THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

APPEARANCE AND CHARACTERISTICS 67
tions they were not only recognized when they appeared
in person, but in many cases human beings were mistaken
for them.
Before taking up a detailed examination of the material
in which the evidence in regard to the size and figure
of the fairies is to be found, it is well to call attention
to the fact, to quote Mr. Sidgwick, " that even today
it is not easy to shake off the inherited impression
that the fairies are only what Shakespeare shows them
to be." Especially is this true in regard to the stature
of the fairies who, like those made familiar by Shakespeare,
are regarded as diminutive or very small.
So deep-rooted is this conception of the diminutiveness
of the fairies that, in many instances, an investigation of
their size and figure either proceeds upon the assumption
of their diminutiveness, as in the case of Ritson,' and of
Keightle~,~ or is subjected to the demand that the evidence
adduced refutes the fact that they were diminutive
-a conception of them of which the 16th century did not
seem to have been aware, and which it was not, therefore,
at any pains to refute by a differentiation of largeness in
contradistinction to smallness.
It must be remembered that the proportions of the
fairies of the 16th century were as familiar to the Elizabethans
as are the proportions of the fairies of Shakespeare
and of their descendants to any lettered person of
today. In the latter case, the smallness of the fairies is
so much a matter of course that no one in writing about
them or referring to them, finds himself under the neces-
Frank Sidgwick, The Sources and Analogues of "A Midsummer-
Night's Dream," 1908, p. 35.
Fairy Tales, pp. 28 and 35.
?Thomas Keightley, Fairy Mythology, 1833, Vol. 11, pp. 121, 126
and 127.