The fairies have already called themselves spirits, ghosts, or shadows, and consequently they never died, a position, at the same time, of which there is every kind of proof that a fact can require. The reviser of Johnson and Steevens’s edition of Shakespeare, in 1785, makes a ridiculous reference to the allegories of Spenser, and a palpably false one to Tickell’s Kensington Gardens, which he affirms “will show that the opinion of fairies dying prevailed in the last century,” whereas, in fact, it is found, on the slightest glance into the poem, to maintain the direct reverse:—
“Meanwhile sad Kenna, loath to quit the grove,
Hung o’er the body of her breathless love,
Try’d every art (vain arts!) to change his doom,
And vow’d (vain vows!) to join him in the tomb.
What would she do? The Fates alike deny
The dead to live, or fairy forms to die.”
The fact is so positively proved, that no editor or commentator of Shakespeare, present or future, will ever have the folly or impudence to assert “that in Shakespeare’s time the notion of fairies dying was generally known.”
Ariosto informs us (in Harington’s translation, Bk. x. s. 47) that
“... (Either ancient folke believ’d a lie,
Or this is true) a fayrie cannot die.”
And again (Bk. xliii. s. 92),
“I am a fayrie, and, to make you know,
To be a fayrie what it doth import:
We cannot dye, how old so ear we grow.