seven days would make any one beautiful; a superstition to which Martial refers in one of his epigrams:
"Si quando leporem mittis mihi, Gellia, dicis,
'Formosus septem, Marce, diebus eris.'
Si non derides, si varum, lux mea, narras,
Edisti nunquam Gellia tu leporem."[1]
"You tell me, Miss Nancy, when sending a hare,
'In a week it will make you quite handsome, I'll swear,'
Now surely that's chaff: if it's true, my dear Nancy,—
Hare's, clearly enough, not a dish that you fancy."
The fact that many plants are named after the hare may also, as Oberle thinks, have a mythological significance; though the origin of such names as "hare-bell" and "hare-parsley" appears sufficiently explained in Hone's Table-Book upon other grounds.[2]
VII. The hare, or some part of it, is frequently used in magical charms Thus, Mr. Edward Peacock has recorded, in Notes and Queries, the discovery of the heart of a hare pierced with pins buried in the foundations of a house. When it was found, the "elders" of the village declared it had been buried there "to withstand witching".[3] "In a village near Preston, a girl, when slighted by her lover, got a hare's heart, stuck it full of pins, and buried it with many imprecations against the faithless man, whom she hoped by these means to torment."[4]
In Egypt, the figure of a hare was worn as an amulet[5]; and hares' heads were worn as amulets by Arab women.[6]
VIII. From the evidence of existing agricultural customs
- ↑ Mart., Ep. v, 29. Cf. also Pliny, 28, 19, and Vet. Epig. apud Lamprid; Alex. Sev., 38.
- ↑ "Hare-bell," so called because it grows in thickets haunted by hares; "hare-parsley", because it is eaten by hares.
- ↑ Notes and Queries, 2nd Series, i, 415. See Grimm, T. M., 1824.
- ↑ Henderson, Folk-lore of the Northern Counties, new ed., Folk-lore Society, 1879. (The passage is not in the first edition.)
- ↑ A. Lang, op. cit., ii, 353.
- ↑ Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Edinburgh, 1889, p. 362.
