Pan and Artemis have no share in these warfares. Queen Mab is one
of the many names, and points to one of the many manifestations of
Artemis; the Lady of the Lake is another. Both of these have died out,
and in the country she is generally hinted at under the veil of
"Mistress of the Wood" or "Lady of the Hill." I heard the latter from
a Wiltshire shepherd; the former is used in Sussex, in the Cheviots,
and in Lincolnshire, and was introduced, I believe, by the Gipsies.
Titania was a name of romance, and so was Oberon, that of her husband
in romance. Queen Mab has no husband, nor will she ever have.

[Footnote 9: But if this is true, who is the King of the Wood? The
statement is too sweeping.]

But she is, of course, a goddess, and not a queen in our sense of the
word. The fairies, who partake of her nature just so far as we partake
of theirs, pray to her, invoke her, and make her offerings every day.
But a vital difference between their kind and ours is that they can
see her and live; and we never see the Gods until we die.

They have no other leaders, I believe, and certainly no royal houses.
Faculty is free in the fairy world to its utmost limit. A fairy's
power within his own order is limited only by the extent of his
personal faculty, and subject only to the Gods. There is no civil law
to restrain him, and no moral law; no law at all except the law of
being.[10]

[Footnote 10: Apparent eccentricities of this law, such as the
obedience to iron, or zinc (if we may believe Beckwith), should be
noted. I can't explain them. They seem arbitrary at first sight, but
nothing in Nature is arbitrary.]

We are contemplating, then, a realm, nay, a world, where anarchy is
the rule, and anarchy in the widest sense. The fairies are of a world
where Right and Wrong don't obtain, where Possible and Impossible are
the only finger-posts at cross-roads; for the Gods themselves give no
moral sanction to desire and hold up no moral check. The fairies love
and hate intensely; they crave and enjoy; they satisfy by kindness or
cruelty; they serve or enslave each other; they give life or take it
as their instinct, appetite or whim may be. But there is this
remarkable thing to be noted, that when a thing is dead they cannot be
aware of its existence. For them it is not, it is as if it had never
been. Ruth, therefore, is unknown, their emotions are maimed to that
serious extent that they cannot regret, cannot pity, cannot weep for
sorrow