Part 2

“O then, I see, queen Mab hath been with you, She is the fairy’s midwife, and she comes In shape no bigger than an agate–stone On the fore–finger of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomies Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep; Her waggon–spokes made of long spinner’s legs; The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers; The traces, of the smallest spider’s web; The collars, of the moonshine’s wat’ry beams: Her whip, of cricket’s bone; the lash, of film: Her waggoner, a small grey–coated gnat, Not half so big as a round little worm Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid: Her chariot is an empty hazel–nut, Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub, Time out of mind the fairies’ coachmakers. And in this state she gallops night by night Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love! ... This is that very Mab, That plats the manes of horses in the night; And bakes the elf–locks in foul sluttish hairs, Which, once untangled, much misfortune bodes.”

(_Romeo and Juliet._)

Ben Jonson, in his “Entertainment of the Queen and Prince at Althrope,” in 1603, describes to come “tripping up the lawn a bevy of fairies attending on Mab their queen, who, falling into an artificial ring that was there cut in the path, began to dance around.”—(_Works_, v. 201.)

In the same masque the queen is thus characterised by a satyr:—

“This is Mab, the mistress fairy, That doth nightly rob the dairy, And can hurt or help the churning, (As she please) without discerning. She that pinches country–wenches If they rub not clean their benches, And with sharper nails remembers When they rake not up their embers; But, if so they chance to feast her, In a shoe she drops a tester. This is she that empties cradles, Takes out children, puts in ladles; Trains forth midwives in their slumber, With a sieve the holes to number; And thus leads them from her boroughs, Home through ponds and water–furrows. She can start our franklin’s daughters, In their sleep, with shrieks and laughters, And on sweet St. Agnes’ night Feed them with a promised sight, Some of husbands, some of lovers, Which an empty dream discovers.”

Fairies, they tell you, have frequently been heard and seen—nay, that there are some living who were stolen away by them, and confined seven years. According to the description they give who pretend to have seen them, they are in the shape of men, exceeding little. They are always clad in green, and frequent the woods and fields; when they make cakes (which is a work they have been often heard at) they are very noisy; and when they have done, they are full of mirth and pastime. But generally they dance in moonlight when mortals are asleep and not capable of seeing them, as may be observed on the following morn—their dancing–places being very distinguishable. For as they dance hand in hand, and so make a circle in their dance, so next day there will be seen rings and circles on the grass.—(Bourne’s _Antiquitates Vulgares_, Newcastle, 1725, 8vo, p. 82.)

These circles are thus described by Browne, the author of _Britannia’s Pastorals_:—

“... A pleasant meade, Where fairies often did their measures treade, Which in the meadow made such circles greene, As if with garlands it had crowned beene.

Within one of these rounds was to be seene A hillock rise, where oft the fairie queene At twy–light sate, and did command her elves To pinch those maids that had not swept their shelves: And further, if by maidens’ over–sight Within doores water were not brought at night, Or if they spred no table, set no bread, They should have nips from toe unto the head; And for the maid that had perform’d each thing, She in the water–pail bad leave a ring.”

The same poet, in his “Shepeards Pipe,” having inserted Hoccleve’s tale of _Jonathas_, and conceiving a strange unnatural affection for that stupid fellow, describes him as a great favourite of the fairies, alleging, that—

“Many times he hath been seene With the fairies on the greene, And to them his pipe did sound, While they danced in a round, Mickle solace would they make him, And at midnight often wake him, And convey him from his roome To a field of yellow broome; Or into the medowes, where Mints perfume the gentle aire, And where Flora spends her treasure, There they would begin their measure. If it chanc’d night’s sable shrowds Muffled Cynthia up in clowds, Safely home they then would see him, And from brakes and quagmires free him.”

The fairies were exceedingly diminutive, but, it must be confessed, we shall not readily find their real dimensions. They were small enough, however, if we may believe one of queen Titania’s maids of honour, to conceal themselves in acorn shells. Speaking of a difference between the king and queen, she says:—

“But they do square; that all the elves for fear Creep into acorn cups, and hide them there.”

They uniformly and constantly wore green vests, unless when they had some reason for changing their dress. Of this circumstance we meet with many proofs. Thus in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_—

“Like urchins, ouphes, and fairies green.”

In fact we meet with them of all colours; as in the same play—

“Fairies black, grey, green, and white.”

That white, on some occasions, was the dress of a female, we learn from Reginald Scot. He gives a charm “to go invisible by [means of] these three sisters of fairies,” _Milia_, _Achilia_, _Sibylia_: “I charge you that you doo appeare before me visible, in forme and shape of faire women, in white vestures, and to bring with you to me the ring of invisibilitie, by the which I may go invisible at mine owne will and pleasure, and that in all hours and minutes.”

It was fatal, if we may believe Shakespeare, to speak to a fairy. Falstaff, in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, is made to say, “They are fairies. He that speaks to them shall die.”

They were accustomed to enrich their favourites, as we learn from the clown in _A Winter’s Tale_—

“It was told me I should be rich by the fairies.”

They delighted in neatness, could not endure sluts, and even hated fibsters, tell–tales, and divulgers of secrets, whom they would slily and severely bepinch when they little expected it. They were as generous and benevolent, on the contrary, to young women of a different description, procuring them the sweetest sleep, the pleasantest dreams, and, on their departure in the morning, always slipping a tester in their shoe.

They are supposed by some to have been malignant, but this, it may be, was mere calumny, as being utterly inconsistent with their general character, which was singularly innocent and amiable.

Imogen, in Shakespeare’s _Cymbeline_, prays, on going to sleep—

“From fairies, and the tempters of the night, Guard me, beseech you.”

It must have been the _Incubus_ she was so afraid of.

Hamlet, too, notices this imputed malignity of the fairies:—

“... Then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch has power to charm.”

Thus, also, in _The Comedy of Errors_:—

“A fiend, a fairy, pitiless and rough.”

They were amazingly expeditious in their journeys. Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, answers Oberon, who was about to send him on a secret expedition—

“I’ll put a girdle round about the earth In forty minutes.”

Again the same goblin addresses him thus:—

“Fairy king, attend and mark, I do hear the morning lark. _Obe._ Then, my queen, in silence sad, Trip we after the night’s shade— We the globe can compass soon, Swifter than the wand’ring moon.”

In another place Puck says—

“My fairy lord this must be done in haste; For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast, And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger, At whose approach ghosts, wandering here and there, Troop home to churchyards,” etc.

To which Oberon replies—

“But we are spirits of another sort: I with the morning’s love have oft made sport; And, like a forester, the groves may tread, Even till the eastern gate, all fiery–red, Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams, Turns into yellow gold his salt–green streams.”

Compare, likewise, what Robin himself says on this subject in the old song of his exploits.

They never ate—

“But that it eats our victuals, I should think, Here were a fairy,”

says Belarius at the first sight of Imogen, as Fidele.

They were humanely attentive to the youthful dead. Thus Guiderius at the funeral of the above lady—

“With female fairies will his tomb be haunted.”

Or, as in the pathetic dirge of Collins on the same occasion:—

“No wither’d witch shall here be seen, No goblins lead their nightly crew; The female fays shall haunt the green, And dress the grave with pearly dew.”

This amiable quality is, likewise, thus beautifully alluded to by the same poet:—

“By fairy hands their knell is rung, By forms unseen their dirge is sung.”

Their employment is thus charmingly represented by Shakespeare, in the address of Prospero:—

“Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves; And ye, that on the sands, with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him When he comes back; you demi–puppets, that By moonshine do the green–sour ringlets make, Whereof the ewe not bites; and you, whose pastime Is to make midnight mushrooms; that rejoice To hear the solemn curfew.”

In _The Midsummer Night’s Dream_, the queen, Titania, being desirous to take a nap, says to her female attendants—

“Come, now a roundel, and a fairy song; Then, for the third part of a minute hence; Some to kill cankers in the musk–rosebuds; Some, war with rear–mice for their leathern wings, To make my small elves coats; and some keep back The clamorous owl that nightly hoots, and wonders At our quaint spirits. Sing me now asleep; Then to your offices, and let me rest.”

Milton gives a most beautiful and accurate description of the little green–coats of his native soil, than which nothing can be more happily or justly expressed. He had certainly seen them, in this situation, with “the poet’s eye”:—

“... Fairie elves, Whose midnight revels, by a forest side Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon, Sits arbitress, and neerer to the earth Wheels her pale course, they, on thir mirth and dance Intent, with jocond music charm his ear; At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.”

The impression they made upon his imagination in early life appears from his “Vacation Exercise,” at the age of nineteen:—

“Good luck befriend thee, son; for, at thy birth The faiery ladies dannc’t upon the hearth; The drowsie nurse hath sworn she did them spie Come tripping to the room where thou didst lie, And, sweetly singing round about thy bed, Strew all their blessings on thy sleeping head.”

L’Abbé Bourdelon, in his _Ridiculous Extravagances of M. Ouflé_, describes “The fairies of which,” he says, “grandmothers and nurses tell so many tales to children. These fairies,” adds he, “I mean, who are affirmed to be blind at home, and very clear–sighted abroad; who dance in the moonshine when they have nothing else to do; who steal shepherds and children, to carry them up to their caves,” etc.—(English translation, p. 190.)

The fairies have already called themselves _spirits_, _ghosts_, or _shadows_, and consequently they never died, a position, at the same time, of which there is every kind of proof that a fact can require. The reviser of Johnson and Steevens’s edition of _Shakespeare_, in 1785, makes a ridiculous reference to the allegories of Spenser, and a palpably false one to Tickell’s _Kensington Gardens_, which he affirms “will show that the opinion of fairies dying prevailed in the last century,” whereas, in fact, it is found, on the slightest glance into the poem, to maintain the direct reverse:—

“Meanwhile sad Kenna, loath to quit the grove, Hung o’er the body of her breathless love, Try’d every art (vain arts!) to change his doom, And vow’d (vain vows!) to join him in the tomb. What would she do? The Fates alike deny The dead to live, or fairy forms to die.”

The fact is so positively proved, that no editor or commentator of Shakespeare, present or future, will ever have the folly or impudence to assert “that in Shakespeare’s time the notion of fairies dying was generally known.”

Ariosto informs us (in Harington’s translation, Bk. x. s. 47) that

“... (Either ancient folke believ’d a lie, Or this is true) a fayrie cannot die.”

And again (Bk. xliii. s. 92),

“I am a fayrie, and, to make you know, To be a fayrie what it doth import: We cannot dye, how old so ear we grow. Of paines and harmes of ev’rie other sort We tast, onelie no death we nature ow.”

Beaumont and Fletcher, in _The Faithful Shepherdess_, describe—

“A virtuous well, about whose flow’ry banks The nimble–footed fairies dance their rounds, By the pale moonshine, dipping oftentimes Their stolen children, so to make ’em free From dying flesh, and dull mortality.”

Puck, _alias_ Robin Goodfellow, is the most active and extraordinary fellow of a fairy that we anywhere meet with, and it is believed we find him nowhere but in our own country, and, peradventure also, only in the South. Spenser, it would seem, is the first that alludes to his name of Puck:—

“Ne let the _Pouke_, nor other evill spright, Ne let Hob–goblins, names whose sense we see not, Fray us with things that be not.”

“In our childhood,” says Reginald Scot, “our mothers’ maids have so terrified us with an oughe divell having hornes on his head, fier in his mouth, and a taile, eies like a bason, fanges like a dog, clawes like a beare, a skin like a niger, and a voice roaring like a lion, whereby we start and are afraid when we heare one crie Bough! and they have so fraied us with bull–beggers, spirits, witches, urchens, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, sylens, Kit with the cansticke, tritons, centaurs, dwarfes, giants, imps, calcars, conjurors, nymphes, changling, Incubus, Robin Goodfellow, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell wain, the fier drake, the puckle, Tom Thombe, Hob gobblin, Tom Tumbler, boneles, and such other bugs, that we are afraid of our owne shadowes.”—(_Discoverie of Witchcraft_, London, 1584, 4to, p. 153.) “And know you this by the waie,” he says, “that heretofore Robin Goodfellow and Hob goblin were as terrible, and also as credible, to the people as hags and witches be now.... And in truth, they that mainteine walking spirits have no reason to denie Robin Goodfellow, upon whom there hath gone as manie and as credible tales as upon witches, saving that it hath not pleased the translators of the Bible to call spirits by the name of Robin Goodfellow.”—(P. 131.)

“Your grandams’ maides,” says he, “were woont to set a boll of milke before Incubus and his cousine Robin Goodfellow for grinding of malt or mustard, and sweeping the house at midnight; and you have also heard that he would chafe exceedingly if the maid or good–wife of the house, having compassion of his naked state, laid anie clothes for him, besides his messe of white bread and milke, which was his standing fee. For in that case he saith, What have we here?

“Hemton, hamton, Here will I never more tread nor stampen.”

(_Discoverie of Witchcraft_, p. 85.)

Robin is thus characterised in _The Midsummer Night’s Dream_ by a female fairy:—

Either I mistake your shape and making quite, Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite Call’d Robin Goodfellow: are you not he That fright the maidens of the villagery; Skim milk; and sometimes labour in the quern, And bootless make the breathless housewife churn; And sometime make the drink to bear no barm; Mislead night–wanderers, laughing at their harm? Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck, You do their work, and they shall have good luck.”

To these questions Robin thus replies:—

“Thou speak’st aright; I am that merry wanderer of the night. I jest to Oberon, and make him smile, When I a fat and bean–fed horse beguile, Neighing in likeness of a filly foal: And sometimes lurk I in a gossip’s bowl, In very likeness of a roasted crab; And, when she drinks, against her lips I bob, And on her wither’d dewlap pour the ale. The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale, Sometime for three–foot stool mistaketh me; Then slip I from her bum, down topples she, And ‘tailor,’ cries, and falls into a cough; And then the whole quire hold their hips, and laugh; And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and swear, A merrier hour was never wasted there.”

His usual exclamation in this play is Ho, ho, ho!

“Ho, ho, ho! Coward, why com’st thou not?”

So in _Grim, the Collier of Croydon_:—

“Ho, ho, ho! my masters! No good fellowship! Is Robin Goodfellow a bugbear grown, That he is not worthy to be bid sit down?”

In the song printed by Peck, he concludes every stanza with Ho, ho, ho!

“If that the bowle of curds and creame were not duly set out for Robin Goodfellow, the frier, and Sisse the dairymaid, why, then, either the pottage was so burnt to next day in the pot, or the cheeses would not curdle, or the butter would not come, or the ale in the fat never would have good head. But if a Peter–penny, or an housle–egge were behind, or a patch of tythe unpaid, then ’ware of bull–beggars, spirits,” etc.

This frolicsome spirit thus describes himself in Jonson’s masque of _Love Restored_: “Robin Goodfellow, he that sweeps the hearth and the house clean, riddles for the country maids, and does all their other drudgery, while they are at hot–cockles; one that has conversed with your court spirits ere now.” Having recounted several ineffectual attempts he had made to gain admittance, he adds: “In this despair, when all invention and translation too failed me, I e’en went back and stuck to this shape you see me in of mine own, with my broom and my canles, and came on confidently.” The mention of his broom reminds us of a passage in another play, _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, where he tells the audience—

“I am sent with broom before, To sweep the dust behind the door.”

He is likewise one of the _dramatis personæ_ in the old play of _Wily Beguiled_, in which he says—

“Tush! fear not the dodge. I’ll rather put on my flashing red nose, and my flaming face, and come wrap’d in a calf–skin, and cry _Bo, bo_! I’ll pay the scholar, I warrant thee.”—(Harsnet’s _Declaration_, London, 1604, 4to.) His character, however, in this piece, is so diabolical, and so different from anything one could expect in Robin Good–fellow, that it is unworthy of further quotation.

He appears, likewise, in another, entitled _Grim, the Collier of Croydon_, in which he enters “in a suit of leather close to his body; his face and hands coloured russet colour, with a flail.”

He is here, too, in most respects, the same strange and diabolical personage that he is represented in _Wily Beguiled_, only there is a single passage which reminds us of his old habits:—

“When as I list in this transform’d disguise I’ll fright the country people as I pass; And sometimes turn me to some other form, And so delude them with fantastic shows, But woe betide the silly dairymaids, For I shall fleet their cream–bowls night by night.”

In another scene he enters while some of the other characters are at a bowl of cream, upon which he says—

“I love a mess of cream as well as they; I think it were best I stept in and made one: Ho, ho, ho! my masters! No good fellowship! Is Robin Goodfellow a bugbear grown That he is not worthy to be bid sit down?”

There is, indeed, something characteristic in this passage, but all the rest is totally foreign.

Doctor Percy, Bishop of Dromore, has reprinted in his _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_ a very curious and excellent old ballad originally published by Peck, who attributes it, but with no similitude, to Ben Jonson, in which Robin Good–fellow relates his exploits with singular humour. To one of these copies, he says, “were prefixed two wooden cuts, which seem to represent the dresses in which this whimsical character was formerly exhibited upon the stage.” In this conjecture, however, the learned and ingenious editor was most egregiously mistaken, these cuts being manifestly printed from the identical blocks made use of by Bulwer in his “Artificial Changeling,” printed in 1615, the first being intended for one of the black and white gallants of Seale–bay adorned with the moon, stars, etc., the other a hairy savage.

Burton, speaking of fairies, says that “a bigger kind there is of them, called with Hob–goblins, and Robin Goodfellowes, that would in those superstitious times, grinde corne for a messe of milke, cut wood, or do any kind of drudgery worke.” Afterward, of the dæmons that mislead men in the night, he says, “We commonly call them Pucks.”—(_Anatomy of Melancholie._)

Cartwright, in _The Ordinary_, introduces _Moth_, repeating this curious charm:—

“Saint Frances and Saint Benedight Blesse this house from wicked wight, From the nightmare, and the goblin That is hight Goodfellow Robin; Keep it from all evil spirits, Fairies, weezels, rats, and ferrets; From curfew time To the next prime.”

(Act III. Sc. I.)

This Puck, or Robin Good–fellow, seems, likewise, to be the illusory candle–holder, so fatal to travellers, and who is more usually called _Jack–a–lantern_, or _Will–with–a–wisp_; and, as it would seem from a passage elsewhere cited from Scot, _Kit with the canstick_. Thus a fairy, in a passage of Shakespeare already quoted, asks Robin—

“... Are you not he That frights the maidens of the villagery, Misleads night–wanderers laughing at their harm?”

Milton alludes to this deceptive gleam in the following lines—

“... A wandering fire, Compact of unctuous vapour, which the night Condenses, and the cold environs round, Kindled through agitation to a flame, Which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends, Hovering and blazing with delusive light, Misleads th’ amazed night–wanderer from his way To bogs and mires, and oft through pond and pool.”

(_Paradise Lost_, Bk. 9).

He elsewhere calls him “the frier’s lantern.”—(_L’ Allegro_).

This facetious spirit only misleads the benighted traveller (generally an honest farmer, in his way from the market, in a state of intoxication) for the joke’s sake, as one very seldom, if ever, hears any of his deluded followers (who take it to be the torch of Hero in some hospitable mansion, affording “provision for man and horse”) perishing in these ponds or pools, through which they dance or plunge after him so merrily.

“There go as manie tales,” says Reginald Scot, “upon Hudgin, in some parts of Germanie, as there did in England of Robin Good–fellow.... Frier Rush was for all the world such another fellow as this Hudgin, and brought up even in the same schoole—to wit, in a kitchen, inasmuch as the selfe–same tale is written of the one as of the other, concerning the skullian, who is said to have beene slaine, etc., for the reading whereof I referre you to frier Rush his storie, or else to John Wierus, _De Præstigiis Dæmonum_.”

In the old play of _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_, printed in 1575, Hodge, describing a “great black devil” which had been raised by Diccon, the bedlam, and being asked by Gammer—

“But, Hodge, had he no horns to push?”

replies—

“As long as your two arms. Saw ye never Fryer Rushe, Painted on a cloth, with a side–long cowe’s tayle, And crooked cloven feet, and many a hoked nayle? For al the world (if I schuld judg) chould reckon him his brother; Loke even what face frier Rush had, the devil had such another.”