THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

132 EARTHLY LIFE OF FAIRIES
And such was the Fairy Queen's insistence upon cleanli-
ness that no one was allowed to come into the royal fairy
presence, but
There must a world of ceremonies pass;
You must be bath'd and fumigated first.81
In spite of their horror of dirt, they did not always use
force in inculcating cleanliness. Instead, they rewarded
virtue :
. . . lovingly would they use wenches that cleanly were, giving
them silver and other pretty toyes, which they would leave for
them, sometimes in their shooes, other times in their pockets, some-
times in bright basons and other cleane vessels.82
And,
. . . if the house be swept,
And from uncleannesse kept,
We praise the house and maid,
And surely she is paid:
For we do use before we go
To drop a Tester in her shoe.83
This latter method of theirs provided one of the agree-
able excitements of dwelling in a fairy-ridden country,
and one greatly lamented when the fairies vanished:
Farewell rewards and Faeries,
Good houswives now may say,
For now foule slutts in daries
Doe fare as well as they.
81 Jonson, Gifford ed., Alchemist, I, I.
82 Robin Goodfellow; his mad trankes, and merry Jests, Hazlitt
rpt., p. 176.
83 The Mysteries of Love M Eloquence, attributed to Edward
Phillips: "The Fairies Fegaries," rpt. DeLattre, English Fairj
Poetry, p. 214.