Loo! quod he, and leet me see.

Lord mercy! I seide; This is a present of muche pris, What prynce shal it have?

It is a precious present, quod he, Ac the _pouke_ it hath attached, And me theremyde, quod that man, May no wed us quyte,

Ne no buyrn be oure borgh, Ne bringe us from his daunger; Out of the _poukes pondfold_ No maynprise may us fecche, Til he come that I carpe of, Crist is his name, That shall delivere us som day Out of the _develes_ power.

Golding also must have understood Pooke in the sense of devil, when in the ninth book of his translation of Ovid, unauthorised however by the original, he applies it to the Chimaera,

The country where Chymaera, that same _pooke_ Hath goatish body, lion's head and brist, and dragon's tayle.

Spenser employs the word, and he clearly distinguishes it from hob-goblin:

Ne let housefires nor lightnings helpless harms, Ne let the _pouke_[363] nor other evil sprites, Ne let mischievous witches with their charms, Ne let _hob-goblins_, names whose sense we see not, Fray us with things that be not.--_Epithalamion_, v. 340.

These terms are also distinguished in the poem named The Scourge of Venus:

And that they may perceive the heavens frown, The _poukes_ and _goblins_ pull the coverings down.

In Ben Jonson's play of The Devil is an Ass, the unlucky fiend who gives origin to its name is called Pug, and in the same author's Sad Shepherd the personage named Puck-hairy is, as Gifford justly observes, "not the Fairy or Oriental Puck, though often confounded with him."[364] In truth, it is first in Shakespeare that we find Puck confounded with the House-spirit, and having those traits of character which are now regarded as his very essence, and have caused his name Pug to be given to the agile mischievous monkey, and to a kind of little dog.

We will now discuss the origin of this far-famed appellation and its derivation.

In the Slavonic tongues, which are akin to the Teutonic, _Bog_ is God, and there are sleights of etymology which would identify the two terms; the Icelandic Puki is an evil spirit, and such we have seen was the English Pouke, which easily became Puck, Pug, and Bug; finally, in Friesland the Kobold is called Puk, and in old German we meet with Putz or Butz as the name of a being not unlike the original English Puck.[365] The Devonshire fairies are called Pixies, and the Irish have their Pooka, and the Welsh their Pwcca, both derived from Pouke or Puck. From Bug comes the Scottish Bogle, (which Gawin Douglas expressly distinguishes from the Brownie) and the Yorkshire Boggart.[366] The Swedish language has the terms _spoka_, _spoke_; the Danish _spoge_, _spogelse_, the German, _spuken_, _spuk_, all used of spirits or ghosts, and their apparitions. Perhaps the Scottish _pawkey_, sly, knowing, may belong to the same family of words. Akin to Bogle was the old English term Puckle, noticed above, which is still retained in the sense of mischievous, as in Peregrine Pickle and Little Pickle. It has been conjectured[367] that _Pickleharing_, the German term for zany or merry-andrew, may have been properly _Pickleharin_, _i.e._ the hairy sprite, answering to Jonson's Puck-hairy, and that he may have worn a vesture of hair or leaves to be rough like the Brownie and kindred beings.

From Bug also come Bugbear, and Bugleboo, or Bugaboo. They owe their origin probably to the Ho! Ho! Ho! given to Puck or Robin Goodfellow, as it was to the Devil (_i.e._, Pouke) in the Mysteries. Bull-beggar may be only a corruption of Bugbear.[368]

The following passage from a writer of the present day proves that in some places the idea of Puck as a spirit haunting the woods and fields is still retained. "The peasantry," says Mr. Allies,[369] "of Alfrick and those parts of Worcestershire, say that they are sometimes what they call _Poake-ledden_, that is, that they are occasionally waylaid in the night by a mischievous sprite whom they call Poake, who leads them into ditches, bogs, pools, and other such scrapes, and then sets up a loud laugh and leaves them quite bewildered in the lurch." This is what in Devon is called being _Pixy-led_. We may observe the likeness here to the Puck of Shakspeare and Drayton, who were both natives of the adjoining county.

A further proof perhaps of Puck's rural and extern character is the following rather trifling circumstance. An old name of the fungus named _puffball_ is _puckfist_, which is plainly Puck's-fist, and not _puff-fist_ as Nares conjectured; for its Irish name is _Cos-a-Phooka_, or Pooka's-foot, _i.e._, Puck's-foot. We will add by the way, that the Anglo-Saxon [Old English: Wulfes-fist], Wolf's-fist, is rendered in the dictionaries toadstool, mushroom, and we cannot help suspecting that as wolf and elf were sometimes confounded, and wolf and fist are, in fact, incompatible terms, this was originally [Old English: aelfes-fist] Elf's-fist, and that the mushrooms meant were not the thick ugly toadstools, the "grislie todestooles," of Spenser, but those delicate fungi called in Ireland _fairy-mushrooms_, and which perhaps in England also were ascribed to the fairies.[370]

So much then for Puck; we will now consider some other terms.

Robin Goodfellow, of whom we have given above a full account, is evidently a domestic spirit, answering in name and character to the Nisse God-dreng of Scandinavia, the Knecht Ruprecht, _i.e._, Robin of Germany. He seems to unite in his person the Boggart and Barguest of Yorkshire.

Hob-goblin is, as we have seen, another name of the same spirit.

Goblin is the French _gobelin_, German Kobold; Hob is Rob, Robin, Bob; just as Hodge is Roger. We still have the proper names Hobbs, Hobson, like Dix, Dixon, Wills, Wilson; by the way, Hick, _i. e._ Dick, from Richard, still remains in Hicks, Hickson.

Robin Hood, though we can produce no instance of it, must, we think, also have been an appellation of this spirit, and been given to the famed outlaw of merry Sherwood, from his sportive character and his abiding in the recesses of the greenwood. The hood is a usual appendage of the domestic spirit.

Roguery and sportiveness are, we may see, the characteristics of this spirit. Hence it may have been that the diminutives of proper names were given to him, and even to the Ignis Fatuus, which in a country like England, that was in general dry and free from sloughs and bog-holes, was mischievous rather than dangerous.[371] But this seems to have been a custom of our forefathers, for we find the devil himself called Old Nick, and Old Davy is the sailor's familiar name for Death.

In the Midsummer Night's Dream the fairy says to Puck "Thou Lob of spirits;" Milton has the _lubber-fiend_, and Fletcher says,[372]

"There is a pretty tale of a witch that had a giant to be her son that was called Lob Lie-by-the-fire." This might lead us to suppose that _Lob_, whence _loby_ (looby), _lubbard_, _lubber_,[373] and adding the diminutive _kin_, Lubberkin, a name of one of the clowns in Gay's Pastorals, was an original name of some kind of spirit. We shall presently see that the Irish name of the Leprechaun is actually Lubberkin. As to the origin of the name we have little to say, but it may have had a sense the very opposite of the present one of _lubber_, and have been connected with the verb _to leap_.[374] Grimm[375] tells of a spirit named the Good Lubber, to whom the bones of animals used to be offered at Mansfield in Germany; but we see no resemblance between him and our Lob of spirits; we might rather trace a connexion with the French Lutin, Lubin.[376] The phrase of _being in_ or _getting into Lob's Pound_ (like the "Pouke's pondfold,") is easy of explanation, if we suppose Lob to be a sportive spirit. It is equivalent to being _Poake-ledden_ or _Pixy-led_.

Wight, answering to the German _Wicht_, seems to have been used in the time of Chaucer for elf or fairy, most probably for such as haunted houses, or it may have had the signification of _witch_, which is evidently another form of it. In the Miller's Tale the carpenter says,

I crouche thee from elves and from _wights_.

And

Jesu Crist, and Seint Benedight, Blisse this house from every wicked _wight_![377]

Urchin is a term which, like _elf_ and such like, we still apply to children, but which seems formerly to have been one of the appellations of the fairies. Reginald Scott, as we have seen, places it in his list, and we find it in the following places of the poets:--

_Urchins_ Shall for the vast of night that they may work All exercise on thee.--_Tempest_, i. 2.

His spirits hear me, And yet I needs must curse; but they'll not pinch.

Fright me with _urchin-shows_, pitch me i' the mire, Nor lead me like a fire-brand in the dark Out of my way, unless he bid 'em.--_Ib._ ii. 2.

Like _urchins_, ouphs, and fairies.

_Merry Wives of Windsor_, iv. 4.

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 Beowulf, 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 Beowulf, 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 Iotunn 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."

Sone swa he com on eorthe, So soon he came on earth, Alven hine ivengen. Elves received him.