British Wild Beasts. 183 



more familiar to most of us than hares. In a country walk 

 you pass a second rabbit without remark ; but you draw 

 attention to a hare every time you see it, and watch it as 

 long as you can. 



But in the poets there are fifty hares for every rabbit, — 

 " as numerous as hares on Athos " — and the reasons for this 

 are obvious. The poets go by preference to antiquity, 

 legends, fictions, for their Nature. They do not go to Nature 

 for it 



Now, the " light-foot " hare possesses as voluminous a 

 folk-lore as almost any animal, and ever since there were 

 men and women in the world to be frightened by supersti- 

 tion, this little creature, itself one of the most timid of 

 things, has inspired human beings with dread. 



•' Nor did we meet with nimble feet 

 A single fearful lepus, 

 That certain sign, as some divine, 

 Of fortune bad to keep us." 



Sir Thomas Browne says, " There are few above the age 

 of threescore and ten who are not perplexed at a hare 

 crossing their path," and a number of poets allude to the 

 superstition of the ill-luck foreboding, when inauspicatum 

 dat iter oblatus lepus. 



•' If a poor timorous hare but crosse the way, 

 Morus will keep the chamber all the day." — Quarles. 



"The mythical hare," says delightful Gubernatis, "is 

 undoubtedly the moon," and the wide-spread connection of 

 the animal with that luminary gives the myth something of 

 a popular acceptation. Thus the Chinese represent the 

 moon-figure, Jut-ho, with a hare at her feet, and symbolise 

 Luna by a rabbit pounding in a mortar. In Vedic myth, 

 "the leaping one" is the moon, and the spots on the face 

 of it are hares by the shore of the moon-lake. These hares 



