If Drayton's fancy touching the fairy-palace be accepted as original, it can hardly, I think, be considered graceful. Certainly cats' eyes were supposed to be inherently luminous, and we remember that "kilting's eyen" were amongst the several strange lights of Oberon's dwelling enumerated in one of Herrick's vulgar imitations of the graceful singers who preceded him.
"A cup in fashion of a fly,
Of the linx's piercing eye,
Wherein there sticks a sunny ray,
Shot in through the clearest day,"
was Claia's[1] wedding present to Tita; still I cannot help feeling that something less suggestive of felicide than cats' eyes might have been chosen to give congruous light to dainty elves, even though they were content to dwell within walls of consolidated spider-legs and under a bat-skin roof. Far more agreeable was Randolph's[2] conception of a house in fairy-land: it was made of mother-o'-pearl, had an ivory tennis-court, a nutmeg parlour, a sapphire dairy-room, a ginger hall, chambers of agate, and kitchens all of crystal, where the spits were Spanish needles and the jacks were made of gold. Without were amber walks, ponds of nectar, and orchards that bare alike in winter and in summer. Here was delight indeed; eyes and nose, both had it! With the vegetable and mineral kingdoms at his command it is a pity that Drayton came to the animal kingdom to choose his building materials.
The lord and the lady of this unique erection were King Oberon and his spouse, here called, not Titania, but Mab[3]—a fact non-accordant with the theory of those who hold that the useful personage, who, according to Mercutio, brings forth dreams from sleepers' brains, is not queen as meaning sovereign or royal consort, but queen=quean
- ↑ The Muses Elysium: Nymphal, viii. [iv. 1507]. In this cup Venus had been moved to put her drink of love. The limbeck used in the distillation was "a phoenix' quill." This appears to me to be a most charming fancy.
- ↑ See an extract from the Pastoral of Amyntas, or, the Impossible Dowry (act i. sc. 6), in Keightley's Fairy Mythology (p. 340), and in Hazlitt's Fairy Tales, Legends, and Romances illustrating Shakespeare, &c. (p. 288).
- ↑ Mab is perhaps a Celtic word meaning child. Oberon is said to be the out- come of Elberich, a celebrated German dwarf, whose name became disguised during its passage over French tongues.
