Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/146

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138
THE FOLK-LORE OF DRAYTON.

"there is a swelling ground
About which Ceres nymphs dance many a wanton round.
The frisking fairies there as on the light air borne,
Oft run at barley-break,[1] upon the ears of corn,
And catching drops of dew in their lascivious chaces,
Do cast the liquid pearl in one another's faces."

We are informed that in Rockingham's delightful bowers—

"The fauns and fairies make the longest days but hours."

Ryedale, I may note in passing, is the subject of an on dit: amongst her groves of old "some say that elves did keep."[2]

Not much more than the few passages just indicated had Drayton written about the "small folk" before the appearance of Nymphidia, which was the natural outcome of a poetic mind, impressed with the revelations of Shakespeare and Jonson concerning faerie, and encouraged to speak out by the prevailing taste which they and others had excited and maintained. One only wonders that Drayton had kept so long silent, for he was a sexagenarian before he became the confident of Nymphidia; and yet after a little apologetic exordium touching his condescension to so trifling a theme he proceeds with a lilt and with a fire for which we may well thank "the active Muse" (whom, by dint of diligent exercise and strange experiments he had kept so buxom and so sprightly), and the other lady-help aforesaid, whom he thus apostrophizes—

"And thou, Nymphidia, gentle fay,
Which meeting me upon the way,
These secrets did to me bewray.
Which now I am in telling.



  1. Barley-break, prison-base, hood-wink, and tick were games in which the nymphs delighted, especially in the first two of them—See Pol. xi. [iii. 862]; Pol. xxx. [iii. 1225]; Nymphal, i. [iv. 1450]. They danced hornpipes, galiards, jiggs, and braules.—Pol. xx. [iii. 1043]; Pol. xxiii. [iii. 1114]; Nymphidia [ii. 461]. Nymphs are also associated with fauns.—Pol. xi. [iii. 862]. Mortals, contemporaneously, trampled out their shoes in dancing around the may-pole, lighted bel-fires, and bewrayed their loves "in pretty riddles":

    "In questions, purpose, or in drawing gloves."


    Witness Pol. xv. [iii. 947]; Pol. xiv. [iii. 93]; Eng. Heroic Epis. [i. 370].

  2. Pol. xxviii. [iii. 1201]. Here we have the almost obsolete sense of keep=dwell. To keep terms is to dwell at Oxford or at some other university for a specified time. In dialect English a keeping-room is a sitting-room, as opposed to a bed-chamber.