THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

ORIGIN AND NATURE 45
Robert Kirk cites this idea of the fairies' origin as one
of several, held by the lowland Scotch:
But other Men of the Second Sight, being illiterate, and unwary
in their Observations, learn from those; one averring those sub-
terranean People to be departed Souls, attending awhile in this in-
ferior State, and clothed with Bodies procured throwgh their
Almsdeeds in this Lyfe; fluid, active, aetheriall Vehicles to hold
them, that they may not scatter, or wander, and be Iost in the
Totum, or their first Nothing;
and Hobbes, in his Leviathan, makes fairies and ghosts 72
the same order of beings :
The Ecclesiastiques are Spiritual1 men, and Ghostly Fathers.
The Fairies are Spirits and Ghosts. Fairies and Ghosts inhabite
Darknesse, Solitudes, and Graves. The Ecclesiastiques walke in
Obscurity of Doctrine, in Monasteries, Churches, and Church-
yard~.~~
71 Sec. Comm., p. 18.
72 It must have been this conception of the fairies to which Shake-
speare was referring when Puck reminded Oberon in M. N. D., 111,
2 :
" My fairy lord, this must be done with haste;
For night's swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,
And yonder shines Aurora's harbinger;
At whose approach, ghosts, wandering here and there,
Troop home to church-yards: damned spirits all,
That in cross-ways and floods have burial,
Already to their wormy beds are gone;
For fear lest day should look their shames upon,
They wilfully themselves exile from light,
And must for aye consort with black-brow'd night."
73 Rpt. of 1651 ed., Oxford, 1909, p. 545. Cf. also trans. of Aeneid
by Stanyhurst, Arber ed., 1880, pp. 68, 108, III; and Burton, Anat. of
Mel., Vol. I, p. 206, as follows: "There is a foolish opinion, which
some hold, that they are the souls of men departed, good and more
noble were deified, the baser grovelled on the ground, or in the lower
parts, and were devils."