Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/150

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142
THE FOLK-LORE OF DRAYTON.

Milton, and others attribute to Mab herself, are by Drayton spoken of as being those of minor elves; but remembering the principle just advanced with regard to Gull, this is a point that need not detain us.

"Little frisking Elves and Apes,
To earth do make their wanton scapes,
As hope of pastime hastes them:
Which maids think on the hearth they see,
When fires well near consumed be,
There dancing hayes by two or three,
Just as their fancy casts them.

These make our girls their slutt'ry rue,
By pinching them both black and blue,
And put a penny in their shoe.
The house for cleanly sweeping;
And in their courses make that round,
In meadows and in marshes found,
Of them so call'd the Fairy ground.
Of which they have the keeping.

These, when a child haps to be got.
Which after proves an idiot.
When folk perceive it thriveth not
The fault therein to smother:
Some silly doting brainless calf,
That understands things by the half.
Say that the Fairy left this aulf,
And took away the other."

Why "frisking elves and apes"? This strikes me as being a compatriotism not elsewhere countenanced in literature, and one suspects that the union may have been brought about by mere exigence of rhyme, though the stress would hardly seem to have been unavoidable. Mr. Grant Allen has tried to persuade readers of the Cornhill Magazine[1] that fairies sprang from dim traditions and fancies concerning pre-historic peoples. May we believe that Drayton's imagination carried him back to a time which Darwin would have rejoiced to see, to an age when the races aforesaid had not yet evolved humanity? Milton, who tells us on hearsay evidence that on a particular occasion

"The faery ladies danced upon the hearth,"[2]


  1. "Who were the Fairies?" March, 1881.
  2. "At a Vacation Exercise," l. 60.