are they set upon me;
Sometimes like apes, that mow and chatter at me,
And after bite me: then like hedgehogs which
Lie tumbling in my bare-foot way, and mount
Their pricks at my footfall; sometime am I
All wound with adders, who, with cloven tongues
Do hiss me into madness.”
That fairies are sometimes exceedingly diminutive is fully shown by Shakespeare, who gives several instances of this peculiarity. Thus Queen Mab, in “Romeo and Juliet,” to which passage we have already had occasion to allude (i. 4), is said to come
“In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman.”24
And Puck tells us, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1), that when Oberon and Titania meet,
“they do square, that all their elves, for fear,
Creep into acorn cups, and hide them there.”
Further on (ii. 3) the duties imposed by Titania upon her train point to their tiny character:
“Come, now a roundel and a fairy song;
Then, for the third part of a minute, hence;
Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds,
Some war with rere-mice for their leathern wings,
To make my small elves coats.”
And when enamoured of Bottom, she directs her elves that they should —
“Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes;
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries;
The honey bags steal from the humble-bees,
And for night tapers crop their waxen thighs
And light them at the fiery glow-worm’s eyes,
To have my love to bed, and to arise;
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes.”
We may compare, too, Ariel’s well-known song in “The Tempest” (v. 1):
“Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry,
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily,
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.”
Again, from the following passage in “The Merry Wives of Windsor” (iv. 4) where Mrs. Page, after conferring with her husband, suggests that —
“Nan Page my daughter, and my little son,
And three or four more of their growth, we’ll dress
Like urchins, ouphes, and fairies, green and white,
With rounds of waxen tapers on their heads,
And rattles in their hands”
it is evident that in Shakespeare’s day fairies were supposed to be of the size of children. The notion of their diminutiveness, too, it appears was not confined to this country,25 but existed in Denmark,26 for in the ballad of “Eline of Villenskov” we read:
“Out then spake the smallest Trold;
No bigger than an ant; —
Oh! here is come a Christian man,
His schemes I’ll sure prevent.”
Again, various stories are current in Germany descriptive of the fairy dwarfs; one of the most noted being that relating to Elberich, who aided the Emperor Otnit to gain the daughter of the Paynim Soldan of Syria.27
The haunt of the fairies on earth are generally supposed to be the most romantic and rural that can be selected; such a spot being the place of Titania’s repose described by Oberon in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1):28
“a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania some time of the night,
Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.”
Titania also tells how the fairy race meet
“on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By paved fountain, or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea.”
In “The Tempest” (v. 1), we have the following beautiful invocation by Prospero:
“Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;
And ye, that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back – ”
Their haunts, however, varied in different localities, but their favorite abode was in the interior of conical green hills, on the slopes of which they danced by moonlight. Milton, in the “Paradise Lost” (book i.), speaks of
“fairy elves,
Whose midnight revels, by a forest side
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth
Wheels her pale course, they, on their mirth and dance
Intent, with jocund music charm his ear;
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.”
The Irish fairies occasionally inhabited the ancient burial-places known as tumuli or barrows, while some of the Scottish fairies took up their abode under the “door-stane” or threshold of some particular house, to the inmates of which they administered good offices.29
The so-called fairy-rings in old pastures30– little circles of a brighter green, within which it was supposed the fairies dance by night – are now known to result from the out-spreading propagation of a particular mushroom, the fairy-ringed fungus, by which the ground is manured for a richer following vegetation. An immense deal of legendary lore, however, has clustered round this curious phenomenon, popular superstition attributing it to the merry roundelays of the moonlight fairies.31 In “The Tempest” (v. 1) Prospero invokes the fairies as the “demy-puppets” that
“By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you, whose pastime
Is to make midnight-mushrooms.”
In “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (ii. 1), the fairy says:
“I do wander