pest" (i. 2), Prospero says:

"Urchins
Shall, for that vast of night that they may work,
All exercise on thee;"

and later on in the same play (ii. 2) Caliban speaks of being frighted
with "urchin shows." In the witch scene in "Macbeth" (iv. 1) the
hedge-pig is represented as one of the witches' familiars; and in the
"Midsummer-Night's Dream" (ii. 2), in the incantation of the fairies,
"thorny hedgehogs" are exorcised. For the use of urchins in similar
associations we may quote "Merry Wives of Windsor" (iv. 4), "like
urchins, ouphes, and fairies;" and "Titus Andronicus" (ii. 3), "ten
thousand swelling toads, as many urchins."[427] In the phrase still
current, of "little urchin" for a child, the idea of the fairy also
remains. In various legends we find this animal holding a prominent
place. Thus, for example, it was in the form of a hedgehog[428] that the
devil is said to have made his attempt to let the sea in through the
Brighton Downs, which was prevented by a light being brought, though the
seriousness of the scheme is still attested in the Devil's Dyke. There
is an ancient tradition that when the devil had smuggled himself into
Noah's Ark he tried to sink it by boring a hole; but this scheme was
defeated, and the human race saved, by the hedgehog stuffing himself
into the hole. In the Brighton story, as Mr. Conway points out, the
devil would appear to have remembered his former failure in drowning
people, and to have appropriated the form which defeated him. In
"Richard III." (i. 2), the hedgehog is used as a term of reproach by
Lady Anne, when addressing Gloster.

[426] Singer's "Shakespeare," vol. ix. p. 75.

[427] See Wright's Notes to "The Tempest," 1875, p. 94.

[428] Conway's "Demonology and Devil-Lore," 1880, vol. i. p. 122.

_Horse._ Although Shakespeare's allusions to the horse are most
extensive, yet he has said little of the many widespread superstitions,
legends, and traditional tales that have been associated from the
earliest times with this brave and intellectual animal. Indeed, even
nowadays, both in our own country and abroad, many a fairy tale is told
and credited by the peasantry in which the horse occupies a prominent
place. It seems to have been a common notion that, at night-time,
fairies in their nocturnal revels played various pranks with horses,
often entangling in a thousand knots their hair--a superstition to which
we re