[15] See Nares’s Glossary, vol. ii. p. 695.

[16] Mr. Dyce considers that Lob is descriptive of the contrast between Puck’s square figure and the airy shapes of the other fairies.

[17] “Deutsche Mythologie,” p. 492.

[18] See Keightley’s “Fairy Mythology,” pp. 318, 319.

[19] “Three Notelets on Shakespeare,” pp. 79-82.

[20] Showing, as Mr. Ritson says, that they never ate.

[21] “Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft,” 1831, p. 121.

[22] “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” p. 115.

[23] “Elizabethan Demonology,” p. 50.

[24] Agate was used metaphorically for a very diminutive person, in allusion to the small figures cut in agate for rings. In “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2), Falstaff says: “I was never manned with an agate till now; but I will inset you neither in gold nor silver, but in vile apparel, and send you back again to your master, for a jewel.” In “Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 1) Hero speaks of a man as being “low, an agate very vilely cut.”