king, furious with jealousy, pursues her, and is as mad as Orlando. He grapples with a wasp whom he mistakes for the enemy; next plunges upon a glowworm, and thumps her for carrying fire: then runs into a hive of bees who daub him all over with their honey; then leaps upon an ant, and gallops her; then scours over a mole-hill, and plumps into a puddle up to his neck. The queen hears of his pursuit, and she and all her maids of honor secrete themselves in a nutshell. Pigwiggen goes out to meet the king, riding upon a fiery earwig!

A FAIRY'S ARMS AND WAR-HORSE.

His helmet was a beetle's head
Most horrible and full of dread,
That able was to strike one dead,
Yet it did well become him.
And for his plume a horse's hair,
Which being tossed by the air,
Had force to strike his foe with fear,
And turn his weapon from him.

Himself he on an earwig set,

Yet scarce he on his back could get,

So oft and high he did curvet

Ere he himself could settle;

He made him turn, and stop, and bound,

To gallop and to trot the round,

He scarce could stand on any ground,*
He was so full of mettle.

The queen, scandalized and alarmed at the height to which matters are now openly proceeding, applies to Proserpina for help. The goddess takes pity on her, and during a dreadful combat between the champions, comes up with a bag full of Stygian fog and a bottle of Lethe water. The contents of the bag being suddenly dis

* Stare loco nescit, &c. — Virgil.

charged, the knights lose one another in the mist; and on the latter's clearing off, the goddess steps in as herald on behalf of Pluto to forbid further hostilities, adding that the ground of complaint shall be duly investigated, but first recommending to the parties to take a draught of the liquor she has brought with her, in order to enlighten their understandings. They drink and forget every thing; and the queen and her maids of honor, "closely smiling" at the jest, return with them to court, and have a grand dinner. Now this is "worshipful society," and a good plot. The "machines," as the French school used to call them, are in good keeping; and the divine interference-worthy.

In the "Muses' Elysium" of the same poet is a description of a fairy wedding. The bride wears buskins made of the shells of the lady-bird, with a head-dress of roseyellows and peacock-moons, &c.; but her bed is a thing to make one wish one's self only a span long, in order to lay one's cheek in it. The coverlid is of white and red rose-leaves; the curtains and tester of the flower-imperial, with a border of harebells; and the pillows are of lily, stuffed with butterfly-down.*

*From "The Recreations of Christopher North," we take this beautiful and very poetical description of a Fairy's Funeral:

There it was, on a little river island, that once, whether sleeping or waking we know not, we saw celebrated a fairy's funeral. First we heard small pipes playing, as if no bigger than hollow rushes that whisper to the night winds; and more piteous than aught that trills from earthly instrument was the scarce audible dirge! It seemed to float over the stream, every foam-bell emitting a plaintive note, till the airy anthem came floating over our couch, and then alighted without footsteps among the heather. The pattering of little feet was then heard, as if living creatures were arranging themselves in order, and then there was nothing but a more ordered hymn. The harmony was like the melting of musical dew-drops, and song, without words, of sorrow and death. We opened our eyes, or rather sight came to them when closed, and dream was vision: Hundreds of creatures, no taller than the crest of the lap

We think, with the author of the "Mythology," that Herrick's fairy poetry is inferior to that of Drayton. Herrick is indeed very inferior to the reputation which a few happy little poems have obtained for him; and the late reprint of his works has done him no good. For one delicacy there are twenty pages of coarseness and insipidity. His epigrams, for the most part, are ludicrous only for the total absence of wit; and inasmuch as he wanted sentiment, he was incapable of his own voluptuousness. His passion is cold, and his decencies impertinent. In his offerings at pagan altars, the Greek's simplicity becomes a literal nothing; though there is an innocence in the pedantry that is by no means the worst thing about him. His verses on his maid Prue are edifying. Herrick was a jovial country priest, a scholar, and a friend of Ben Jonson's, and we dare say had been a capital university-man. Scholarship and a certain quickness were his real inspirers, and he had a good sense, which in one instance has exhibited itself very remarkably; for it led him to speak of his being "too coarse to love." To be sure, he

wing, and all hanging down their veiled heads, stood in a circle on a green plat among the rocks; and in the midst was a bier, framed as it seemed of flowers unknown to the Highland hills; and on the bier a fairy, lying with uncovered face, pale as the lily, and motionless as the snow. The dirge grew fainter and fainter, and then died quite away; when two of the creatures came from the circle, and took their station, one at the head and the other at the foot of the bier. They sang alternate measures, not louder than the twittering of the awakened wood-lark before it goes up the dewy air, but dolorous and full of the desolation of death. The flower-bier stirred; for the spot on which it lay sank slowly down, and in a few moments the greensward was smooth as ever - the very dews glittering about the buried fairy. A cloud passed over the moon; and, with a choral lament, the funeral troop sailed duskily away, heard afar off, so still was the midnight solitude of the glen. Then the disenthralled Orchy began to rejoice as before through all her streams and falls; and at the sudden leaping of the waters and outbursting of the moon, we awoke. — Ed.

has put the observation in the mouth of a lady, and probably he found it there. He well deserved it for the foolish things he has said. He made a good hit now and then, when fresh from reading his favorite authors; and among them, we must rank a fairy poem mentioned by the author of the " 'Legends of the South of Ireland.” His office helped to inspire him in it, for it is a satire, and a bitter one, on the ceremonies of Catholic worship. We must own we have a regard for a Catholic chapel; but it is not to be denied that some of the duties performed in it are strange things, and open to quaint parodies. The names of the saints in Herrick are worthy of Drayton.

There is one thing in the fairies of Drayton which deserves mention. He does not shirk the miscellaneous, and, in some respects, anti-human nature of their tastes. The delicacies at their table are not always such as we should think pleasant, or even bearable. This is good; perhaps more so than he was aware, for he overdoes it.

Milton's "pert fairies and dapper-elves" are a little too sophistical. They are too much like fairies acting themselves; which is overdoing the quaint nicety of their consciousness. But in addition to the well-known passages we have quoted from him already, there is a very fine one in his First Book. He is speaking of the transformation of the devils into a crowd in miniature.

As bees

In spring-time, when the sun with Taurus rides,
Pour forth their populous youth about the hive
In clusters: they among fresh dews and flowers
Fly to and fro, or on the smoothed plank,
The suburb of their straw-built citadel,

New rubb'd with balm, expatiate and confer
Their state affairs. So thick the aery crowd
Swarm'd and were straiten'd; till the signal given,
Behold a wonder! They but now who seem'd

In bigness to surpass earth's giant sons,
Now less than smallest dwarfs in narrow room
Throng numberless, like that Pygmean race,
Beyond the Indian mount; or faery 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.

There is a pretty fairy tale in Parnell, where a young man, by dint of moral beauty, loses his hump. Perhaps it was this poem that suggested a large prose piece to the same effect, written, we believe, by a descendant of the poet's family, and well worthy the perusal of all who are not acquainted with it. It is entitled "Julietta, or the Triumph of Mental Acquirements over Bodily Defects;" and is found in most circulating libraries. But the most beautiful of all stories on the subject, and indeed one of the most beautiful stories in the world, is the celebrated fairy tale of "Beauty and the Beast." Of this, however, we may speak another time; for the fairies of the French books (however minute may be their dealings occasionally) are not the little elves of the North, but the Fates or enchantresses of Romance, paying visits to the nursery.

We shall conclude with a few goblin anecdotes, illustrative of the present state of fairy belief in its true northern region, that is to say, in the British and other islands, Scandinavia, and Germany; and, as the creed is, in fact, the same throughout the whole of that part of the world, though modified by the customs of the different people, we shall not stop to make literal or national distinctions, when the spirit of the thing is the same. Our authorities are the "Fairy Mythology," and the "Fairy