“I love a mess of cream as well as they;
I think it were best I stept in and made one:
Ho, ho, ho! my masters! No good fellowship!
Is Robin Goodfellow a bugbear grown
That he is not worthy to be bid sit down?”
There is, indeed, something characteristic in this passage, but all the rest is totally foreign.
Doctor Percy, Bishop of Dromore, has reprinted in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry a very curious and excellent old ballad originally published by Peck, who attributes it, but with no similitude, to Ben Jonson, in which Robin Good-fellow relates his exploits with singular humour. To one of these copies, he says, “were prefixed two wooden cuts, which seem to represent the dresses in which this whimsical character was formerly exhibited upon the stage.” In this conjecture, however, the learned and ingenious editor was most egregiously mistaken, these cuts being manifestly printed from the identical blocks made use of by Bulwer in his “Artificial Changeling,” printed in 1615, the first being intended for one of the black and white gallants of Seale-bay adorned with the moon, stars, etc., the other a hairy savage.
Burton, speaking of fairies, says that “a bigger kind there is of them, called with Hob-goblins, and Robin Goodfellowes, that would in those superstitious times, grinde corne for a messe of milke, cut wood, or do any kind of drudgery worke.” Afterward, of the dæmons that mislead men in the night, he says, “We commonly call them Pucks.”—(Anatomy of Melancholie.)
Cartwright, in The Ordinary, introduces Moth, repeating this curious charm:—
“Saint Frances and Saint Benedight
Blesse this house from wicked wight,
From the nightmare, and the goblin
That is hight Goodfellow Robin;
Keep it from all evil spirits,
Fairies, weezels, rats, and ferrets;
From curfew time
To the next prime.”
(Act III. Sc. I.)
This Puck, or Robin Good-fellow, seems, likewise, to be the illusory candle-holder, so fatal to travellers, and who is more usually called Jack-a-lantern, or Will-with-a-wisp; and, as it would seem from a passage elsewhere cited from Scot, Kit with the canstick. Thus a fairy, in a passage of Shakespeare already quoted, asks Robin—