“From fairies, and the tempters of the night,
Guard me, beseech you.”
It must have been the Incubus she was so afraid of.
Hamlet, too, notices this imputed malignity of the fairies:—
“... Then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch has power to charm.”
Thus, also, in The Comedy of Errors:—
“A fiend, a fairy, pitiless and rough.”
They were amazingly expeditious in their journeys. Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, answers Oberon, who was about to send him on a secret expedition—
“I’ll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes.”
Again the same goblin addresses him thus:—