The Mole. 
15 
animal, he adds that, though they have no ears, yet they 
hear perfectly in the earth. 
The idea of the mole’s blindness, still lingering in 
country districts, is often referred to by the Elizabethan 
poets. Caliban warns his companions to be silent:— 
“ Pray you, tread softly, that the blind mole may not 
Hear a foot fall: we now are near his cell.” 
( Tempest , iv. 1, 195.) 
“ Ye work and work like moles, blind in tbe paths 
That are bor’d thro’ the crannies of the earth.” 
(Ford, The Lover's Melancholy, ii. 2.) 
Sylvester, in his translation of Du Bartas’ great work, 
Divine Weekes and Workes, published 1605, introduces 
the following simile :— 
“ Even as the soft, blinde, mine-inventing moule, 
In velvet robes under the earth doth roule, 
Refusing light, and little ayre receives, 
And hunting worms her moving hillocks heaves.” 
(Ed. 1633, p. 186.) 
In Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, published 1621, 
we read:— 
“ Comfort thyself with other men’s misfortunes, as the mouldiwarpe 
in iEsope told the fox for complaining of want of a tail, You complain 
of toies, but I am blind, be quiet.” (Page 310, ed. 1837.) 
Owen Glendower probably employed these little 
animals in his incantations. Hotspur replies to his 
uncle’s lecture upon the impropriety of petulant im¬ 
patience :— 
“ I cannot choose : sometime he angers me 
With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant, 
Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies.” 
(1 Henry IV., iii. 1, 148.) 
To Topsell we are indebted for an account 
of the Shrew, or the erdshrew:— 
“ The word hamaha of the Hebrewes remembred in the second 
