Young Randolph has an equally delightful account in the pastoral drama of Amyntas, of his wee folk orchard-robbing; whose chorused Latin Leigh Hunt thus translates, roguishly enough:
We the fairies blithe and antic,
Of dimensions not gigantic,
Tho' the moonshine mostly keep us,
Oft in orchard frisk and peep us.
Stolen sweets are always sweeter;
Stolen kisses much completer;
Stolen looks are nice in chapels;
Stolen, stolen, be our apples!
When to bed the world is bobbing,
Then's the time for orchard-robbing:
Yet the fruit were scarce worth peeling,
Were it not for stealing, stealing!
You will notice that Shakespeare places his Gothic goblins in the woods about Athens, a place where real fairies never set their rose-leaf feet, but where once sported yet lovelier Dryads and Naiads. These dainty British Greeks are very small indeed: Titania orders them to make war on the rear-mice, and make coats of their leathern wings. Mercutio's Queen Mab is scarce bigger than a snowflake. Prospero, in The Tempest, commands, besides his "delicate Ariel," all
—elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves.
The make-believe fairies in The Merry Wives know how to pinch offenders black and blue. The shepherd, in the Winter's Tale, takes the baby Perdita for a changeling. So that all the Shakespeare people seem wise in goblin-lore.
You see that we have looked for the literature of our pretty friends only among the old poets, and only English poets at that; but the foreign fairies are no less charming. Chaucer and Spenser loved the brood especially. Robert Herrick knew all about
—the elves also,
Whose little eyes glow;
Sidney smiled on them once or twice, and great Milton could spare them a line out of his majestic verse. But the high-tide of their praise was ebbing already when Dryden and Pope were writing. Lesser poets than any of these, Parnell and Tickell, wrote fairy tales, but they lack the relish of the honeyed rhymes Drayton, Lyly, and supreme Shakespeare, give us. Keats was drawn to them, though he has left us but sweet and brief proof of it; and Thomas Hood, of all gentle modern poets, has done most for the "small foresters and gay." In prose the fairies are "famoused" east and west; for which they may sing their loudest canticle to the good Brothers Grimm, in Fairyland. The arts have been their handmaids; and some of this world's most lovable spirits have delighted to do them merry honor: Mendelssohn in his quicksilver orchestral music, and dear Richard Doyle in the quaintest drawings that ever fell, laughing, from a pencil-point.