Thair was Pluto that elricke incubus
In cloke of grene, his court usit in sable.
Even so late as 1602, in Harsenet's Declaration of Popish Imposture, p. 57, Mercury is called Prince of the Fairies.
But Chaucer, and those poets who have adopted his phraseology, have only followed the romance writers; for the same substitution occurs in the romance of Orfeo and Heurodis, in which the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is transformed into a beautiful romantic tale of faëry, and the Gothic mythology engrafted on the fables of Greece. Heurodis is represented as wife of Orfeo, and queen of Winchester, the ancient name of which city the romancer, with unparalleled ingenuity, discovers to have been Traciens, or Thrace. The monarch, her husband, had a singular genealogy:
His fader was comen of King Pluto,
And his moder of King Juno;
That sum time were as godes y-holde,
For aventours that thai dede and tolde.
Reposing, unwarily, at noon, under the shade of an ymp tree,[[A]] Heurodis dreams that she is accosted by the King of Fairies,
With an hundred knights and mo,