[358] Comp. Milton, L'Allegro, 105 seq.
[359] Richardson, Table-Book, iii. 45; see above, p. [297].
[360] This word, as we may see, is spelt faries in the following legends; so we may suppose that fairy is pronounced farry in the North, which has a curious coincidence with Peri: see above, p. [15].
[361] Probably pronounced Poke, as still in Worcestershire. Our ancestors frequently used ou, or oo for the long o while they expressed the sound of oo by o followed by e, as rote root, coke cook, more moor, pole pool.
[362] Passus xvii. v. 11,323 seq. ed. 1842. Comp. vv. 8363, 9300, 10,902.
[363] Mr. Todd is right, in reading pouke for ponke, an evident typographic error: wrong in saying, "He is the Fairy, Robin Good-fellow, known by the name of Puck." Robin is the "hob-goblin" mentioned two lines after.
[364] We know nothing of the Oriental origin of Puck, and cannot give our full assent to the character of our ancestry, as expressed in the remaining part of Mr. Gifford's note: "but a fiend engendered in the moody minds, and rude and gloomy fancies of the barbarous invaders of the North." It is full time to have done with describing the old Gothic race as savages.
[365] Der Putz würde uns über berg und thäler tragen. To frighten children they say Der Butz kommt! see Grimm, Deut. Mythol. p. 474.
[366] The former made by adding the Anglo-Saxon and English el, le; the latter by adding the English art: see p. [318].
[367] By Sir F. Palgrave, from whose article in the Quarterly Review, we have derived many of the terms named above. He adds that the Anglo-Saxon pæcan is to deceive, seduce; the Low-Saxon picken to gambol; pickeln to play the fool; pukra in Icelandic to make a murmuring noise, to steal secretly; and pukke in Danish to scold. He further adds the Swedish poika boy, the Anglo-Saxon and Swedish piga and Danish pige girl. If, however, Pouke is connected with the Sclavonic Bog, these at the most can be only derivations from it. By the way boy itself seems to be one of these terms; the Anglo-Saxon piga was probably pronounced piya, and a is a masculine termination in that language.