The several chairs of order look you scour
With juice of balm, and every precious flower."[347:A]
No one could aspire to the favour and protection of the Fairies who was slovenly or personally impure; punishment, indeed, awaited all who thus offended; even the majesty of Mab herself condescended
"To bake the elf-locks in foul sluttish hair;"[347:B]
and Cricket, the fairy, being sent on a mission to the chimnies of Windsor, receives the following injunction:—
"Where fires thou find'st unraked, and hearths unswept,
There pinch the maids as blue as bilberry:
Our radiant queen hates sluts, and sluttery."[347:C]
In order to complete the picture of fairy superstition, as given us by Shakspeare, it remains to consider his description of Puck or Robin Good-fellow, the confidential servant of Oberon, an elf or incubus of a mixed and very peculiar character. This quaint, frolicksome, and often mischievous sprite, seems to have been compounded of the qualities ascribed by Gervase of Tilbury to his Goblin Grant, and to his Portuni, two species of dæmons whom he describes, both in name and character, as denizens of England; of the benevolent propensities attributed by Agricola to the Guteli, Cobali, or Brownies of Germany, and of additional features and powers, the gift and creation of our bard.
A large portion of these descriptions of the German writers, and of his countryman Gervase, Shakspeare would find in Reginald Scot, and from their union with the product of his own fancy, has arisen the Puck of the Midsummer-Night's Dream, a curious amalgamation of the fairy, the brownie, and the hob-goblin, whom Burton calls "a bigger