Ben Jonson makes Robin Goodfellow say—
"Sometimes I meet them like a man,
Sometimes an ox, sometimes a hound,
And to a horse I turn me can,
To trip and trot about them round.
But if to ride,
My back they stride,
More swift than wind away I go:
O'er edge and lands,
Through pools and ponds,
I whirry laughing, Ho! ho! ho!"
There is some diversity and variety of colouring in the various fairy types presented in different localities, but they have sufficient in common to justify perfect faith in their near relationship, whether they are styled Peris, as in Persia, Pixies, as in Devonshire, Ginns, as in Arabia, Gnomes or Elves, amongst the Teutons, or "the Leprachaun" or "Good people," of the sister Island. The finest modern artistic realisation of the fairy kingdom is unquestionably to be found in Shakspere's "Midsummer Night's Dream." How strangely, yet how beautifully and consistently, has he there woven together his ethereal conceptions with the grosser, as well as with the more elevated aspect of our common humanity! How exquisite is the poetry in which the visions of his imaginations are embodied! The fairy-King Oberon thus describes his queen, Titania's, bower:—
I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
Where oxslips and the nodding violet grows;
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine;
There sleeps Titania, some time of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight,
And there the snake throws her enamelled skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.
And again at the close of the play, Puck says—
Now it is the time of night,
That the graves all gaping wide,
Every one lets forth his sprite
In the church-way paths to glide:
And we fairies that do run
By the triple Hecat's team,
From the presence of the sun,
Following darkness like a dream,
Now are frolic.
Witches, fairies, ghosts, and boggarts seem to have become intimately amalgamated in the repertoire of modern superstition. Doubtless many of them have a common origin, and are but separate developments, mythical or artistic, of the universal tendency of primitive peoples to personify, or render more tangible to the ruder sense, their conceptions of those forces of nature, the laws governing which are, to them, hidden in the delusive gloom of ignorance. "Feeorin" is a general term for all things of this character that create fear in the otherwise intrepid heart of a "Lancashire lad." Mr. Edwin Waugh, whose songs in the dialect are not more remarkable for their quaint humour and homely pathos than for their idiomatic truthfulness, aptly illustrates the mingling of the various supernatural terrors to which I have referred, in his admirable ballad, "What ails thee, my son Robin." The mother, alarmed at the lad's melancholy mood, says, inquiringly:—
Neaw, arto fairy-stricken;
Or arto gradely ill?
Or hasto bin wi' th' witches
I'th cloof, at deep o'th neet?
Robin replies—
'Tisn't lung o'th feeorin'
That han to do wi' th' dule;
There's nought at thus could daunt mo,
I'th cloof, by neet nor day;
It's yon blue een o' Mary's:
They taen my life away.