[402] Whalley was certainly right in proposing to read Agnes. This ceremony is, we believe, still practised in the north of England on St. Agnes' night. See Brand, i. 34.
[403] Shakespeare gives different colours to the Fairies; and in some places they are still thought to be white. See p. [306].
[404] Act i. sc. 5. R. Dodsley's Old Plays, vii. p. 394. We quote this as the first notice we have met of the red caps of the fairies.
[405] Brown, their author, was a native of Devon, the Pixy region; hence their accordance with the Pixy legends given above.
[406] This is perhaps the dancing on the hearth of the fairy-ladies to which Milton alludes: see above, p. [42]. "Doth not the warm zeal of an English-man's devotion make them maintain and defend the social hearth as the sanctuary and chief place of residence of the tutelary lares and household gods, and the only court where the lady-fairies convene to dance and revel?"—Paradoxical Assertions, etc. 1664, quoted by Brand, ii. p. 504.
[407] The reader will observe that the third sense of Fairy is the most usual one in Drayton. It occurs in its second sense two lines further on, twice in Nymphidia, and in the following passage of his third Eclogue,
For learned Colin (Spenser) lays his pipes to gage,
And is to Fayrie gone a pilgrimage,
The more our moan.
[408] Mr. Chalmers does not seem to have known that the Crickets were family of note in Fairy. Shakspeare (Merry Wives of Windsor) mentions a Fairy named Cricket; and no hint of Shakspeare's was lost upon Drayton.
[409] In the Musarum Deliciæ.
[410] This is a palpable mistake of the poet's. The Friar (see above, p. [291]) is the celebrated Friar Rush, who haunted houses, not fields, and was never the same with Jack-o'-the-Lanthorn. It was probably the name Rush, which suggested rushlight, that caused Milton's error. He is the Brüder Rausch of Germany, the Broder Ruus of Denmark. His name is either as Grimm thinks, noise, or as Wolf (Von Bruodor Rauschen, p. xxviii.) deems drunkenness, our old word, rouse. Sir Walter Scott in a note on Marmion, says also "Friar Rush, alias Will-o'-the-Wisp. He was also a sort of Robin Goodfellow and Jack-o'-Lanthorn," which is making precious confusion. Reginald Scot more correctly describes him as being "for all the world such another fellow as this Hudgin," i. e. Hödeken: see above, p. [255].