; 

 And yet besides all this, I've goodly bear-whelps two." 



Its ^ voice is a curious, unnatural-sounding snoring, and 



