enumerating the "gall of goat" ("Macbeth," iv. 1) among
the ingredients of the witches' caldron. His object seems to have been
to include the most distasteful and ill-omened things imaginable--a
practice shared, indeed, by other poets contemporary with him.

_Hare._ This was formerly esteemed a melancholy animal, and its flesh
was supposed to engender melancholy in those who ate it. This idea was
not confined to our own country, but is mentioned by La Fontaine in one
of his "Fables" (liv. ii. fab. 14):

"Dans un profond ennui ce lievre se plongeoit,
Cet animal est triste, et la crainte le rounge;"

and later on he says: "Le melancolique animal." Hence, in "1 Henry IV."
(i. 2), Falstaff is told by Prince Henry that he is as melancholy as a
hare. This notion was not quite forgotten in Swift's time; for in his
"Polite Conversation," Lady Answerall, being asked to eat hare, replies:
"No, madam; they say 'tis melancholy meat." Mr. Staunton quotes the
following extract from Turbervile's book on Hunting and Falconry: "The
hare first taught us the use of the hearbe called wyld succory, which is
very excellent for those which are disposed to be melancholicke. She
herself is one of the most melancholicke beasts that is, and to heale
her own infirmitie, she goeth commonly to sit under that hearbe."

The old Greek epigram relating to the hare--

"Strike ye my body, now that life is fled;
So hares insult the lion when he's dead,"

--is alluded to by the Bastard in "King John" (ii. 1):

"You are the hare of whom the proverb goes,
Whose valour plucks dead lions by the beard."

A familiar expression among sportsmen for a hare is "Wat," so called,
perhaps, from its long ears or wattles. In "Venus and Adonis" the term
occurs:

"By this, poor Wat, far off upon a hill,
Stands on his hinder legs, with listening ear."

In Drayton's "Polyolbion" (xxiii.) we read:

"The man whose vacant mind prepares him to the sport,
The finder sendeth out, to seek out nimble Wat,
Which crosseth in the field, each furlong, every flat,
Till he this pretty beast upon the form hath found."

_Hedgehog._ The urchin or hedgehog, like the toad, for its solitariness,
the ugliness of its appearance, and from a popular belief that it sucked
or poisoned the udders of cows, was adopted into the demonologic system;
and its shape was sometimes supposed to be assumed by mischievous
elves.[426] Hence, in "The Tem