FOOTNOTES:
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Keightley, Thomas
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 Deliciæ.
[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 Brüder 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. Hödeken: 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.
[415] Mr. Cromek. There was, we believe, some false dealing on the part of Allan Cunningham toward this gentleman, such as palming on him his own verses as traditionary ones. But the legends are genuine.
[416] This answers to the Deenè Mâh, Good People, of the Highlands and Ireland. An old Scottish name, we may add, for a fairy seems to have been Bogle, akin to the English Pouke, Puck, Puckle; but differing from the Boggart. Thus Gawain Douglas says,
Of Brownyis and of Boggles full is this Beuk.
[417] Daemonologie, B. III. c. 5.
[418] These elf-arrows are triangular pieces of flint, supposed to have been the heads of the arrows used by the aborigines. Though more plentiful in Scotland they are also found in England and Ireland, and were there also attached to the fairies, and the wounds were also only to be discerned by gifted eyes. In an Anglo-Saxon poem, there occur the words æa eco and ýla eco, i. e. arrow of the Gods, and arrow of the Elves. Grimm, Deut. Mythol., p. 22.
[419] "It was till lately believed by the ploughmen of Clydesdale, that if they repeated the rhyme
Fairy, fairy, bake me a bannock and roast me a collop, And I'll gie ye a spurtle off my gadend!
three several times on turning their cattle at the terminations of ridges, they would find the said fare prepared for them on reaching the end of the fourth furrow."—Chambers' Popular Rhymes of Scotland, p. 33.
[420] See above, pp. 302, 311. Graham also relates this legend in his Picturesque Sketches of Perthshire.
[421] Hugh Miller, The Old Red Sandstone, p. 251. We are happy to have an opportunity of expressing the high feelings of respect and esteem which we entertain for this extraordinary man. Born in the lowest rank of society, and commencing life as a workman in a stone-quarry, he has, by the mere force of natural genius, become not only a most able geologist but an elegant writer, and a sound and discerning critic. Scotland seems to stand alone in producing such men.
[422] He is named as we have seen (p. 351) by Gawain Douglas. King James says of him "The spirit called Brownie appeared like a rough man, and haunted divers houses without doing any evill, but doing, as it were, necessarie turns up and down the house; yet some are so blinded as to believe that their house was all the sonsier, as they called it, that such spirits resorted there."
[423] Popular Rhymes of Scotland, p. 33.
[424] Grimm (Deut. Mythol., p. 479) says it is the German Schellenrock, i. e., Bell-coat, from his coat being hung with bells like those of the fools. A Pūck he says, once served in a convent in Mecklenburg, for thirty years, in kitchen, and stable, and the only reward he asked was "tunicam de diversis coloribus et tintinnabulis plenam."
[425] Sketches of Perthshire, p. 245.
[426] In what precedes, we have chiefly followed Mr. Cromek. Those anxious for further information will meet it in the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and other works.
[427] Mr. Croker says, that according to the Munster peasantry the ordinary attire of the Fairy is a black hat, green coat, white stockings, and red shoes.
[428] In Irish as in Erse, e m (deenè mâh).
[429] See above, p. 26.
[430] They are (shia), (shifra), ce (shicârè), (shee), e (sheeè), b (sheeidh) all denoting, spirit, fairy. The term also signifies a hag, and a hillock, and as an adjective, spiritual.
[431] We never heard a fairy-legend from any of the Connaught-men with whom we conversed in our boyhood. Their tales were all of Finn-mac-Cool and his heroes.
[432] In Irish, one (dhia eenè). We are inclined to think that he must have added, on, one (dhia dhardheen, dhia eenè), i.e. Thursday, Friday; for we can see no reason for omitting Thursday.
[433] See below, Brittany and Spain, in both of which the legend is more perfect; but it is impossible to say which is the original. Parnell's pleasing Fairy Tale is probably formed on this Irish version, yet it agrees more with the Breton legend.
[434] This story may remind one of the Wonderful Lamp, and others. There is something of the same kind in the Pentamerone.