420 The Animal-Lore of Shakspeare's Time. 
While Titania sleeps, her attendant fairies warn off 
from her elfin bower all hurtful intruders:— 
“ Weaving spiders, come not here ; 
Hence you, long-legg’d spinners, hence ! 
Beetles black, approach not near ; 
Worm nor snail, do no offence.” 
(Midsummer Night’s Dream , ii. 2, 21.) 
Mercutio thus describes Queen Mob's equipage 
“ Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs, 
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers, 
The traces of the smallest spider’s web.” 
(Borneo and Juliet , i. 4, 59.) 
The word spinner is generally explained by annotators 
to mean spider, but it seems probable that in both these 
instances the crane-fly or daddy-long-legs is referred to. 
There is a want of imagination in repeating, even under 
another name, the same creature in the very next line. 
Ben Jonson writes, “ Walk as if thou hadst borrowed 
legs of a spinner and voice of a cricket ” ( Bartholomew 
Fair , i. 1). And again, in the same scene : “ Quar. Good 
faith, he looks, metkinks, and you mark him, like one 
that were made to catch flies, with his Sir Cranion-legs.” 
Drayton, however, gives this appellation to a fly :— 
“ Four nimble gnats the horses were, 
Their harnesses of gossamere, 
Fly Cranion, her charioteer 
Upon the coach-box getting.” 
(Nymphidia.) 
Mr. Patterson notices, but does not explain, the curious 
comparison in Henry V. (v. 2,434):— 
“Maids, well summered and warm kept, are like flies at Bar- 
tholomew-tide, blind, though they have their eyes; and then they will 
endure handling, which before would not abide looking on.” 
He imagines this allusion to have reference to some for¬ 
gotten legend, some ancient superstition. By the end of 
