kind of fairy."[348:A] Scot's vocabulary of the fairy tribe is singularly copious, including not less than nine or ten appellations which have been bestowed, with more or less propriety, on this Proteus of the Gothic elves.—"In our childhood," he observes, "our mother's maids have so terrified us with—bull-beggers, spirits, urchens, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, sylens, kit with the cansticke, dwarfes, imps, nymphes, changlings, incubus, Robin Good-fellowe, the spoone, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell waine, the fier drake, the puckle Tom thombe, hob goblin, Tom tumbler, boneless, and such other bugs, that we are afraid of our owne shadowes."[348:B]
It is remarkable, however, that the Puck of Shakspeare is introduced by a term not found in this catalogue:—"Farewell, thou Lob of Spirits," says the fairy to him in their first interview,—a title which, as we shall perceive hereafter, could not be meant to imply, as Dr. Johnson supposed, either inactivity of body or dulness of mind, for Puck was occasionally swifter than the wind, and notorious, as the immediately subsequent passage informs us, for his shrewdness and ingenuity:—
"Either I mistake your shape and making quite,"
says the fairy, after bestowing the above title,
"Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite,
Call'd Robin Good-fellow;"
and then proceeds to characterise him by the peculiarity of his functions:—
—————————————— "Are you not he,
That fright the maidens of the villagery;
Skim milk; and sometimes labour in the quern,