Elves, _urchins_, goblins all, and little fairyes. _Mad Pranks_, etc., p. 38. Great store of goblins, fairies, bugs, nightmares, _Urchins_, and elves, to many a house repairs. _Old Poem_, in Brand, ii. 514. Trip it, little _urchins_ all. _Maid's Metamorphosis._ Helping all _urchin-blasts_ and ill-luck signs, That the shrewd meddling elfe delights to make. _Comus_, 845. Urchin is a hedgehog, as Stevens has justly observed,[378] and in these lines of Titus Andronicus (ii. 3.) A thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes, Ten thousand swelling toads, as many _urchins_, it probably has this sense. We still call the _echinus marinus_ the Sea-urchin. Still as we have no analogy, but rather the contrary, for transferring the name of an animal to the elves, we feel inclined to look for a different origin of the term as applied to these beings. The best or rather only hypothesis we have met with[379] is that which finds it in the hitherto unexplained word _Orcneas_ in Beówulf, which may have been _Orcenas_, and if, as we have supposed,[380] the Anglo-Saxons sometimes pronounced _c_ before _e_ and _i_ in the Italian manner, we should have, if needed, the exact word. We would also notice the old German _urkinde_, which Grimm renders _nanus_.[381] We now come to the poets. In Beówulf, an Anglo-Saxon poem, supposed not to be later than the seventh century, we meet with the following verse, "Eotenas, and Ylfe, And Orcneas." The first of these words is evidently the same as the Iötunn or Giants of the northern mythology; the second is as plainly its Alfar, and we surely may be excused for supposing that the last may be the same as its Duergar. Layamon, in the twelfth century, in his poetic paraphrase of Wace's Brut,[382] thus expands that poet's brief notice of the birth of Arthur:-- "Ertur son nom; de sa bunte Ad grant parole puis este."