THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

18 INTRODUCTION
with fairy lore underwent a change. The fairies of A
Midsummer Night's Dream, as will be seen later, be-
came the fashion and gradually usurped the place of the
fairies of folklore in the works of most of the outstand-
ing poets of the time with the exception of Cowley, who
referred to the folk fairy, and of Milton, who celebrated
the traditional fairies of the folk save in the matter of
their size. Only in the philosophical and religious
treatises, and in discourses proving the existence or non-
existence of witches, as the works of Henry More,
Glanvil, John Webster, Edward Fairfax, Harsnet,
Hobbes, and Robert Kirk are the fairies of folklore to
be found.
The most striking absence of interest in fairy lore is
to be noted in the works of Sir Thomas Browne, espe-
cially his dissertation on Vulgar and Common Errors,
where the fairies and the belief in the fairies are not men-
tioned except for a reference to fairy or elf stones. This
is not the case, however, with Butler's Hudibras, where
the superstitions of the folk with regard to witches and
fairies and Robin Goodfellow are recorded.47
47 For the convenience of the reader, the texts containing references
to the fairies and Robin Goodfellow, have been arranged in a separate
bibliography and are to be found at the end of Chap. VI.
There are a number of questions which occur to one's mind in re-
gard to the prominence of the fairies during the 16th century in Eng-
land. Did their vogue spring from a growing familiarity with the
poems of Chaucer and Gower, and with the medieval romances? Did
an almost universal knowledge of classical mythology and a famili-
arity with the wood gods and spirits of Rome and Greece turn the
literary man's thoughts to his own folklore? Was it the growing
number of poets from the lower classes, fresh from the country and
from the smaller villages and towns (where belief in the fairies was
a matter of course), bound by no slavish adherence to authority nor
limited by the dignity of scholarship, who put the fairies into poems
and plays as naturally as had the classical poets, the nymphs and
satyrs? The answers to these questions will always be conjectural.