sons of the North invaded England, the hardy paganism which they brought with them blended readily enough with the fairydom of their Celtic neighbours and subjects. Thus the fairy creed of the British Celts bears some resemblance to the elf belief of Teutonic mythology. Fairies, like elves, dwell underground and are fond of the green meads, where they indulge in their midnight revels, although in Wales a lake often takes the place of the Irish "fairy hill. Both usually assume the human shape, and are like men in not a few respects: they marry, and bear children, the female fairies, however, beautiful as they are, only giving birth to an ugly, ailing brood which they exchange, whenever they are given a chance, for healthy babes. Both love order and neatness. Both, and Celtic fairies especially, are quick at taking offence, and, often enough, lay the peasant or his cattle under a spell. The English Hobgoblin or Robin Good-Fellow is called puck, or more accurately pwcca in Wales, pooka or púca in Ireland, poake in Worcestershire, pixy in the West of England. He is chiefly an evil spirit, leading travellers astray into the bogs, taking all sorts of shapes, that of an ass for instance, when he beguiles some foot-sore passerby to mount upon his back, of which the poor fellow soon repents. Another fairy connected with Teutonic elfdom, but quite peculiar to Ireland, is called the Lepra-caun. He is an old, withered, solitary goblin who makes shoes for the fairies, which, when

dancing, they wear out in no time; he has grown very rich, but, an arrant curmudgeon, must be threatened, if not fairly cudgelled, into showing to the "little people" the mysterious places where his treasures lie hidden.

Besides these inferior, somewhat gross and barbarous, divinities of fairy mythology common to the peasant belief of Teuton and Celt alike, the Celtic fairy-world includes a good many denizens peculiar to and justly representative of the race. "Sentimental," wrote Matthew Arnold in his famous essay so keenly interpretative, despite its superficial knowledge, "if the Celtic nature is to be characterised by a single term, is the best term to take." And further on: "For good and for bad, the Celtic genius is more airy and unsubstantial, goes less near the ground than the German.' Thus, instead of the bustling crowd of stumpy, dwarfish elves, homely, practical, hard-working, so uncouth with their sturdy looks and rough, grotesque humour, there appear among the Celts whole families of fairies, graceful, restless, openhearted, passionate, sensitive to joys and sorrows alike. In some parts of Ireland, the fairies, according to the peasant belief, were a number of the fallen Angels who, being less guilty than the rest, had escaped their brethren's dreadful fate, and were allowed to remain on earth. Or they belonged to such divine tribes as the Tuatha On the Study of Celtic Literature, pp. 100-2.

dé Danann, of the Gaelic myth, or their kin, the Welsh gods of the Mabinogion; they were the "givers of life, " deathless therefore, and the bestowers of fruitfulness; but being no longer worshipped they had dwindled away in the popular mind, till they were only remembered as fairies. Such was Finvarra, the Irish king, who with his queen Onagh ruled over Fairyland. They lived in a "sidh," a barrow or hillock which was the entrance to the other-world, an Elysium of sensuous delight according to the Celtic imagination, planted with apple-trees always in fruit, and overflowing with never ebbing streams of wine or mead. Every fairy is for the Irish peasant, even to the present day, a "Fer-Sidhe,"1 that is a man of the hill, and every goddess a "Bean-Sidhe," a woman of the hill, hence the "banshee " of popular legend, that ominous deity attached to the oldest agricultural families, who makes an appearance only to foretell the death of one of their members.

The contrast between Teutonic elves and Celtic fairies widens when we turn to their relations with men. Fairies are to be met with in most early Celtic myths. They do not, as a rule, share the tiny size of their northern kindred. In genuine folk-tales, they are generally described as of at least human stature; and they play an important part in Celtic that body of imaginative fiction produced

romance,

Pronounced Far-shee.

between the VIIth and the XIIth centuries, the themes of which were drawn from the heroic traditions of the race. They are chiefly women, wondrously fair with their pale long faces, and flowing hair "like red gold, or the flowers of the bog in summer. They dwell on "the blue of the sea, on the shores of "the Land of

verge

Youth," or in the "Island of the Blest. They take a keen interest in forwarding man's love, helping him in his quest after the lady of his heart, unless, as may happen, they refuse to share it with another. They contribute to Celtic lore that mysterious agency of sorcery and magic, that aërialness which we have come to consider as one of its essential features. They already suggest, with their infinite, aimless desires or their wistful regrets, the feminine ideal of Chivalry. The Celtic fairy-world never admits such dreadful fights or blood-thirsty vengeances as are SO frequent in the Teutonic Eddas or the Niebelungenlied. It is the realm of "beauty and amorousness," where the stout warrior makes it his duty both to deal with his foe in a knightly way, as we see in the story of Cuchulinn and Ferdiad, and to treat the woman he loves, as is displayed in the wooing of Emer, with the most submissive delicacy. The difference was very small indeed which still separated the "good people" of the Celtic folk-belief from the magic maidens of the Romantic bards.

III

As the Celtic fairies glided away from their popular origins into the province of romantic fancy, and, from a pre-Christian, purely mythological conception of peasant-lore, came to be looked upon as one of the favourite themes of the more enlightened class of lords and ladies, their magic "amorousness was made more and more conspicuous, and they soon came into contact with the fays of French romance.

One is struck, in wandering through the mazes of Arthurian romance, by the many characteristics. which were already to be found in, if they were not actually borrowed from, the older Celtic world. The very word may be French.1 The romance may have been produced on the Continent, written in French, popularized through England under that outlandish garb, the French language still being generally known on the other side of the Channel in the XIIth and XIIIth centuries, when the Arthurian legend was most in vogue: the spirit is quite different from that which informs the "matter of France," that is to say the cycle of Charlemagne and of his Paladins. The latter was chiefly historical, grounded on actual fact and worked on a very simple plan: the direct

1 Romance, as is well known, first meant a tale told in Romance, the French language of the XIth or XIIth century, instead of in Latin.