THE creatures we have hitherto been considering—the griffin, the phoenix, the manticora or the sea-horse—have either been unmitigated monsters of the fancy, or else, like the salamander or the chameleon, so transformed by legend as to be scarcely less monstrous and unreal. Having the fear of Pope’s oft-quoted line upon us, “The proper study of mankind is man,” we leave for a while these fantastic imaginings, and turn to another class of forms scarcely less grotesque, but all agreeing in this, the presence in them of more or less of the human form and nature. This class of forms readily subdivides itself into three sections, which we propose to deal with in the order in which we enumerate them. The first of these are forms compounded of the human and the animal, as, for example, the sphinx or the centaur; the second may be considered as human, though distorted, as the one-eyed cyclops, or, “the men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders;” while the third class may be held to embrace the fairies, pigmies, and giants, forms that are human, yet in bulk or minuteness bear no semblance to ordinary humanity.

The Sphinx may be considered as more especially an artistic and symbolic creation, though the old Greek myth of Œdipos would seem to show that in very early times there was a real belief in a real monster. The sphinx is composite in nature, being in Greek art and legend ordinarily the combination of the head and bust of a woman with the body of a lion and the wings of an eagle; while in Egyptian art the creature is always wingless, and its recumbent leonine body is surmounted by the head of a man, hawk, or other creature. Egyptian art is full of such composite monsters, and in cases where such attributes as the courage of the lion or the wisdom of the serpent were to be expressed, it was held that the actual leonine body or the head of the serpent itself would best convey the required characteristics to the eye and mind of the beholder. A reference to Wilkinson, Rosellini, or any other good standard work on Egypt, will reveal an immense variety of these curious composite figures, though, as they are evidently in most cases symbolic merely, they scarcely fall within the limits of our present study. According to some authorities, the well-known type of Egyptian sphinx represented the royal power by its junction in one creation of the highest physical and mental strength. Pliny, however, states that it is to be taken as the representation of the beneficent Nile, as the annual rising took place while the sun was in Leo and Virgo. As the head is masculine in type, and not that of maiden fair, this theory will scarcely meet the case.

The sphinx of classic story, a monster half-woman, half-lion, was sent by Hera to devastate the land of Thebes in revenge for an insult that had been offered to her. Sitting by the roadside, the sphinx put to every passer-by the celebrated riddle, “What creature walks on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three in the evening?” As one after another of these luckless travellers was obliged to “give it up” he was cast from the rock on which the monster sat into a deep abyss at its foot. The understanding was, that if any one could solve this conundrum the sphinx should herself perish, a consummation devoutly to be wished. One Œdipos hit upon the happy idea that perhaps it was a man that was meant, his career being traced through crawling infancy to stalwart manhood, and thence to tottering old age. Probably the sphinx had presumed too thoroughly on the badness of the riddle, and thought that its inane character would be her safeguard in this perilous game for forfeits. Lord Bacon[14] supplies a curious theory in explanation of the Greek legend; he tells us that the creature represented science, her composite nature being the various and different branches of which it is composed; that the female face denoted volubility of speech, while the wings showed the rapidity with which knowledge could be diffused. Her hooked talons are supposed to remind us of the arguments of science laying hold of the mind. Her position on the crag is a hint that the road to knowledge is steep and difficult, while the riddles of science “perplex and harass the mind.” Probably our readers have already made up their minds as to the value of this theory of Bacon’s; it appears to us that fifty other equally good explanations might be devised, and all equally wide of the mark. Of course after so sweeping a statement we can scarcely be expected to supply one ourselves for the other forty-nine critics to mercilessly dissect.

The ChimÆra was, according to Hesiod, a fire-breathing monster compounded of lion, goat, and serpent, having three heads, one of each of these creatures. It is in this form often represented in classic art; but Coats, a great authority in blazonry in the last century, in describing the monster departs somewhat from the ancient type, and in so doing brings the creature within the scope of our present chapter. He speaks of it as “an imaginary creature invented by the Poets, and represented by them as having the Face of a beautiful Maiden, the two Fore-legs and the Main of a Lyon, the Body like a Goat, the hinder-legs like a Griffin, and the Tayl like a Serpent or Dragon turned in a Ring.” He does not, however, give his authorities. Though Milton in his “Paradise Lost” gives us the line, “Gorgons, and Hydras, and ChimÆras dire,” the myth has been received amongst ourselves with so little faith that anything wildly improbable is branded as chimerical, and scouted accordingly.

The Centaurs are said by Virgil and Horace to have dwelt in Thessaly, a land then greatly famed for its breed of horses. Instances, as in the landing of the Spaniards in America, have not been unknown where those to whom the horse was unknown have imagined that the horse and his rider were but one creature. The belief in centaurs is not, therefore, so difficult a myth to trace to its origin as many others. The usual form of representation is the conjoining of the body and legs of a horse and the head, arms, and body of a man so far as the waist, though in some early works, as, for example, in archaic pottery in the British Museum, the legs of the man take the place of the fore-legs of the horse. The celebrated statue in the Louvre known as the Borghese Centaur, a sculpture of the most refined period of Greek art, gives the best idea, perhaps, of the highest treatment the form permits. Other fine examples, fragments of the sculpture of the Parthenon, may be seen in our own national collection in London.[15] In the works of the earlier writers, as Homer, the centaurs have nothing unnatural in their composition; we read nothing of their being half-horse, half-man, but they are introduced to us as a tribe of men whose home was in the mountains and whose nature was altogether barbarous and ferocious. The contests with centaurs, so favourite a subject in Greek art, have been generally conceived to be the struggle of Greek civilisation with the barbarism of the tribes with which it came in contact in the early Pelasgian period, a struggle that strangely enough finds its memorial not only in the grand sculptures of the matchless Parthenon, but in the delicate beauty of a little English wild flower, the pink centaury.[16]

Isidore refers to a creature called the Onocentaur, “which has the shape of a man down to the waist, and behind has the make of an ass.”

As the centaurs are frequently represented as bearing bows and arrows, the Sagittarius of the heralds (such, for instance, as that assigned as the armorial bearing of King Stephen or the sign of the Zodiac of the same name) is ordinarily represented in this half-human, half-equine form, though it is, of course, obvious on a moment’s consideration of the real meaning and derivation of the word, that this is but a narrow and arbitrary limitation, and that Robin Hood, for example, or William Tell, to say nothing of “A, the archer that shot at a frog,” might as readily, in fact, be called a Sagittarius as any Thessalian centaur.

Other partly human, partly animal forms often found in classic art and literature are those of the Satyrs and the Fauns. The satyrs are represented as having bristly hair, ears sharply pointed like those of animals, low sensual faces, small horns growing out of the top of the forehead, and a tail like that of a horse or goat. These satyrs, Greek in their conception, are often confounded with the fauns of the Romans, creatures half-man and half-goat, the head, like that of the satyrs, being horned. Our readers will doubtless recall the lines in “Hamlet:”—

These woodland sprites, as attendants on Pan, Bacchus, and Silenus, are often represented in classic art, and were a firm article of belief in those early ages. Thorwaldsen and other modern sculptors have also introduced them in their work, and they were often a feature in the quaint processions of the Guilds of the Middle Ages.[17]

The Harpys, three in number, were creatures employed, according to the belief of the Greeks and Romans, by the higher gods as the instruments for the punishment of the crimes of men. Their bodies were those of vultures, their heads those of women, and it was their evil property to contaminate everything they touched. They are not infrequently represented in classic art; several examples of their introduction may be seen on vases in the British Museum, and notably on some bas-reliefs from a monument brought from Xanthus, in Lycia, and commonly, from the subjects of these sculptures, called the Harpy Tomb—a monument dating probably from about the sixth century before the Christian era. Homer mentions but one harpy, Hesiod gives two, but all later writers mention three. Milton refers to these creatures in his “Paradise Lost,” Book II., in the lines:—

Shakespeare, too, in his “Much Ado About Nothing,” Act ii. scene 1, mentions the creature, though in a more indirect way, using the word, as we from time to time find it employed elsewhere, as typical of one who wants to seize on everything and get people into his own power—“a regular harpy.” Another reference will be found in the third scene in the third act of the “Tempest,” where Ariel in the midst of thunder and lightning enters as a harpy and addresses those before him as follows:—“I have made you mad.... I and my fellows are ministers of fate.” In “Pericles,” again, Act iv. scene 4, we find Cleon exclaiming—

In the “Monstrorum Historia” of Aldrovandus[18] we find figured a mediÆval rendering of the creature, and Guillim in his “Heraldry” seems to frankly accept the harpy as a real thing, while the lines he quotes in support from Virgil are powerfully descriptive:—

Virgil, it will be noticed, makes the creature wholly fearful, while Shakespeare makes the horror yet more weird by giving the implacable and destroying monster a face of angelic sweetness.

Upton, another old writer on heraldry, says that in blazoning arms “the Harpy should be given to such persons as have committed Manslaughter, to the End that by the often view of their Ensigns they might be moved to bewail the Foulness of their Offence.” This we should imagine, is more simple in theory than in practice, and Upton must have been very simple himself to fancy that any one could thus be induced to blazon their misdoings abroad like that. In the earlier days of heraldry the monarch had two powerful means of rewarding or punishing his nobles in what were termed respectively marks of augmentation and of abatement in their armorial bearings, but in the later times in which Upton lived no such compulsory stigma was possible. We fancy, too, that in the earlier days a good deal of what a modern judge and jury would call manslaughter went on, and was not by any means considered a foul offence to be bewailed over.

The terrible Echidna, half-woman, half-serpent, the mother of the dread chimÆra, the fierce dragon of the Hesperides, the gorgons that turned to stone all who gazed on them, the hydra of the Lernean marsh, the vulture that made itself so decidedly unpleasant to Prometheus, and several other children of an equally objectionable type, was another of the monsters once believed in, while the better known Sirens and Mermaids, half-woman, half-fish, will naturally occur to the minds of our readers.

The Sirens were originally nymphs, but Demeter transformed them into beings half-women, half-birds, for reasons that may be found duly set forth in any work on mythology. Ultimately they were again transformed into creatures of which the upper portion was that of a beautiful woman, while the lower was fish-like. These sirens dwelt in the cliffs on the Sicilian shore, and by the sweetness of their voices bewitched passing travellers, who, allured by the charms of their song, were drawn to them, when they were lulled into insensibility and perished. Skeletons lay thickly round their dwelling, but the warning was useless and hopeless, as the sirens were allowed by the gods to retain this cruel power over the hearts of men until one arose who could defy their sweet allurements. Orpheus and Odysseus each fulfilled the conditions, and thus the evil power of the sirens came to an end. Orpheus, by the unsurpassable sweetness of his own music and his hymns of praise to the gods, carried himself and his crew safely past the spot so fatal to others; while Odysseus stopped the ears of his crew with wax, that they might be deaf to the bewitching music, while he himself was bound to the mast, and incapable, therefore, of yielding to the soft fascination. It has been surmised that the whole story can be explained by the soft beating and melodious murmur of the waves over the hidden shoals and sands that would engulf those who would attempt to land. However this may be, the sirens were at one time a firm article of belief, and are often represented in ancient art or referred to in ancient poetry, while later moralists find the simile an apt one between the siren-song and its tragic effects and all earthly pleasures that carry within them the seeds of death.[19] A later legend of the same type may be seen in the myth of the Lurlei, a water-spirit whose home was in the steep cliff that overshadows the Rhine near St. Goar, the fairness of whose person was as great as the unfairness of her conduct in luring to their destruction the passing travellers. Here again, of course, matter-of-fact people have stepped in and explained all away, a striking echo and a rock on which to strike being all that is left to us, the moral being, that if people will be so foolish as to awaken by bugle or song the slumbering voices of the rocks when they ought to be giving their whole attention to their steering, what wonder if they come to grief? A very good reference to the siren’s lulling song will be found in the second scene in the third act of the “Comedy of Errors.”

Mermaids and Tritons were once fully accepted facts, and illustrations of them, literary or artistic, abound, Ariel in the “Tempest” sings of the sea-nymphs, and Oberon in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” speaks of

Shakespeare seems to have made a very natural error in confounding the mermaids and the sirens together, for in the “Comedy of Errors” his allusion to the one is in language more adapted to the other:—

Another illustration of this will be found in the third part of King Henry VI., a passage peculiarly appropriate to our present purpose, as it embodies in a concentrated form no less than three of the items of unnatural history we have already dealt with—the siren’s death-dealing charms, the death-giving glance of the basilisk, and the changing tints of the chameleon, besides referring to the hypocritical tears of the crocodile. The passage will be found in the second scene of the third act, where Gloster exclaims—

Other references will be found in “Hamlet” and in “Antony and Cleopatra.”

It has been conjectured that the ancients derived their idea of the mermaid from the Manatees that may be found on the shores of Africa washed by the Atlantic, or from the Dugongs of the littoral of the Indian Ocean. These singular animals have been placed by naturalists in a class by themselves and called Sirenia. They have a curious habit of swimming with their heads and necks above water. They thus bear some grotesque and remote resemblance to the human form, and may have given rise to the poetical tales of mermaids and sirens found in ancient literature. When the female Dugong is nursing her offspring the position assumed is almost identical with that of a human mother. The sea-lions and seals have the same habit of raising themselves in a semi-erect position in the water, and the intelligent aspect of their faces gives them at a little distance a close resemblance to human beings—a resemblance often equally striking when they are seen recumbent on the rocks. It is but little strange, that early navigators with all the superstitions of their race, and having a very slight knowledge of natural history, should be deceived, when we find in Scoresby’s Voyages the incident narrated of the surgeon of his ship so deceived by one of these creatures that he reported that “he had seen a man with his head just above the surface of the water.” At the same time, it appears to us at least as probable that the mermaid, like the sea-horses of Poseidon, was purely a creature of the imagination.

From the graceful beauty of the mermaiden to the less pleasing physiognomy of “Mistress Tannakin Skimker, the hog-faced gentlewoman,” is a great step indeed, yet both beliefs bear testimony alike to the universal desire after something wonderful and outside the ordinary course of nature, a feeling that in its lowest form finds satisfaction in paying a penny to see a six-legged lamb, while more cultured minds revel in the wealth of fancy found in the myths of Hellas. The unhappy lady who has prompted our present remarks was bewitched at her birth on the understanding that she should recover her true shape on being married. She was born, we are told, in 1618 in a town on “the River Rhyne.” Our authority, a book dated the year 1640, gives various facts, but does not say whether any one was so courageous as to remove the spell by offering her marriage. The book is embellished (or otherwise) with a portrait of the luckless Tannakin. While referring to the one old book our thoughts naturally turn to another of a similar type, the “Humana Physiognomonia” of Porta, a book published in the year 1601. It is full of curious woodcuts showing the great resemblance sometimes seen between the features of men and those of some of the lower animals.

Old Burton tells us, in his “Miracles of Art and Nature” (A.D. 1678), of a creature found in Brazil that had “the face of an Ape, the foot of a Lyon, and all the rest of a Man,” and he almost needlessly adds, “a Beast of a most terrible aspect.” This is not by any means the only wonder in that vast and distant land, and he winds up his description by asserting that “it may be said of Brasill as once of Africk, every day some New Object of Admiration.” In his account of India he tells us of dog-headed men, while in the Oriental Isles, besides a river plentifully stored with fish, yet so hot that it scalds the flesh of any man or beast thrown therein, there are men with tails.

Numerous other instances might readily be given of strange combinations of the human form with that of some animal, but enough has been given as an illustration of the sort of thing to be freely met with in ancient and mediÆval history; so we pass to our second division of humanity—those who are wholly human, yet in some way of so marked a departure from the ordinary type of mankind as to come within the scope of our strange history. These modifications sometimes arise from the suppression of some part, as in the case of the headless people; in its exaggeration, as in the instance of the men of India whose ears sweep the ground as they walk; or in the multiplication or subtraction of various members, as in the one-eyed Cyclops or the hundred-armed BriarÆus.

One of the most notable beliefs in mediÆval times was that in the headless people:—

Of the Anthropophagi we may read in Eden’s “Historie of Travayle,” a book published in the year 1577. The word in its literal sense means man-eaters or cannibals.[20] Eden, in the passage to which we have referred, speaks of these as “the wilde and myschevous people called Canibales or Caribes, whiche were accustomed to eate man’s fleshe, and called of the old writers Anthropophagi, molest them exceedingly, invading their countrey, takyng them captive, kyllying and eatyng them.” Our old author, it will be seen, speaks of still older writers, but these we have been unable to lay hands on.

Halliwell, in his noble edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, comments on the opinion of Pope and other writers, that the lines we have quoted from “Othello” were perhaps originally the interpolation of the players, or at best a mere piece of trash admitted to humour the lower class of the audience. He, as we imagine, very justly combats this idea, holding that the case was probably the very reverse of this, and that the poet rather desired to commend his play to the more curious and refined amongst his auditors by alluding here to some of the most extraordinary passages in Sir Walter Raleigh’s account of his celebrated voyage to Guiana in 1595. Nothing excited more universal attention than the accounts which Raleigh brought from the New World of the cannibals, headless people, and Amazons. A short extract of the more wonderful passages was published in several languages, accompanied by a map of Guiana, by Jodocus Hondius, a Dutch geographer, and adorned with copper-plates representing these Anthropophagi, Amazons, and headless men in different points of view.

Raleigh’s book was published in London in 1596, the year after his return from these wondrous lands. Its title runs as follows:—“The discoverie of the large, rich, and bewtiful Empire of Gviana, with a relation of the great and golden City of Manoa, which the Spaniards call El Dorado, performed in the year 1595, by Sir W. Ralegh, Knt.” The book is written throughout in a very fair, honest way, and with an evident desire to gain the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Our hero shall, however, speak for himself. “Next vnto Armi there are two riuers Atoica and Coara, and on that braunch which is called Coara are a nation of people whose heades appeare not aboue their shoulders, which, though it may be thought a meere fable, yet for mine owne parte I am resolued it is true, because euery child in the prouinces of Arromaia and Canuri affirme the same: they are called Ewaipanoma; they are reported to haue their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts, and that a long traine of haire groweth backward betwen their shoulders. The sonne of Topiawari, which I brought with mee into England, told mee that they are the most mightie men of all the lande and vse bowes, arrowes, and clubs thrice as bigge as any of Guiana, or of the Orenoqueponi, and that one of the Iwarawakeri took a prisoner of them the yeare before our arriual there, and brought him into the borders of Arromaia his father’s countrey. And further, when I seemed to doubt of it hee told me that it was no wonder among them, but that they were as great a nation, and as common, as any other in all the prouinces, and had of late yeares slaine manie hundreds of his father’s people and of other nations their neighbors, but it was not my chance to heare of them til I was come away, and if I had but spoken one word of it while I was there, I might haue brought one of them with me to put the matter out of doubt.” It appears to us that “Sir W. Ralegh, Knt.,” comes out of the matter very much better than “the sonne of Topiawari,” who, to say the least of it, and to take the most charitable view, seems to have been under a misapprehension of the facts.

The same year saw the publication of a second book, “A relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana, performed and written in the yeere 1596, by Laurence Keymis, Gent.” This was dedicated to “the approved, right valorous and worthy knight Sir Walter Ralegh,” and he too refers to this mysterious people, though only on the same terms, information at second hand, not actual inspection. He says, “Our interpreter certified mee of the headlesse men, and that their mouthes in their breastes are exceeding wide.” He evidently feels that this is almost as far as he may reasonably expect to gain credence from the folks at home, for he goes on to say, “What I have heard of a sorte of people more monstrous I omit to mention, because it is matter of no difficultie to get one of them, and the report otherwise will appeare fabulous.” He nevertheless does mention it, for in a note on the margin he says of these people, “They have eminent heades like dogs, and live all the day time in the sea: they speake the Charibes language.” Probably these were some kind of seal or sea-lion, though one does not generally associate with such creatures the idea of linguistic acquirements. He does not seem to have found it so easy to get hold of one of these people as he anticipated; his book at least gives no hint that he was so far successful. Guiana, like Africke, was in mediÆval times a land of wonders, and even Hartsinck, in his work on Guiana, published in 1770, or not very much more than a century ago, gravely asserts the existence of a race of negroes in Surinam whose hands and feet were forked like the claw of a lobster, the hands consisting merely of a thumb and one broad finger, like the gloves of one’s tender infancy, while the foot was suggestive of the split hoof of the ox or sheep.

Hackluyt in his “Voyages” dwells on the land Gaora, a tract inhabited by a people without heads, having their eyes in their shoulders and their mouths in their breasts. His book is dated 1598. A similar race of men, called Blemmyes, were said to be found in Africa; and Sir John Maundeville, in his “Voiage and Travaile, which treateth of the way to Hierusalem and of Marvels of Inde, with other Ilands and Countries,” gives an account of these men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. The book is altogether a most curious and interesting one, and the quaint illustrations add greatly to its value. The famous “Nuremburg Chronicle” of the year 1493 has a very curious figure of one of these headless men, almost a hundred years before they are mentioned by Sir Walter Raleigh, and in 1534 we find another representation in one of the books of Erasmus.[21] Raleigh’s book, it will be remembered, was published in 1596.

An extraordinary realisation of these famous and fabulous beings was afforded to the people of Stuttgard at the great Festival held in that city by the Grand-Duke of Wurtemburg on the occasion of his marriage with the Margravine of Brandenburg in the year 1609. The doings of the Festival were illustrated by Balthazar Kuchlein in a volume of 236 plates. A grand procession was a marked feature in the rejoicings, and in this procession we see three of these headless men riding on gaily caparisoned and prancing steeds, besides “Tempus” with his winged hourglass; “Labor,” dressed as a rustic, and bearing in one hand a beehive, and in the other a spade; and “Fama,” a winged lady-fair on horseback, and bearing scroll and trumpet. In this grand but heterogeneous cavalcade we also find, amongst many others, the counterfeit presentments of Julius CÆsar, Alexander of Macedon, Hector of Troy, Diana, Jupiter, Sol, Prudentia, Justicia, Fortitudo, and Abundancia—a strange medley, but doubtless a pageant well pleasing to the burghers of Stuttgard, and to the countless throngs drawn within their city walls.

Pliny gravely writes of the Fanesii, a tribe in the far north of Scandinavia, whose ears were so long that they could cover up their whole body with them; while the author of “Guerino Meschino” speaks of Indians with feet so large that they carried them over their heads as sunshades. Their means of locomotion must have been, under these circumstances, decidedly curious.

Amongst one-eyed people we have the Arimaspians and the Cyclops. The former were a race in Scythia, and were legendarily supposed to be in constant war with the gryphons, as elsewhere we find recorded the continuous hostilities between the pigmies and the cranes. They are referred to by Milton in his “Paradise Lost.” The Cyclops were giants, whose business it was to forge for Vulcan; their single eye was placed in the centre of their foreheads. Of these the most notable was the great giant Polyphemus, the defeated and blinded foe of Ulysses:—

All the departures from the ordinary human type that we have hitherto considered sink into insignificance when we come to the great BriarÆus, the fifty-headed and hundred-handed giant, and his companions:—

Giants of this overwhelming type may be also met with in the mythology of Scandinavia and India, but space forbids our dwelling at greater length on their charms. Having, therefore, so far done homage to the dictum of Pope, “The proper study of mankind is man,” by considering in the first place the combination of the human nature with the animal, and in the second division man himself, yet warped and distorted from the image of God, we now, in the third place, deal with those forms of human mould that owe their departure from the type form to an excess of bulk or the reverse—a class that includes the men of Lilliput and of Brobdingnag, and all their fellows in towering height or microscopic proportion.

The Fairies were held by our ancestors to be a kind of intermediate beings, partaking of the nature both of men and spirits. They had material bodies, and yet possessed the power of rendering themselves invisible at will. They had minds and hearts that could be touched by kindly feelings, and at the same time they delighted in practical jokes of the most pronounced description, while some displayed a cruel and malignant ferocity. The general idea, however, of them seems to have been of a diminutive race possessed with supernatural gifts, animated with joyous spirits, of great beauty, and full of kindliness to the sons of men when not crossed or slighted. We are told, for instance, of an honest farmer who had been reduced by the badness of the seasons to poverty, and was about to return homewards one morning from the fields in despair, having sown what little seed he had, which was not nearly so much as the ploughed land required. While pondering, not knowing what to do, he imagined that he heard a voice behind him saying—

He turned round, and perceived a large sack standing at the end of the field, and on opening it he found it to be full of the most excellent seed-oats. Without hesitation he sowed them; the sample was admirable, and the harvest no less luxuriant. The man carefully preserved the sack, and as soon as possible filled it full of the best grain that his field produced, and set it down on the spot on which he had received the fairy oats. A voice called to him—

The farmer averted his face, and then immediately looked round, but all was gone. Things ever after prospered with him; for, according to the popular belief—

In the same dearth, and in the same parish, an old woman who was nearly perishing of hunger, having tasted no food for two or three days, was one morning astonished to find one of her pans full of oatmeal. This seasonable supply she attributed to some of her benevolent neighbours, who she imagined had been wishing to give her a little surprise. Notwithstanding the care, however, with which she husbanded her meal, it by-and-by was expended, and she was again almost reduced to starvation. After passing another day without food her pan was again replenished, which was regularly done whenever the supply was exhausted, always allowing her to remain one day without food. Her store was replenished so regularly that at last she became careless, and presumed on the generosity of her invisible benefactors. One day, on receiving her new supply, she baked the whole of it into cakes, and having by some means obtained a little meat, invited all her acquaintances to a treat. The guests were just going to fall to when, to their astonishment, they beheld the cakes turn into withered leaves. After this the store was never renewed.

The origin of the belief in fairies is lost in the mists of time. Some supposed them to be the spirits of those who had inhabited the land before the birth of the Saviour, shut out until the final judgment from the joys of Paradise, yet undeserving of a place amongst the lost souls in Hades. Others tell us that they are the Druids thus transformed because they would not give up their idolatrous rites, and that they are continually growing smaller and smaller, until they eventually turn into ants.[24] They may be divided into four classes. 1. The white or good fairies who live above ground, the joyous dancers, the ethereal beings the poets delight to portray. 2. The dark or underground spirits, trolds and brownies, a more irritable race, working in mines and smithies, and doing good or evil offices in a somewhat arbitrary and uncertain fashion. 3. The fairy of the homestead, of whom Puck and Robin Goodfellow are good examples, fond of cleanliness and order, rewarding and helping the industrious and punishing the idle and careless. 4. The water-fairies, the more sombre spirits of the woods and mountains, the Kelpies and Nixies, luring men to destruction. We nevertheless find that the fairies of the sylvan shades interest themselves at times in the affairs of men, and though it is easy to define four very distinct classes, we at the same time find that these classes are blended together a good deal. The whole thing is so purely a creation of the imagination, not of one mind but of thousands, that it is impossible to reduce the subject to mathematical exactness.

The fairies of the poets are ordinarily those of the woodland, while those of the legends of the countryside are at least equally often the fairies of the homestead in their association with the daily life, the trivial round, the common task.

The earliest account of the fairies of England will be found in the writings of Gervase, in the thirteenth century, and after that date allusion to them may frequently be found; grave chroniclers like Reginald Scot, poets like Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, all make mention of them. The first of these, Scot, in his “Discoverie of Witchcraft,” tells us that “the faeries do principally inhabit the mountains and caverns of the earth, whose nature is to make strange apparitions on the earth, in meadows or in mountains, being like men and women, soldiers, kings, and ladies, children, and horsemen clothed in green.” Many unfortunate women were persecuted as witches during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and their connection with the fairies was often one of the leading charges against them, as we may see in the indictment of Alison Pearson; she was convicted of associating with the fairies, the definite charge against her being “for haunting and reparing with the Queene of Elfland.” Another woman was found guilty of “taking employment from a woman to speak in her behalf to the Queene of Faerie;” and many other such cases might be brought forward.

Fairies have ordinarily been invisible, and though they have at times permitted mortals to be present at their revels, more frequently they would appear to have resented any intrusion. In Poole’s “English Parnassus” the most circumstantial details are given: the robes are of snowy cobweb and silver gossamer; the lamps are the mystic lights of glowworms; the minstrelry is the music of the nightingale or the chirp of the cricket. Their emperor was Oberon, and his royal consort and empress was the sweet but mischievous Mab:—