PUCK, as we said, is Shakespeare's fairy. There is some probability that he found in Cwm Pwca, or Puck Valley, a part of the romantic glens of Clydach, in Breconshire, the original scenes of his fanciful Midsummer Night's Dream. This glen used to be crammed with goblins. There, and in many like-named Welsh places, Puck's pranks were well-remembered by old inhabitants. This Welsh Puck was a queer little figure, long and grotesque, and looked something like a chicken half out of his shell; at least, so a peasant drew him, from memory, with a bit of coal. Pwcca, or Pooka, in Wales, was but another name for Ellydan; and his favorite joke was also to travel along before a wayfarer, with a lantern held over his head, leading miles and miles, until he got to the brink of a precipice. Then the little wretch sprang over the chasm, shouted with wicked glee, blew out his lantern, and left the startled traveller to reach home as best he could. Old Reginald Scott must have had this sort of a Puck in mind when he put Kitt-with-the-Candlestick, whose identity troubled the critics much, in his catalogue of "bugbears."
The very old word Pouke meant the devil, horns, tail, and all; from that word, as it grew more human and serviceable, came the Pixy of Devonshire, the Irish Phooka, the Scottish Bogle, and the Boggart in Yorkshire; and even one nursery-tale title of Bugaboo. Oddest of all, the name Pug, which we give now to an amusing race of small dogs, is an every-day reminder of poor lost Puck, and of the queer changes which, through a century or two, may befall a word. Puck was considered court-jester, a mild, comic, playful creature:
A little random elf
Born in the sport of Nature, like a weed,
For simple sweet enjoyment of myself,
But for no other purpose, worth or need;
And yet withal of a most happy breed.
But he kept to the last his character of practical joker, and his alliance with his grim little cousins, the Lyktgubhe and the Kludde. Glorious old Michael Drayton made a verse of his naughty tricks, which you shall hear:
This Puck seems but a dreaming dolt,
Still walking like a ragged colt,
And oft out of a bush doth bolt
On purpose to deceive us;
And leading us, makes us to stray
Long winter nights out of the way:
And when we stick in mire and clay,
He doth with laughter leave us.
Shakespeare, who calls him a "merry wanderer of the night," and allows him to fly "swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow," was the first to make Puck into a house spirit. The poets were especially attentive to the offices of these house-spirits.
According to them, Mab and Puck do everything in-doors which we think characteristic of a Brownie. William Browne, born in Tavistock, in the county of Devon, where the Pixies lived, prettily puts it how the fairy-queen did—
——command her elves
To pinch those maids that had not swept their shelves;
And further, if by maiden's oversight,
Within doors water was not brought at night,
Or if they spread no table, set no bread,
They should have nips from toe unto the head!
And for the maid who had performed each thing
She in the water-pail bade leave a ring.
