fellow, and suchlike spirits, as they term them, of the buttery,
famoused in every old wives' chronicle for their mad merry pranks."[84]

But four years later, as we have seen,[85] Nashe confounds elves with
fairies in deriving all alike from fauns and dryads. Robin is "mad-merry,"
"jocund and facetious," "a cozening idle friar or some such rogue" [in
origin], and so forth--simply described by Shakespeare as a "shrewd and
knavish sprite." The forms of mischief in which he delights are described
in _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, II. i. 33-57, and all these "gests" may be
found in the contemporary Robin Goodfellow literature;[86] though we have
observed that some of the functions attributed to Queen Mab in Mercutio's
famous speech[87] belong rightly to Robin.[88]

Thus we see--to take into consideration but a few points of the myth--that
the fairy-superstition and the elf-superstition were melted together in the
popular pre-Shakespearean mind, and that Shakespeare himself, making a new
division of the characteristics of the two, yet re-welded the whole into
one realm by putting the Puck in subjection under the fairy king.

The main characteristics of Shakespeare's fairies, then, may be summarised
shortly:--[89]

They are a community under a king and queen, who hold a court; they are
very small, light, swift, elemental; they share in the life of nature; they
are fond of dancing and singing; they are invisible and immortal; they
prefer night, and midnight is their favourite hour; they fall in love with
mortals, steal babies and leave changelings, and usurp the function of
Hymen in blessing the marriage-bed. Oberon, "king of shadows," can
apparently see things hidden from Puck.[90]

Titania, "a spirit of no common rate," is yet subject to passion and
jealousy, and had a mortal friend, "a votaress of my order."[91]

The fairy of folk-lore in Shakespeare's day is nearly everything that the
fairies of _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_ are; we may possibly except their
exiguity, their relations in love with mortals, and their hymeneal
functions. His conception of their size as infinitesimal at least differs
from that of the popular stories, where (as far as can be ascertained) they
are shown to be about the size of mortal children.

We may conclude these remarks with the modern Irish-Catholic theory of the
origin of the fairies:--

"When Lucifer saw himself in the glass, he thought himself equal with
God. Then the Lord th