has nothing to say of simian partners, though I think we should be justified in believing that the fanciful maids of Drayton's story saw such in the hayes in which by waning firelight elfin visitants disported themselves. A hay, like the modern French haie, meant in common parlance a hedge or enclosure, and in dancing was the technical term for a ring. It was the specific name of one variety of country-dance in which a ring was a special feature; but in the text we are considering it probably signifies den nächtlichen Reihn, the mere dancing about a central point that produces the "round in meadows and in marshes found," which scientific blindness attributes to the growth and decay of fungi.[1]
The pinching of sluts, the rewarding of the diligent housewife, and the preternatural production of idiots,[2] are topics which have been too often handled by poets, story-tellers and critics, to stand in need of any further illustration or exegetical comment from me.
King Oberon,—"jealous Oberon,"[3]—was rendered uneasy by the attentions to Queen Mab of one of his crew, Pigwiggen.[4] This fairy knight was fully aware that he had found grace in the eyes of the royal lady, and set himself to think what gift he could devise that should make plain to her his state of feeling. He decided on offering a bracelet of emmet's eyes, and with it despatched an amorous letter conjuring her to grant him an interview, at which they might
"without suspect and fear
Themselves to one another clear,
And have their poor hearts eased.
- ↑ Roget's Bridgewater Treatise on Animal and Vegetable Physiology, vol. ii. p. 65.
- ↑ I suspect that the Lincolnshire expression half-rocked, used (sine h) of one who is weak of intellect, may have been originally aulf-rocked, though I confess that my theory is not strengthened by the fact that half-there, half-baked, and half-christened are also employed to indicate mental incompleteness. "He has a want somewhere," is likewise Lincolnshire for the same condition.
- ↑ A Midsummer Night's Dream, act ii. sc. 1.
- ↑ The word is not peculiar to Drayton, though he perhaps introduced it to literature. What Professor Earle calls the "upstart word pig" seems originally to have denoted something comparatively small. Wiggen I regard as a diminutive; and believe wig to be cognate with the Swedish vig, nimble, active. Cf. the provincial porriwiggle=tadpole. Some think that pigwiggen is a form of pig-widden, the smallest pig in a litter.
