This wife which is of _faerie_, Of such a childe delivered is, Fro kinde which stante all amis.

GOWER, _Legende of Constance_.

[389] The derivation of Oberon has been already given (p. 208). The Shakspearean commentators have not thought fit to inform us why the poet designates the Fairy-queen, Titania. It, however, presents no difficulty. It was the belief of those days that the Fairies were the same as the classic Nymphs, the attendants of Diana: "That fourth kind of spritis," says King James, "quhilk be the gentilis was called Diana, and her wandering court, and amongst us called the _Phairie_."

The Fairy-queen was therefore the same as Diana, whom Ovid (Met. iii.

173) styles Titania; Chaucer, as we have seen, calls her Proserpina.

[390]

'Twas I that led you through the painted meads, Where the light Fairies danced upon the flowers, Hanging on every leaf an orient pearl.

_Wisdom of Dr. Dodypoll, 1600. Steevens._

Men of fashion, in that age, wore earrings.

[391]

And the yellow-skirted Fayes Fly after the night-steeds, leaving their moon-loved maze.

MILTON, _Ode on the Nativity_, 235.

[392] _Ouph_, Steevens complacently tells us, in the Teutonic language, is a fairy; if by Teutonic he means the German, and we know of no other, he merely showed his ignorance. Ouph is the same as _oaf_ (formerly spelt _aulf_), and is probably to be pronounced in the same manner. It is formed from _elf_ by the usual change of _l_ into _u_.

[393] _i. e._ Pinch severely. The Ang.-Sax. [Old English: to] joined to a verb or part. answers to the German _zu_ or _zer_. [Old English: to-brecan] is to break to pieces, [Old English: to-drifan] to drive asunder, scatter. Verbs of this kind occur in the Vision of Piers Ploughman, in Chaucer and elsewhere. The part. is often preceded by _all_, in the sense of the German _ganz_, quite, with which some ignorantly join the _to_ as _all-to ruffled_ in Comus, 380, instead of _all to-ruffled_. In Golding's Ovid (p. 15) we meet "With rugged head as white as down, and garments _all to-torn_;" in Judges ix. 53, "and _all to-brake_ his skull." See also Faerie Queene, iv. 7, 8; v. 8, 4, 43, 44; 9, 10.

[394] After all the commentators have written, this line is still nearly unintelligible to us. It may relate to the supposed origin of the fairies. For _orphan_, Warburton conjectured _ouphen_, from _ouph_.

[395] The Anglo-Saxon [Old English: Midan eard] or [Old English: geard]; and is it not also plainly the Midgard of the Edda?

[396] The origin of Mab is very uncertain; it may be a contraction of Habundia, see below _France_. "Mab," says Voss, one of the German translators of Shakspeare, "is not the Fairy-queen, the same with Titania, as some, misled by the word _queen_, have thought. That word in old English, as in Danish, designates the female sex." He might have added the Ang.-Sax. [Old English: cen] woman, whence both _queen_ and _quean_. Voss is perhaps right and _elf-queen_ may have been used in the same manner as the Danish _Elle-quinde_, _Elle-kone_ for the female Elf. We find Phaer (see above, p. 11) using _Fairy-queen_, as a translation for _Nympha_.

[397] _i. e._, Night-mare. "Many times," says Gull the fairy, "I get on men and women, and so lie on their stomachs, that I cause them great pain; for which they call me by the name of Hagge or Night-mare." _Merry Pranks_, etc. p. 42.

[398]

Auraeque et venti, montesque, amnesque, lacusque, Dique omnes nemorum, dique omnes noctis, adeste.

_Ovid, Met._ l. vii. 198.

Ye ayres and winds, ye _elves_ of hills, of brooks, of woods, alone, Of standing lakes, and of the night--approach ye everich one.

GOLDING.

Golding seems to have regarded, by chance or with knowledge, the Elves as a higher species than the Fairies. Misled by the word _elves_, Shakspeare makes sad confusion of classic and Gothic mythology.

[399] _Take_ signifies here, to strike, to injure.

And there he blasts the tree and _takes_ the cattle.

_Merry Wives of Windsor_, iv. 4.

Thou farest as fruit that with the frost is taken.

SURREY, _Poems_, p. 13, Ald. edit.

In our old poetry _take_ also signifies, to give.

[400]

But not a word of it,--'tis fairies' treasure, Which but revealed brings on the blabber's ruin.

MASSINGER, _Fatal Dowry_, Act iv. sc. 1.

A prince's secrets are like fairy favours, Wholesome if kept, but poison if discovered.

_Honest Man's Fortune._

[401] We do not recollect having met with any account of this prank; but Jonson is usually so correct, that we may be certain it was a part of the popular belief.

[402] Whalley was certainly right in proposing to read Agnes. This ceremony is, we believe, still practised in the north of England on St. Agnes' night. See Brand, i. 34.

[403] Shakespeare gives different colours to the Fairies; and in some places they are still thought to be white. See p. 306.

[404] Act i. sc. 5. R. Dodsley's Old Plays, vii. p. 394. We quote this as the first notice we have met of the red caps of the fairies.

[405] Brown, their author, was a native of Devon, the Pixy region; hence their accordance with the Pixy legends given above.

[406] This is perhaps the dancing on the hearth of the fairy-ladies to which Milton alludes: see above, p. 42. "Doth not the warm zeal of an English-man's devotion make them maintain and defend the social hearth as the sanctuary and chief place of residence of the tutelary lares and household gods, and the only court where the _lady-fairies convene to dance and revel_?"--Paradoxical Assertions, etc. 1664, quoted by Brand, ii. p. 504.

[407] The reader will observe that the third sense of Fairy is the most usual one in Drayton. It occurs in its second sense two lines further on, twice in Nymphidia, and in the following passage of his third Eclogue,

For learned Colin (Spenser) lays his pipes to gage, And is to _Fayrie_ gone a pilgrimage, The more our moan.

[408] Mr. Chalmers does not seem to have known that the Crickets were family of note in Fairy. Shakspeare (_Merry Wives of Windsor_) mentions a Fairy named Cricket; and no hint of Shakspeare's was lost upon Drayton.

[409] In the Musarum Deliciae.

[410] This is a palpable mistake of the poet's. The Friar (see above, p. 291) is the celebrated Friar Rush, who haunted houses, not fields, and was never the same with Jack-o'-the-Lanthorn. It was probably the name Rush, which suggested _rushlight_, that caused Milton's error. He is the Bruder Rausch of Germany, the Broder Ruus of Denmark. His name is either as Grimm thinks, _noise_, or as Wolf (Von Bruodor Rauschen, p. xxviii.) deems _drunkenness_, our old word, _rouse_. Sir Walter Scott in a note on Marmion, says also "Friar Rush, _alias_ Will-o'-the-Wisp. He was also a sort of Robin Goodfellow and Jack-o'-Lanthorn," which is making precious confusion. Reginald Scot more correctly describes him as being "for all the world such another fellow as this Hudgin," _i. e._ Hodeken: see above, p. 255.

[411] Ben Jonson's Works, vol. ii. p. 499. We shall never cease to regret that the state to which literature has come in this country almost precludes even a hope of our ever being able to publish our meditated edition of Milton's poems for which we have been collecting materials these five and twenty years. It would have been very different from Todd's. [Published in 1859.]

[412] Evidently drawn from Dryden's Flower and Leaf.

[413] We meet here for the last time with Fairy in its collective sense, or rather, perhaps, as the country:

All Fairy shouted with a general voice

[414] In Mr Halliwell's Illustrations of Fairy Mythology, will be found a good deal of Fairy poetry, for which we have not had space in this work.

SCOTTISH LOWLANDS.