THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

66 APPEARANCE AND CHARACTERISTICS
made of them in 1917.~ Here they appear as diminu-
tive beings, mostly female, clad in diaphanous trailing
drzperies, with butterfly wings and flowing hair, poised
on stalks of grass or on the knee of a child.
.Had these photographs been shown to an inhabitant of
16th century England, he would have had to inquire who
the very diminutive beings with wings were, and he would
have repudiated with scorn, the contention that these pic-
tures were pictures of the fairies.
The picture of fairies as he saw them, is to be found in
Bovet's Pandaemonium:
Those that have had occasion to travel that way, have frequently
seen them there, appearing like men and women of a stature gen-
erally near the smaIIer size of men ; their habits used to be of red,
blew, or green, according to the old way of country garb, with
high-crown'd hats. One time about fifty years since, a person
. . . was riding towards his home that way, and saw just before
him, on the side of the hill, a great company of people, that seemed
to him like country folks, assembled, as at a fair.4
If one is to judge by this record and other records of
the fairies' materializations and appearances, real or
theatrical, the description of the fairies as " near the
smaller size of men " would seem to represent the idea
of their figures and of their measurements held, with few
exceptions, during the 16th century. With these propor-
See ~hotographs facing pp. 65, 80 and 81 of The Coming of the
Fairies, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1922. The book was written to
prove the present existence of the fairies, and the photographs of them,
taken by a medium, were offered as evidence of their reality. The
photographic plates were subsequently acknowledged as spurious, but
the pictures of the fairies produced upon them represent the popular
conception of the fairies' appearance and proportions.
4 Richard Bovet, " Pandaemonium, or the Devil's Cloyster, being a
further blow to modern Sadduceism, proving the existence of witches
and spirits," London, 1684; rpt, in Hazlitt, Fairy Tales, 1875, p. 335.